"burlone"

[Joel S. Berson]

"Monty", by Jim Meddick, today (Sep. 27, 2008)
Boston Globe, E10, col. 4.

'Ha Ha "Beetle Bailey"! What a burlone!'  [Spoken, however, by a
character who is a gangster of Italian descent.]

I see burlone is "jester" in Italian, and has 139,000 hits on
Google.  Apparently a common insult on the web?  Appears in movie
titles ("Il Re Burlone", 1936).  Plus a "Sansome burlone" movie from
1920?  And a Burlone family tree and genealogy, plus a Scientologist.

Being somewhat naive, I don't know where to look for this in English
utterances, other than to say urbandictionary doesn't have it.  Nor
does the OED.

Wikipedia has an article on an Italian TV situation comedy "Quelli
dell'intervallo" that uses "burlone", but it strikes me as a
translation, by computer or inadequate human, from Italian (e.g.,
boys who "discuss topics and combine trouble unpredictable").

After that, I got tired.

Joel

Joel

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