Word: buffoon
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...trick to creating a good comic persona is to find a new way to be unaware. Steve Carell has landed on just such a type: a confident, articulate buffoon who has no idea he's messing things up--Ted Knight without the bubbling insecurity, Will Ferrell without the boyish need to please. With his serious, Father Knows Best demeanor, Carell maintains self-assurance in the face of obvious failure; he's a pompous but lovable loser. "I myself am a lovable loser. So it's an easy transition," Carell says while sitting in the trailer for his upcoming movie...
...about him,” Hunt said. “While he was a rather imposing-looking man, he was unable to convince me that he was more than a lightweight.” Hunt maintains that many Harvardians saw Hanfstaengl as a bit of a “buffoon,” a social butterfly who had little tangible influence on Hitler aside from his skills at the keyboard...
...wasn't a pretty sight. Tousled and bloated, he was drunk much of the time, playing the buffoon and getting into fights at bars and parties, making crude passes at women and cadging money and favors that he rarely repaid. As Andrew Lycett recounts in Dylan Thomas (Overlook Press; 421 pages), he spawned bad debts, pilfered from and vandalized homes he stayed in, and insulted and embarrassed the people who tried the most to help him. It wouldn't be long before he died of alcohol poisoning in New York City...
...Putin's Russia is now a dilemma that confronts the West for at least the next four years, and more if he decides to take up his legislature's offer to extend his term limit. If Yeltsin's Russia had been an economic basket case run by a pliant buffoon, Putin's is a major and growing oil producer run by an authoritarian nationalist willing to deal with the West but on an independent and often competitive basis. Its domestic politics are likely to offend the eye for some time to come, but so does the domestic politics of China...
...walked in a springy slouch, his thin frame forming a question mark, his gut preceding his chest by a beat or two. His hands were ever aflutter, shaking off invisible water (or sewage), conducting an imaginary silly symphony. While Ralph was the choleric loser, Ed was the lucky buffoon. Like the Looney Tunes character Pepe Le Pew (another bon vivant blithely ignorant of the way the world saw and smelled him), Norton exuded a sweet assurance that life would treat him as he treated life: with an easy shrug and an eager guffaw. That's how an acute farceur humanized...