Middle age, the film suggests, inspires industrial-strength compromise; slyly undermining the notion of maturity, it posits adults as lunatic children trapped in aging bodies.
It takes a moment to sort out that this is a performer, not a raving lunatic; children are particularly riveted, sometimes hiding at first behind an adult companion before breaking into wide-eyed giggles.
More broadly, however, he enthusiastically endorsed a social system in which wealthy and powerful white men dominated all of "the weak," including "wives, apprentices, inmates of poor houses, idiots, lunatics, children, sailors, soldiers, and domestic slaves".
And unlike the lunatic-children-running-the-asylum vision of family that has echoed Erma Bombeck's oeuvre since the '70s, on today's family comedy, the children are the only sane ones in the picture.
That theory was, naturally, shot down by J K Rowling. 5. Willy Wonka and the Murder Factory "A drug-crazed lunatic slowly kills children in front of their parents one by one".
Out of the dozens of perspectives and stories I read not a single one mentioned the need to hold gun owners accountable when their guns negligently end up in the hands of lunatics, criminals and children.
You hear about the occasional tragic case of a lunatic who names a child after a football team, but never, in this country, after a politician.
Lord Shaftesbury, a compassionate Tory who contributed to improving the conditions of lunatics in asylums and children in factories (The Ten Hours Act, 1833), agitated endlessly for promoting a Jewish presence in Palestine.
At one point I and another father simultaneously spot one wedged into the brickwork of a pretty bridge that crosses a babbling brook, and we both start grunting like lunatics to our respective children.
With an estimated 300 million guns in circulation in the U.S. people need to be responsible to keep their guns secure from lunatics, criminals and curious children.
Meanwhile, parents scour the Christmas shops for stocking "fillers" priced at £20 and only look slightly aghast at the much-shared photograph of the hoard of 400 presents amassed this year by some lunatic mother for her three children.
