Word: clown
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Disgusting food- and flatulence-related humor do not much lighten this load. Neither do jokes about sexual misunderstanding. One is left wondering why Williams has granted early retirement to his inner anarchist, what dark need compels a great clown to become a sad, fuzzy one in movies only Bob Dole--faking it--could love...
Levy conducted a series of interviews with his profane and grandiloquent subject (favorite quote: John F. Kennedy was "one of the great [extremely vulgar synonym for ladies' man] of all time. Except for me") until the famously volatile comedian blew up at a semitough question about The Day the Clown Cried, his unfinished 1972 film drama about the Holocaust. (Disclosure: Levy's chapter on the making of The Day the Clown Cried relies heavily--and with due credit--on a magazine article I wrote on the subject for Spy.) Levy certainly doesn't shy away from psychobiography: Lewis' demanding though...
...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...