Pierrot a formulaic structure (Cassander, father of Columbine, and Pierrot, his dim-witted servant, undertake a mad pursuit of Columbine and her rogue lover, Harlequin). The formula has proven enduring: Pierrot is still a fixture at Bakken, the oldest amusement park in the world, where he plays the nitwit talking to and entertaining children, and at nearby Tivoli Gardens, the second oldest, where the Harlequin and Columbine act is performed as a pantomime and ballet. Pierrot—as "Pjerrot", with his boat-like hat and scarlet grin—remains one of the parks’ chief attractions. Ludwig Tieck's "The Topsy-Turvy World" (1798) is an early—and highly successful—example of
Pierrot with the reigning American Realist and Naturalist aesthetic (though such figures as Ambrose Bierce and John LaFarge were mounting serious challenges to it). It is in fact jarring to find the champion of American prose Realism, William Dean Howells, introducing "Pastels in Prose" (1890), a volume of French prose-poems containing a Paul Margueritte pantomime, "The Death of Pierrot", with words of warm praise (and even congratulations to each poet for failing “to saddle his reader with a moral”). So uncustomary was the French Aesthetic viewpoint that, when Pierrot made an appearance in "Pierrot the Painter" (1893), a pantomime by Alfred