Word: barnumism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus lion named Jackie put on one of the most sensational animal acts in Manhattan's history. Jackie leaped out of his cage, in the basement of Madison Square Garden while it was being cleaned, strolled forth, spied one Joseph Knapp, a truck driver, chased him up a flight of stairs and treed his prey atop a telephone booth. Foiled for the moment, Jackie lay down beside the lobby's Eighth Avenue doors, put his head on his paws and spent an hour staring moodily at horrified passers-by on the sidewalk outside...
...interest began to perk up under Veeck's Barnum & Bailey tactics, not because the Browns were going anywhere in the pennant race (they finished last, 46 games behind the Yankees), but because the fans wanted to see what Veeck would do next. Cardinal Owner Fred Saigh (rhymes with high), whose club has drawn over a million fans every year of the five Saigh has owned it, countered by placing ads in the St. Louis papers extolling the Cardinals as "a dignified St. Louis institution." The struggle for fans...
...Hydrogen 12. Gurdjieff seems to have been a remarkable blend of P. T. Barnum, Rasputin, Freud, Groucho Marx and everybody's grandfather. To his disciples, he was a great man, a modern saint. To doubters, he was an astute phony peddling intellectual narcotics to spiritual neurotics. But all sides seemed to agree that he had picked up, as he acknowledged himself, an astonishing amount of useful information...
...Greatest Show on Earth (Paramount) is a mammoth merger of two masters of malarkey for the masses: P. T. Barnum and Cecil B. de Mille. It is not just a movie about the circus; it is a fat Technicolored reproduction of the 1951 Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circus itself, fondly filmed from all angles by Producer-Director de Mille, and generously overlaid with a three-ringed melodrama enacted by movie stars in the roles of sawdust demigods...
...wing" publication. Sent to interview a swami called the "Sage of the Wilderness," he quickly falls under the old chap's spell. "Please, master," he asks, "utter a few words of wisdom and . . . comfort the reading classes." But the swami's brand of wisdom is P. T. Barnum's. "Canst thou," he inquires soulfully, "spare me thy trousers, thy jacket, thy shirt, thy shoes, thy cufflinks, thy watch, every accessory thou hast on thy person?" Only too happy to oblige, Hatterr is sent packing back to town in a dirty towel and is promptly fired. He finds...