Word: clown
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...write a profile in Texas Monthly of freshman Congressman Steve Stockman, a former house painter who personifies the desire of voters to throw out incumbents in favor of the inexperienced and the uninformed. Offering a great deal of evidence, she described him as a militia-loving, ethically challenged "class clown." In response, the Congressman's top aide, Cory Birenbaum, shot off a letter to Swartz at home, which Texas Monthly released after the Hill, a Washington newspaper, got a copy. The letter called Swartz "a sad and pathetic creature" who got her job "for reasons I would refuse to speculate...
...only problem with that scenario is the original scenario. The Nutty Professor was never really a comedy. Directed and co-written by Lewis in his "total filmmaker" phase, it mostly projected the comic's disastrous desire to morph his gloriously geeky anarchist into a soulful clown. Murphy, abetted by director Tom Shadyac and a whole raft of writers, cannot entirely escape the curious blend of aspiration and sloppiness that marked the earlier film...
Which is why he expected his FBI file to be among those collected by Bozo the Clown and the other security specialists hired by the Clinton White House. "You'll notice they only had files through the letter G," Hammer told me at lunch one day, shortly after the story hit the papers. "Otherwise my FBI file would have been there. I've been hitting them pretty hard." I nodded. I didn't have the heart to remind him what we've known for 25 years: Hammer doesn't have an FBI file...
What do you want to be when you grow up? Ah, the classic childhood question. "A clown in the circus," I would reply to relatives at family gatherings. Well, it is now 1996, and I am twenty years old--a clown in the circus is just not where I am headed. That's okay, I assure myself--no one is expected to know the precise academic and professional course his or her life will take at such early stages in the game. Correction: No one outside of Harvard is assumed to possess such foresight. But amid the red-bricked buildings...
With an extensive slide show, he illustrated the distinction between "heroes" and "clowns". The clown, he explained, is the part of the human spirit that was pushed aside "when you went to the first day of school... ready to rock, ready to roll, and everyone was looking at you. Because you looked weird...