Word: clowning
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...delegate slung a live cat around his neck. Two Bundestag Deputies played soccer in the aisles. From the podium, a man in a clown suit complained that the conference was interfering with Carnival, West Germany's annual spasm of pre-Lenten revelry. A delegate suggested that male candidates for the European Parliament in Strasbourg, whose nomination was the purpose of the meeting, should "undress and present themselves in the nude because the human body reveals political attitudes." Keynote Speaker Antje Vollmer railed against the "industrialized nature-destroying internationalism of neocolonialist nation states." Finally, the proceedings were disrupted...
...perhaps the movie's greatest fault Irving's prose has a subtle ability to suspend reality and carry the reader smoothly along from one fabuluously bizarre episode to another: But seen on a 15 foot screen these same fabulous events have all the subtlety and appeal of Bozo the clown. For example, the movie's motto "Keep passing the open windows" (i.e. don't jump out) somehow sounds much less embarrassing and trite when you read it in the privacy of your own home than when you hear it blasted through Dolby stereo sound speakers every 10 minutes...
...right, knock off the snickers. This is going to be done straight. Larry Harmon, 59, better known as Bozo, "the world's most famous clown," was in Washington, D.C., last week to announce he is a candidate for the U.S. presidency. "I'm wearing glasses because they make me look a little more like a statesman than I already do," said Harmon, who is running in full regalia on the Bozo Party ticket. The native of Toledo, who started on TV some 35 years ago, claims that he got a hankering for the nation's highest office...
...comic balance. As his agent, Norman, Albert Brooks plays the perfect straight man for the dynamic Moore. In a riotous scene, a freshly released from jail Claude attacks Brooks in the police station. "Police, Police." Norman cries with blue suits literally everywhere. Richard Libertini as the manservant plays the clown character, forcing Moore to focus on his more diverse and definitely more interesting talents...
...roles, Coward is likely to be remembered best as the songwriter with a taste for the bittersweet. Like Porter, he shied from passionate expression, sometimes in the belief that love, like moonlight, was "cruelly deceptive"; sometimes because he saw himself as an English Pierrot, the clown whose laughter cannot quite disguise the catch in his throat. Of the nearly 300 songs in Coward's collection, the dead-on love ballads are the weakest: "Time and tide can never sever/ Those whom love has bound forever" serves to remind the reader that Coward grew up in the Edwardian heyday...