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The immense popularity of Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse shows that, although weak themselves, without expressly desiring it they can come to be defenders of the weak. Both have renounced the security of social prestige. They are poor, humble, and solitary in a world where there is no place for them. But from time to time, they put the powerful in their place. For the middle-class man, in a modern society, there is only the choice to accept the ideology of success (with the discipline that results) or to renounce the world. Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse are amusing because they are sardonic loners who give social failure an ironic dignity.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952 (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy))