"When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") "
You may need to ponder the difference between a book and a newspaper
The article you cited was taken from the Boston Guardian October 1891
Ngram is a tool we use to find those odd phrases, then we look for them in other archives.
So nothing new, you keep proving to everyone that you are unable to find "bumbling buffoon" ever been used in the 19th century.
There is a red faced emoji you’ll be able to use in this case.

The Baron
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