Word: clown
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Life," mused Grock, the famed Swiss clown, "is lousy." After 67 years of it, the greatest grimacier of them all was still in harness (see cut) at Paris' Cirque d'Hiver. "Most of the old clowns have died," he grumbled, "and no new ones have come up because this generation is no good.. . . We are no longer a civilized people but cannibals. . . . People are eating each other up, everything has gone to hell...
...midst of all these exclamation points came a lone period: a terse message from the Philharmonic board, releasing Rodzinski not at the end of the season, as he had asked, but at once. His spirits only soared higher. Elatedly, he jounced his two-year-old son's big clown doll on his knee and told it the news; he grabbed his 75-year-old mother around the waist, waltzed her around the room and cried exultantly: "Babushka, now we are going to Chicago...
...Laugh, Clown, Laugh. "It is ... the particular function of comedy to destroy the more trifling dignities of this earth: quality varies with the shape and size of the dignities it destroys. Pantomime goes with a whack to the seat of the pants; slapstick goes with peel or pie to any section of the anatomy which presents itself; Shaw, a Mack Sennett of the Parlour, trips up the prejudices. The quality deepens till, in Swift, you tumble up the human race itself...
...just try to get inside. At a circus, a clown named "Karandash" (pencil) kept dashing into the ring with a little white hen, which escaped in a flutter of feathers. "Why do you beat your hen?" asked the ringmaster. Answers Karandash: "Because she only gives me powdered eggs...
...last 3½ months Zhdanov has led the pack in the literary-artistic purge directed against all "cultural deviationists" from Clown Karandash to Producer Sergei Eisenstein. He also signed (for the party, with Stalin signing for the Government) the highly significant agricultural decree aimed against the mass, illegal reconversion of collective farms into private holdings. To emphasize the importance of Zhdanov's twin tasks Stalin, ailing at Sochi on the Black Sea, let Zhdanov have the place of honor on Lenin's tomb (see cut) at the Nov. 7 celebration of the 1917 revolution. (A typical and revealing...