| The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996. |
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| NUMBER: | 8695 |
| QUOTATION: | In short, camp mocks bad taste; kitsch exploits it. Camp arouses our sense of the ridiculous and we respond with amused tolerance. When we see Bette Davis or Ruth Gordon, fine if sometimes flamboyant performers, relax their self-discipline and overextend their acting technique in a superfluity of ineffective gestures—finger-twitching and hip-switching, hand-rubbing or hip-protruding—we label the sum total as camp. Mae West, whose nasally provocative delivery, eye-rolling, lip-pursing, and pelvic tics parody the conventional invitation to dalliance, is never out of control and is camp, pure and simple.... Camp was also the stock-in-trade of Carmen Miranda, whose retina-searing Technicolor get-ups, skyscraper headdresses bearing a season’s fruit harvest, clomping platform shoes and garbled English projected in a voice that could be heard on Mars all came together beautifully in her campy personification of Exaggeration. Had we been blessed with the Brazilian Bombshell’s own blazing interpretation of Joan of Arc, the grotesque, if fascinating, result would surely have been kitsch. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Curtis F. Brown, U.S. author. “Is It Kitsch or Is It Camp?” Star-Spangled Kitsch, Universe Books (1975). |
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| | | The Columbia World of Quotations. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. |
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