Definition of "carnival"

Like most human activities, ballooning has sponsored heroes and hucksters and a good deal in between. For every dedicated scientist patiently recording atmospheric pressure and wind speed while shivering at high altitudes, there is a carnival barker with a bevy of pretty girls willing to dangle from a basket or parachute down to earth.

2013 June 7, David Simpson, “Fantasy of navigation”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 188, number 26, page 36

The social environment contains the ambiguous traces of carnival: it resists the ideology of capitalism and, at the same time, reproduces the capitalist social order.

2010, Gulnara Karimova, “Jackass, South Park, and 'Everyday' Culture”, in Studies in Popular Culture, volume 33, page 37