Word: buffoon
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Butt, cuckold, buffoon-Hirsch gives Georges Dandin the engaging dignity of self-knowledge, the man who says his own name with the rueful shake of the head that makes it ring through the play like a bell, the shrewd peasant who knows he has made a bad bargain in a wife, the naif who thinks he can prove it to the parents from whom he bought...
...does not have to be an effete snob, a nattering nabob, or even a Democrat to be thoroughly offended by the contrived, consciously catchy mixed metaphors daily being flung at us by Spiro Agnew [Sept. 21]. One gets the impression that this buffoon is just discovering his power to appeal to people's prejudices for his own purposes. Probably Agnew has already planned his first post-V.P. book: Selected Smashing Speeches by the Sensation of the '70s. One suspects that he is also running for the title: Most Vocal and Vituperative Veep of the Century...
...Frank Langella contributes many moments of force and subtlety to his boisterous role. But Richard Benjamin, one of the standouts of Catch-22, takes a giant step backward. The part is a ludricrous stereotype; Benjamin plays it-or is directed by Frank Perry to play it-like a buffoon...
Still, no member of the press corps makes the mistake of writing off "Old Pete" as a buffoon. They all laughed when he foiled security by slipping his rented car, crudely lettered STATE DEPARTMENT 1-A, into a key position in Khrushchev's 1959 motorcade through Des Moines, but the joke was on them. It usually...
...people, the Japanese lives constantly in a state of near-total control or near-total release. A man may be a perfectly decorous office worker at 4:55 p.m., but by 5:05, after one drink at the bar around the corner, he may be a giggling buffoon. Extremely rigid codes define proper behavior in virtually every social situation, but there are no codes at all to cover many modern contingencies. That is why so much body-checking and elbowing go on in a Tokyo subway or department store. As Author-Translator Edward Seidensticker puts it in his recent Japan...