What is "clownish"

Usage examples of "clownish".

And clownish Stencil capering along behind her, bells ajingle, waving a wooden, toy oxgoad.

Gelnhausen told his wretched bawdy tales and decanted clownish wisdom in three different dialects, for in the course of the war Stoffel had acquired the Westphalian and Alemannic stammer on top of his native Hessian.

Colonel Hogan tricking Schultz into giving him the keys to the stalag gate -- again, this is redolent of Forties propaganda flicks, which portrayed Axis leaders as bungling and clownish.

He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.

Nice, perhaps, if it were real, but there was something so clownish about it.

Ayla would have smiled at his clownish antics if she had not remembered to control it in time.

In Sussex or in Somerset, however dull and clownish the typical inhabitant, he plainly belongs to an ancient order of things, represents an immemorial subordination.

My hired suit looked even more festively clownish, in the floodlights of day.

Someone might have thought the gesture melodramatic or even clownish, but he preferred it to any words.

But then happiness is a pretty clownish condition, when you stop to think about it.

Perhaps, of course, as they jolted and wobbled past, they had smiled because they saw a clownish mask.

So as they gazed after her a while,Lo where a griesly Foster forth did rush,Breathing out beastly lust her to defile:His tyreling iade he fiercely forth did push,Through thicke and thin, both ouer banke and bushIn hope her to attaine by hooke or crooke,That from his gorie sides the bloud did gush:Large were his limbes, and terrible his looke,And in his clownish hand a sharp bore speare he shooke.

So she took him by the hand with a blandishing air, to which he replied with some clownish grins.

Beck somewhere found and purchased a snare drum and a tenor drum, and conscripted another Slovak into the band to play them, for they served better than Hannibal's big bass drum to sound a suspenseful roll during a thrill act or a brisk rataplan during clownish knockabouts.

As for my own costume: It was appropriately clownish - a top hat, a claw-hammer coat and striped pants, a pearl-gray vest with matching spats, a soiled white shirt with a choke collar and tie.