Word: clownish
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Because they are humanized, these objects take on a marvelous, even clownish pathos. The blue vinyl mass of Oldenburg's Three-Way Plug - Scale A hangs from the ceiling, drag ging its prongs on the floor like a deflated giant; its sockets gaze mournfully at the room; one feels an urge to speak gently to the thing and soothe its defeat. By contrast, Oldenburg's Heroic Sculpture in the Form of a Bent Type writer Eraser, 1970, which was com missioned - and then rejected - for an office plaza on Manhattan's 57th Street, is a veritable parody...
...cream truck. In the role of the anti-hero hero, Kevin McCarthy is splendid. McCarthy has always been an actor with thought behind an ingratiating personality and imperishable good looks, and that is precisely what is needed here in a role that, like the play itself, consists of clownish attitudinizing...
...Miller Odyssey. which opened Friday night under the joint sponsorship of the International Association for Cultural Freedom and the Advocate. is as alive, quick, and visually sensitive as Miller himself. Snyder makes no attempt to study Miller's place in literary history, but shows him as the passionate contradictory clownish person...
Agnew is not merely seeking political capital in the South, nor is his rhetoric aimed only at Moratorium marchers and other opponents of the war. Rather, he is emerging as a kind of improbable mahdi of Middle America. His often odd, occasionally clownish locutions, rendered in a W. C. Fields singsong, are abristle with nostalgias and assumptions of what American life ought to be. Armored in the certitudes of middle-class values, he speaks with the authentic voice of Americans who are angry and frightened by what has happened to their culture, who view the '60s as a disastrous montage...
...their zeal, Tanzanians have turned up some curious threats to their cultural independence, and sparked a lively debate. Football, declared one letter to an editor, is "a degrading product of colonialism and elite European boarding schools. African culture never produced such a clownish performance." On the other side, an upholder of law and order wrote that "the Wall Street mob of American society that watched a busty woman is more desirable than the unruly mob that besieged terrified girls in the Kariakoo market...