clown

As Bozo's influence spread through popular culture, his very name became a synonym for clownish behavior.

The jarring note of the programme was Kylian's Tar and Feathers, which had neither but did feature the frequent roars of a fierce beastie, a pile of fake snow, a grand piano on enormous stilts, a woman is some mental anguish and five men and women in fright wigs with clownish red lips wearing skirts fashioned from bubblewrap.

Tirman (executive director, Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) protests that he is not being "cranky or clownish" in enumerating 100 things that the United States has dove in the world that "[have] gone awry, or worse, [have] gone as planned with disastrous results for almost everyone else." He urges readers to think of his discussion as a corrective, as he goes about criticizing neoliberalism, the war in Vietnam, support for Third World dictators, cultural imperialism, pollution, nuclear weapons, the "War on Terrorism," policy towards Cuba, racial bigotry, violence in culture, cynical public diplomacy, empty celebrity culture, American exceptionalism, Walt Disney, hypocritical religiosity and a host of other ills.

JACQUES CHIRAC IS expected to step down next year as France's president, so his clownish performance at Tuesday's NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, was apparently something of a final Bronx cheer for his fellow Atlantic Alliance leaders.

He retired in 1984, luckily before the firm was taken over by Robert Maxwell and his clownish minions.

The Keppoch chief has said clan members should accept the decision to inaugurate him rather than indulge in "clownish antagonistic propaganda".

He sets us straight on some of our most common mistakes: the difference between imply and infer, the rule on less and fewer, and why to avoid the "clownish" use of "irregardless." But what we like most is the needle he takes to overblown, multi-syllabic, make-me-sound-important "prior to's" and "restructuring's" that fill our administrative memos.

As the small-town milkman in turn-of-the-century Russia forced to question all the traditions on which his identity is based, he is by turns gruff, sly, exasperated, clownish, and--especially when his faith is challenged--ferocious.

Seseliai veidrodyje is an amusing book, slightly dusty with sadness, with sometimes a rather nasty edge to its clownish smile.

LOUD, PROUD, AND ALCOHOL-FUELED, New York City's Bad Wizard does the hard rock thing the way it used to be done--before clownish rappers became frontmen, second-class DJs added noises, and bland self-conscious moanings better suited for a therapist's couch became acceptable as lyrics.

A Clownish fat Flanderkin, always laughing at what he says himself, and believing it a Jest, tho' never such Nonsence' (Leigh's part) and 'La Pupsey.

Nevertheless, amid the mud and dung, her dignity and resolution rarely waver, and she becomes oddly nurturing and protective for the clownish bumpkins Cane portrays with affection, no matter how greedy and lecherous they might be.

Two examples: The National Review's Rod Dreher referred to West as a "clownish minstrel" and the New York Daily News's Zev Chafetz called him "a self-promoting lightweight with a militant head of hair."

CLOWNISH Airtours boss Richard Carrick is the new Gerald Rattner after branding complaining passengers as whingers.