QUESTION: How’s Jeff Bezos’ intervention at the Washington Post coming along? Answer: Not fast enough:
At Outkick the Coverage, Matt Riegle writes: Woke Clown Offended That People Use ‘Clown’ As An Insult.
If you didn’t think it was possible for clowns to be any less funny than they already are, buckle up.
On Thursday, The Washington Post published an opinion piece the likes of which I’ve never seen before titled, “I’m a clown. Donald Trump is not one of us.”
I was not prepared for a blistering hot take like this courtesy of the wokest clown I’ve ever heard of, Tim Cunningham, the board president of Clowns Without Borders.
That’s not a joke. That’s a real group that performs clown shows for communities facing hardship, which is great, but when I’ve faced hardship, my first thought was never, “I wish someone was here to shock me with a joy buzzer and spray me in the face with seltzer from a flower on the lapel,” but we all process grief differently.
Anyway, the piece opens by discussing the way “clown” or “clown show” has become a common way for people to describe President Trump and the Trump administration.
However, Cunningham’s problem wasn’t that it’s a lazy insult that typically misses the mark; he doesn’t like the pejorative use of the word “clown,” which I think has been going on since around the time the word came into existence.
“Clown, capital C, is a valuable and varied art form; pantomimes, acrobats, magicians, dancers, stand-up comedians, vaudeville artists and jugglers are all examples of artists who incorporate Clown into their work,” Cunningham writes.
Other than, eventually, embarrassment, nothing will happen to Cunningham. Unlike the clown who dared mock the president in 2013, earning the wrath of the entire DNC-MSM, including CNN: After Obama-mocking rodeo clown, Missouri fair requires ‘sensitivity training.’
A state fair’s response to the uproar over a rodeo clown’s mockery of President Obama is creating an uproar of its own.
From now on, the Missouri State Fair won’t allow any rodeo cowboys or clowns from the state’s association to take part unless they all undergo “sensitivity training.”
And that’s just part of the fallout from the Saturday incident in which a clown wearing an Obama mask held a broom descending from his backside while a voice said, “Hey, I know I’m a clown. He’s just running around acting like one. Doesn’t know he is one.”
Mark Ficken, president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association, has resigned.
Rodeo clown Tuffy Gessling has apologized. He told Missouri news outlet digitalburg.com that he was the one whose voice was heard at the event, and that he never meant to offend.
“It was a colleague of mine that was dressed up. I am the rodeo clown making jokes,” he said.
“Dog the Wag,” James Taranto quipped at the time at the Wall Street Journal:
In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche observed that “a man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child at play.” Such might be the credo of the professional clown.
Yes, the professional clown. If it never occurred to you to think of clowning as a full-blown “profession,” that makes two of us. Reader, prepare to be educated.
The occasion for the lesson is the kerfuffle over the Missouri rodeo clown who became this week’s Emmanuel Goldstein of the left when he performed a skit while wearing a mask of President Obama. For his offense against the Dear Leader, he has been banned for life from the Missouri State Fair–in effect excommunicated from the clown community.
As an Insta-commenter wrote back then, “If Obama were a classy guy, he’d ask the folks that run the rodeo to un-fire the clown. He’d say, Hey, I can take a joke.” But of course, we all knew at the time that neither he nor his operatives with bylines could.