Word: buffoon
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...sifting Esslin's text, three significant plays emerge as historic steps in the development of absurd theater. The first was Ubu Roi, performed in Paris in 1896, and written by Alfred Jarry, a 23-year-old bourgeois baiter. Ubu is a pear-shaped buffoon-monster and a travesty on middle class values, e.g., thrift, family life, patriotism. He punctuates every third line of dialogue with an excremental word. Ubu Roi furnished the absurdists with their basic attitude: shock the bourgeoisie and slam the Establishment. In a 1923 play, In the Jungle of the Cities, Bertolt Brecht furnished the theater...
Follow a Star (Rank; Zenith) is a rickety vaudeville vehicle designed to display the low-comedy high jinks of British Buffoon Norman Wisdom, an artificial hybrid who seems to have resulted from the cross-pollination of Tom Ewell Jerry Lewis and an otter. Wisdom plays a knockabout Cockney trying to sing his way from pants presser to Palladium. Enroute, he falls off a psychiatrist's couch is clobbered over the head by a fat-lady voice coach ("We must always remember to keep our vowels open!"), gets stuck astraddle a spiked, swinging gate. When that gets rusty, he drops...
...Hostage. A jolly but self-indulgent romp in which Playwright Brendan Behan proves himself more than a buffoon if less than a philosopher...
...last week-and Harris was swiftly fired. At that point, to the utter astonishment of all, the Yankees made a move that seemed as though General Motors had been delivered into the hands of a Keystone Cop. As their new manager, the Yankees chose baseball's buffoon: Charles Dillon ("Casey") Stengel...
...stab to the heart or a surface shot that plumbs the depths, it is perhaps easy to make too much of it, to find its anarchic flings an assay of an ill-governed world, its rancid taste an assault on respectability. Less than a philosopher and more than a buffoon, Behan is chiefly an insatiable human being. He is no one's cup of tea who recoils from finding it sloshed into a saucer, no one's humorist who, for being outraged, can't be amused. If his people often have the rackety mirth of Burns...