Word: mountebank
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...interest in the story of an embittered, vengeful killer whose philosophy is "we all deserve to die." But if such a character can be engaging, then Tolins' Sweeney is engaging. Edwards' Mrs. Lovett is hilarious, as are Johnson's lascivious, foppish beadle and Arthur Fuscaldo's Pirelli, a mountebank rival barber. Wolman's judge is surprisingly sympathetic, and Michael Starr is strong as Tobias, Mrs. Lovett's fiercely devoted young shill...
...Johnson, normally an evenhanded fellow. He suggested in a column that Reagan's overwhelming support proved Abraham Lincoln wrong, that in this age of packaged candidates it was possible to fool all of the people all the time, or at least enough of the time to put a mountebank like Reagan in the White House...
...Rudolf Hess; then the "vain, pompous, incredibly stupid" Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was to be Foreign Minister. Shirer recalls being dumbfounded by Bernhard Rust, the Nazi Education Minister, a bureaucratic ideologue who explained the difference between serious, careful, Aryan physics and the degenerate Jewish physics, as represented by the mountebank Einstein...
Dirksen's oratory succeeded in part because it functioned simultaneously as a satire upon oratory, in somewhat the way that Mae West has always been a walking satire upon sex. But all of and splendor, with his rapscallion rhapsodies and hints of the mountebank, could not conceal a small truth about what that ahead for the ancient discipline of rhetoric: an art that wanes into self-mockery is dying...