Clowning Around: On the Principles of Clowning
funnyhow.substack.com
funnyhow.substack.com
> There are Zen monks who have used absurdity to teach their pupils existential principles.
I get a sense of how those pupils must have felt because I don't feel like I've learned anything about clowning from this post.
One of my pet peeves are tutorials that only make sense after you understood the topic being explained, and I feel that these guidelines fall in that category. "The clown enters the stage to accomplish a task, not to get laughs. If there are laughs it is an interruption" sounds very deep, but I'm not sure how to square that with "The clown offers energy and fun for the audience to enjoy".
All the clowns I remember aimed to get laughs from their audience. Does that make them bad clowns? Or is it a "no true clown comes from Scotland" situation?
I always got the feeling that "high clowning" must be out there and be really interesting to watch. I would have liked the post to shed more light on that.
Most of them are incredibly untalented, and the ones that are talented don't need to dress like a clown at all.
Sometimes in life I come across people, colleagues mainly, that are one-to-one a fucking clown except they are not wearing make up, so I'm confused, are we setting the bar too high for these assholes to actually become a clown, or for a clown to become a software engineer?
They both have clearly playful senses of humor once you get to know them, and a lot of surprising little physical, verbal, and musical skills. But neither has that, ahem, "class clown" center of attention type personality. They're just confident, socially skilled, well liked people, one of them is one of the most effective managers I've ever known.
It's long made me wonder what they teach at clown school. When I was reading through this list, thinking of these two, I kept going "ahhh I see." Maybe they were like this before the school, probably were to some extent. But it's also kind of foolish to think several years of focused study on how you can use your body to affect people's perception of your actions would bear no fruit.
From the article, "The body tells the story.", "Have an emotional reaction and invite the audience to join in your experience.", "A clown is costume and makeup. Clowning is a verb." - these all capture some of what it is. The ability to wholeheartedly commit to a bit with absolutely none of your personal baggage coming along for the ride, to use your body expressively to cause the audience to feel something, to be a perfectly smooth lump of clay that's immediately formed into exactly what the scene requires; it's an astonishing superpower that right now I can only dream of having.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development
> Unlike court jesters, clowns have traditionally served a socio-religious and psychological role, and traditionally the roles of priest and clown have been held by the same persons. Peter Berger writes, "It seems plausible that folly and fools, like religion and magic, meet some deeply rooted needs in human society." […] A society in which such clowns have an important position are termed clown societies, and a clown character involved in a religious or ritual capacity is known as a ritual clown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processional_giant
These are heads, or entire characters, made of papier-mâché or resin, and in European cultures, they're paraded around in both secular and religious contexts. Probably also in New Orleans as part of the krewes' culture there, too.
But Americans hate these provincial customs and Americans don't understand villagers' sense of reverence, or villagers' sense of exaggeration and metaphor in terms of these farcical characters that may enter into a liturgical context.
Clowns as I know them have a physicality, a wordless absurdity that is derived by leveraging the exaggerated facial features in makeup, the enormous shoes, the slapstick comedy and pratfalls that play well to international crowds. Clowns don't need to speak English; they don't need to speak to be amusing or entertaining. Mimes are specialized clowns. Clowns appeal to children, and the young at heart, because clowns demonstrate insight into the essential human condition; times when we love to poke fun at serious "straight men", or times when we desperately need to be distracted from accidents or bleeding gymnasts or a rodeo broco rider who was just gored; that's when the rodeo clown tries to distract everyone with antics.
The "funny thing" is that one of my own priests was an actual clown, (as in circus clown, Barnum and Bailey's Three Rings Traveling Show thing), and he definitely never wore the makeup or the clown costume during Holy Mass. Father was the son of a clown himself, and thus, clowning was a family tradition that was passed down father-to-son. And Father being a priest wasn't a long stretch from circus clowning, and court jester's duties, and winning the hearts and minds of the audience. Father innovated many things, including the part where he stepped out from behind the ambo, and gave his homilies from the center aisle, or he would even journey through the rows of pews with a long, long cabled microphone, and engage the faithful with questions and answers. For these innovations, according to the Second Vatican Council, Father endured great controversy, and many people would've preferred the status quo, and I wonder how many school parents knew that Father had the true heart of a bona fide clown.
But yet, Father held on to his clown makeup and his clown wig and his clown accoutrements, and they were carefully packaged in a leather carrying-case, and he made no secret of them. But he was a good and devout priest, he smiled and he loved children, and we loved him in turn.
There's the kind we all think of -- white face, red nose, at the circus.
But there's other kinds too. I know the most about two related forms: commedia dell'arte and bouffon.
In commedia dell'arte, performers play different "stock characters" based on Italian society in the 1600s, when commedia was originally developed. Commedia is concerned with status within a society: rich/poor, servant/master, young/old. Each character has its own specific mask. One character might be the blue-collar working person, who isn't learned, but is not dumb. Another character is the rich person who thinks themself smart and cultured, but is neither. These performances are often partially scripted, partially improvised. One example is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DjGoDEks7U
In bouffon (mentioned in the article as the group Mil Grus). These characters are grotesque (physically -- often these performers put foam inside their clothing to make the character look inhuman) and outcasts. You might think of them as a tribe of people thrown out of society in the middle ages, who the king invites back in once a year. Because of their outcast status, they are allowed to say things that people inside that society cannot. One modern example is Red Bastard (who I've studied with), who can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFJWnfNUXnc.