clown

   Normally used of someone who is deliberately acting in a funny way, trying to amuse others, though it can also be applied to someone who has unwittingly done something stupid. ‘Bloody clown’ as used in The Country Girls, by Edna O’Brien, is a good-natured remark, not an insult. A Kind of Loving, by Stan Barstow, has a scene between a young man and his mother.

   I jump up from the table and throw my arms out and go into my Al Jolson take-off. ‘Mammy, how I love yer, how I need yer, my dear old mammy…’ She can’t help smiling, though she does her best. ‘Gerraway with yer, you great clown.’

   Other Men’s Wives, by Alexander Fullerton, has a scene where a wife overhears her husband making an assignation with another woman. When she confronts him she says: ‘Any other little service I could render you and your little harem, is there, you stupid-looking clown, you?’ There is an authorial comment: She was rather pleased with herself for having, after all that provocation, limited her epithets to ‘stupid-looking clown.’ The more obvious terms would have included such words as ‘filthy’, ‘rotten’, ‘swine’, ‘bastard’, and so on. Whereas her words had downgraded him, she felt, without any indication of pain or damage inflicted on herself. She’d expressed contempt without allowing him to seem to matter to her.