clownishness

All the old forms of political clownishness are out.

"And see what your clownishness will cost you!"

Or is it just a piece of unfortunate clownishness?"

Whatever one might say about the clownishness of these creatures, they knew how to lay out a city, and how to build.

And ignorance, and what is termed clownishness, are surely an evil?

The character's clownishness turns the possibility of a realistic dimension into crude condescension.

So he approaches medical school with a combination of wild-man clownishness, secret apprehension and studied cool.

It was his clownishness that undid me.

A portrait of the artist as antihero, its clownishness is tempered by an appealing pathos.

The old man had remained an enigma, swinging precipitantly between clownishness and decisiveness.

At times, coarse direction and ludicrous pseudo-Albanian costumes nudged them toward a clownishness that threatened to upset the opera's equipoise.

Babbitt has a great clownishness in him, but he never becomes a mere clown.... Every American city swarms with his brothers.

"Il Trol, isn't this some of your under-the-rocks clownishness of several days ago?"

Instead they document the celebrity circus with an acutely literal vision, submitting the famous to playfully acrobatic postures and various acts of clownishness.

Mr. Wilson does have his leading man mug a lot, but Mr. Raymond's charm is broader and deeper than mere clownishness throughout the familiar story.

I held my breath and wished that I could read what he was writing, for despite all his clownishness, I was convinced that it was important.

"Some of my under-the-rocks clownishness, yes," Il Trol saod.

Abner watched, no hint of clownishness on his face, no laughter in his eyes as he watched the vectors play out in holographic display.

Although Mr. John has sharply toned down his clownishness in recent years, he still cut a colorful figure on Friday evening at Madison Square Garden.

For this bit of clownishness, Rapiermaster Garot, my long-time patron and personal friend, knocked me backward over the bricks of the dormitory court.

It suited him to confront the world with a certain barn-yard clownishness, but many of the things he had to say about undisciplined mankind were not only funny but true.

Mr. Paik was forever young in the best sense of the phrase, although his perennial joviality, which sometimes bordered on clownishness, could disguise the extent of his achievement.

And so on to the most notorious example of D'Amato's clownishness, when he mimicked Judge Lance Ito on Don Imus's radio show a year ago.

She has a grasp of the work's many layers and she gets at the comic undercurrents, the dark and the light, with a clownishness that radiates giddiness and poignancy.

It is left to Steve Routman's well-remunerated Costard and Julia Gibson's Jacquenetta to add a note of country clownishness.