Word: clown
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...word the Founding Fathers could find for a seat in the House. Now Congress was just the little fat whiskery man in the newspaper cartoons, forever falling on his face, leading his family to the public trough, his shirt front puffed out with the blowsy dignity of a burlesque clown. The only Congressional greats left are old men like Nebraska's Senator George W. Norris, Virginia's Senator Carter W. Glass-and they are past their prime...
...fortune, sinks to the lowest flophouses and gambling dens of Mexico City, where "there are but two rules: luck and cheating. The former is more lawful, but the latter is surer." In jail the prisoners rob him and empty their slop pots over him (Poll cheerfully reports himself as clown, coward, butt and skunk...
...last line of I Pagliacci, sung by a clown who has just stabbed a man and a woman...
Year of the Clown. From all the appalling bulk of printed paper, only two books-Koestler's novel and Auden's poem -made a dead-center philosophical attack on the real problems of 1941. But sometimes the philosophies have not the last word. One writer who is less pretentiously touched with genius than any of them is Ludwig Bemelmans. His Ecuadorian travelogue, The Donkey Inside ($3), was the most delightful book of a far from delightful year. This month he published his even better-written Hotel Splendide ($2.50), a collection of waiters' eye-views of life...
...clear the fact that beauty, discipline, pleasure and kindness are not byproducts, but are at the source of human liberation. He makes clear, as the ambitious Auden half managed to do too, that an age of tragedy and of dementia is of all ages the proper one for a clown...