Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Reminiscent of Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin (1889–1977), English comic actor and film director of the silent film era.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Chaplin +‎ -esque

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Examples

  • Halpern also reproached me for "disingenuously ignoring the memorable ending" of Crane's hapless little poem "Chaplinesque": but we have seen

    PoetryFoundation.org 2008

  • Various venues, to 13 NovRobert ClarkWith his little moustache and penchant for deadpan silliness, Cezary Bodzianowski cuts a Chaplinesque figure.

    This week's new exhibitions 2011

  • Andrew Sachs, he says, is one of those people he really admires in life – "I mean, he's a proper old gentleman, he's got real class" – whose portrayal of Manuel, he says, was "Chaplinesque".

    It's time for you to talk 2011

  • As "daughter of the regiment", she whisks and spins across stage with comedic pell-mell energy and Chaplinesque elfin charm, at once mascot, laundrette and unexplored love interest for the gauche troops.

    Tosca; La fille du régiment; Takacs Quartet 2010

  • He grasped Autolycus, for instance, that wandering snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, in Ronald Eyre's 1981 The Winter's Tale at Stratford-upon-Avon, and transformed him into a Chaplinesque tramp with a deliciously unlikely repertoire of Victorian parlour songs.

    Geoffrey Hutchings obituary 2010

  • Unquestionably, Tracy is great moviemaking, a feast for the eyes, a breathtaking marriage of nostalgia and violence, presenting a coldly expressionistic world that owes much to G. W. Pabst and Bertolt Brecht, but is also shot through with Dickensian and Chaplinesque sentiment.

    STAR PETER BISKIND 2010

  • Vignon pulled the bloody trousers away from his anguished posterior and did a kind of Chaplinesque walk toward his car.

    Babylon Nights Daniel Depp 2010

  • At times he was almost Chaplinesque, at others like a refugee from a John Le Carré novel or a fifties-era Organization Man taking the commuter train from Greenwich.

    RJ Eskow: Leonard Cohen Works For A Living 2009

  • The clash between Henry Ford -- the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions in order to produce a series of infinitely identical products, the first indistinguishable from the millionth -- and the Amazon, the world's most complex and diverse ecosystem, was Chaplinesque in its absurdity, producing a parade of mishaps straight out of a Hollywood movie.

    Greg Grandin: Touring Empire's Ruins 2009

  • But it was a Charlie Chaplinesque kind of defeat, sympathetic but funny at the same time.

    Tonya Plank: The Largely Self-Taught Dancer Wins America's Collective Hearts: So You Think You Can Dance Season Finale 2008

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