Word: buffooning
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...Dryden quotation from Absalom and Achitophel goes on: Stiff in Opinions, always in the wrong; Was Everything by starts, and Nothing long; But, in the course oj one revolving Moon, Was Chymist, Fidler, Statesman, and Buffoon...
Khrushchev may perhaps be walking down a path that leads eventually to madness, but he is not a madman now, any more than he is the bumbling buffoon that the West first imagined him to be when it observed him on his hamming, hard-drinking trips abroad in 1954-57 with then-Premier Nikolai Bulganin...
...meant to be entertainment, not solemn tragedy. In Graves's view, the poem is a satirical work in which Homer lampooned the princelings at whose courts he recited, while pretending to hymn the heroes of the past. In this view, Agamemnon, leader of the Achaeans, is the prize buffoon. And when Hector, the Trojan leader, offers to stake the whole war on a single combat, the Greeks respond at first with resounding silence. Then Menelaus, whose wife Helen set off the strife by running away with Paris, grudgingly accepts the challenge-but quickly lets himself be talked...
Encolpius offends Priapus. god of fertility and lust, and Priapus retaliates by making the buffoon impotent. The anguished lover delivers a severe lecture to his disabled member, but to no effect. Petronius borrows some lines from Vergil to describe the disaster...
...Paycock is fashioned around characters who escape the last-act curtain and become dramatic immortals like Hamlet, Tartuffe, and St. Joan. Captain Boyle, the strutting Paycock, is a Homeric boozer, braggart and whine. With a sea-rolling gait and a gravelly brogue, Melvyn Douglas makes him an amiably puckish buffoon but scarcely a Dublin Falstaff. O'Casey's Juno has a spiny tongue for her shiftless husband, but she is also an Earth Mother of Sorrows. Her unmarried daughter becomes pregnant; her son loses an arm to the British and his life to the I.R.A. Shirley Booth puts...