Word: clownishness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Albert Benjamin ("Happy") Chandler, the sometimes clownish governor of Kentucky and the first announced candidate for President of the U.S. in 1960, has his faults-but racial demagoguery has never been one of them. Under Chandler the number of integrated school districts in Kentucky rose to 92 (out of 217) by the end of the 1956-57 school year, and Louisville became a model of its kind. Last week seven more Kentucky districts began integration-including coal-mining Union County, where a Sturgis (pop. 2,300) mob last year turned away Negroes trying to enroll in high school...
...showboats while studying law, eventually wended his way via vaudeville villainry to Hollywood where he met (1919) skinny, sad-eyed Stan Laurel, onetime understudy to Charlie Chaplin. Two of America's few genuinely creative comedians, interested more, as Hardy once said, in "human appeal" than in "straight clownish antics," they teamed up in 1927, and as bumblingly chivalrous misfits strove ineffectually to solve hopeless problems (e.g., while struggling to get a grand piano over a narrow suspension bridge across a horrifying chasm between two Alpine peaks, they would encounter, midway, a gorilla). Hardy was the master of mime...
...Tufts production conveys much of Giraudoux's imaginative wit and irony, but lacks dynamism and the smoothness of a thoroughly rehearsed production. Alkmena is anemic, Amphitryon should be more possessive. Instead of vigorous verbal fencing between Jupiter and Alkmena, we hear but gentle gibes. Muffed lines, awkwardly handled props, clownish warriors, nonexistent Theban mobs, and a series of confused sounds purporting to be "cosmic music" mar the plays buoyancy...
...Barnyard. The Soviet embassy was a true enclave-an island of cruel and clownish Soviet life. The best part of the Petrovs' book describes in detail the life of the higher Soviet bureaucracy: by a paradox, the egalitarian theory of Communism has produced a pathologically heightened sense of status-so that life in the embassy went on by rules something like the pecking hierarchy observed by barnyard fowl. Mrs. Petrov got into hot water for having put a comic picture within eyeshot of Stalin's portrait, and even hotter water when she was falsely accused of having thrown...
...common denominator, present U.S. policy depends on the clownish heirs of a corrupt and disorderly daydream. If the U.S. makes sense to the world in January 1956, it can thank not Robert Livingston and George Washington but Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin. It reacts, through John Foster Dulles, brilliantly. But does it act? Does it present to the world an idea of order...