Nightmare on Elm Street had the brilliant idea of the demon haunting one's dreams – that grotesque figure in a hat, burned face and clawed glove.
The humor turns grotesque as hunched women in corsets and hats quiver to the sound of a mambo, their youth behind them.
Next stop, the toilet queue where I find myself next to a man dressed as a grotesque clown, with a black-and-white stripey cone hat, spewing obscenities and comical grunting noises.
Abandoning the relatively tolerant approach to the issue he had adopted in the years before he donned a cardinal's red hat, he condemned homosexuality as immoral, and as a "grotesque subversion".
A staff of black waiters served fried chicken to a predominantly white clientele in a room filled with the restaurant's hallmark logo, a grotesque cartoon of a smiling black man wearing a bellhop's hat.
Those whose familiarity with Oliver Sacks extends only to his vivid book titles — "The Island of the Colorblind," "An Anthropologist on Mars," "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" — may picture his writing as a gallery of grotesques, a parade of the exotically impaired.
He is a successful person who, as the left often notes, is also the exact opposite — a grotesque loser, sensitive and prideful about his outsider status, ready at the drop of a hat to go on the attack, self-obsessed, selfish, abrogating, unquestioning of his own mansplaining and spreading, so insecure he must assault women.
His head was so vast that the hatters of Regent Street struggled to find a top hat large enough to cover it, and George Eliot splendidly took Cosima Wagner to task for her husband's grotesque anti-Semitism.
