This
paper was presented at Salford Comedy Symposium ‘Documenting Comedy’ on 13th
May 2015, hosted by University of Salford and Media City UK, Salford
Documenting
Clown Training
I
want to ask some questions about the nature of clowning, or a particular part of it, which arise when we
consider the relationship between clown performance and its possible
documentation. By doing so I will also reflect upon the nature of documentation
itself.
What
do we mean by clowning?
What do we include? Exclude? The term is
multi-connotational and sometimes hotly disputed. It depends on who you ask,
clowns or clowning are:
-
‘A clown who doesn’t provoke
laughter is a shameful mime’ (Gaulier 2007a: 289)
-
‘It's okay not to be funny. Clowns do not have to make people
laugh‘ (Simon 2009: 31)
-
Clowns are sad and exhibit ‘shabby melancholy‘ (Stott 2009: XVI).
-
‘The key feature
uniting all clowns is their ability, skill or
stupidity, to break the rules (McManus 2003: 12).
-
Etymologically, in 16th England, clowns those who do not behave like
gentlemen, but in ‘uncivil fashions‘ (French
Academy, 1586).
-
‘a quest for liberation from the “social
masks” we all wear‘ (Murray 2003: 79, on
Jacques Lecoq).
-
‘the main similarity between
clown and Zen is that if you are you are thinking, then you are not where you
want to be‘ (Cohen 2005);
-
‘Clowning is about the freedom
that comes from a state of total, unconditional acceptance of our most
authentic selves‘ (Henderson 2008).
-
Some believe clowns are
responsible for bringing rain to the crops: ‘they also fast, mortify themselves, and pray to Those Above that every kind
of fruit may ripen in its time, even the fruit in woman’s womb‘
(Bandolier 1890: 34).
-
Some ascribe such powers to
their taboo-breaking: ‘This “wisdom” magically acquired shows well that this is
a question of the breaking of a taboo’ (Makarius 1974: 63).
-
Some think that clowns are a
socially useful way to control traffic, since they ’can achieve what traffic
police cannot achieve using warning and sanctions [...] by employing artistic
and peaceful actions’ (Toothaker 2011),
-
Others believe that to be a clown
is to sink below human dignity: ’I'm going to earn something, even if it’s as a
clown’ (Partido del Trabajo de México 2009).
-
Some have believed clowns could
stop wars: ’The laughter of Bim and Bom almost stopped the Russian Revolution’
(Schechter 1998: 33).
-
Alternatively, they might find
themselves on the side of governments: ’Nikulin replied: “Who will be the
subject of our parody? The government is marvellous”’ (Schechter 1998: 15-16).
The list is much longer. Clowns have
been seen as revolutionary, reactionary, avant-garde, universal, marginal,
irrelevant, fundamental, dangerous, harmless, immoral, exemplary, skilled,
chaotic, wealthy, poor, innocent, cruel, scary, joyous, melancholic, or as fulfilling
any number of social, artistic, cultural or political functions as can be
imagined.
There is one particular definition of
clowning I want to look at here. It has its contemporary source in the
experiments by Jacques Lecoq with clowning in the early 1960s: the flop... the
eliciting and re-eliciting of laughter. Laughter as a response to the failure
of the clown to make us laugh, which is the job, the agreed contract between
clown and audience. And that this laughter should be as a result of our finding
the clown himself the joke.
This definition or practice has been
hugely influential, indeed dominant, over the last half century of contemporary
clowning, and forms a pillar of clown training, in many, though not all, clown
pedagogies.
Over the last half century clown
workshops and training, since Jacques Lecoq’s experiments teaching clown in the
early 1960s, have arguably gained prominence over clown performance itself.
Clown teachers command international respect and power, aesthetic and
financial, which very few clown performers can aspire to. In the workshop,
theories, orthodoxies and philosophies have become established which often make
transcendent claims to ‘truth’, in a manner that general actor training has
done for some time.
Despite remaining a relatively isolated
niche in the fields of performer training and comedy performance, this
new-found boost in the value assigned to clown training and its practitioners
has also visibly filtered into the public arena, via tributes paid by household
names such as Sacha Baron-Cohen, or Edinburgh Perrier award-winner Phil Burgers
(Dr Brown) and others to master clown teachers such as Philippe Gaulier.
However, outside the confines of the
clown workshop, very little is known about just what the value of clown
training might be. Are the experiences of students and teachers of clowning
alike, which are often reported to be ‘life-changing’, destined to lie
neglected as traces in the personal memories of participants? Or can they be
documented and disseminated in such a way that a wider audience might share
their insights?
So, how can we document this clowning?
How can we document a flop?
Before addressing that question, I want
to briefly ask what a document is.
What
is a document/documentation?
Etymologically,
a document means (early 15c)
"teaching, instruction," from Old French document (13c.)
"lesson, written evidence," from Latin documentum "example,
proof, lesson," in Medieval Latin "official written instrument,"
from docere "to show, teach" (see doctor (n.)). Meaning
"something written that provides proof or evidence" is from early
18c.
document (v.)
1640s, "to teach;" see
document (n.). Meaning "to support by documentary evidence" is from
1711.
In
Library and Information Science,
a document is, according to Suzanne
Briet’s influential “What is documentation?” (1951) a theoretical construct, "evidence
in support of a fact." (Buckland, Michael (1998). “What is a digital
document?”)
In a Court of Law
I have to provide proofs, or documents,
to convince you of the probability of my argument. These might be material
evidence - signed papers, photographs, audio recordings, bus tickets, phone
bills, scientific experiments, forensic tests. Or witness statements converted
into written and signed statements.
Either way, the document’s function is
to aid proof of an argument.
Clown
documentation
If we take this sense of a document as only
being a document as such when it serves the purpose of demonstrating, or
proving, something, how does this then apply to clown documentation?
Imagine this: I have witnessed some
clowning, some good clowning, but a friend of mine wasn’t there to see it. How
will I explain and convince my friend of the value of the clowning? How can I show
to those who were not present why it was good, or why it was clowning, or
perhaps more objectively, why, or when we laughed?
If you’ve ever done, seen or trained in
clowning, you may have had the experience of trying to recount your experience
to someone who wasn’t there. ‘Oh it was so funny what they did, one of them was
smiling then he stopped and we all laughed, then the other one left and it was
hilarious!’
At times, while teaching clowning, I
venture to suggest that this undocumentability, or more precisely, this
undisseminatability, is a good indication that good clowning has taken place.
If clowning, at least of this type, is about you, the clown, being the joke,
then how could I possibly transmit or explain ‘you’? If on the other hand the
pleasure was in the jokes, as in other kinds of non-clown comedy, or the
farcical situation, or in the characters, then I would be more likely to be
able to convey, to recount to retell the jokes, the stories or the situations to
my friend. Even if I couldn’t tell the jokes as funnily as the comedian, my
friend would at least have seen that, in the hands of a professional, this
material might well elicit laughter. That would be enough to convince my friend
that when I say I laughed a lot when I saw that show, I am not lying, nor am I
completely mad.
Gaulier argues precisely this, that
clowning is not about having good jokes, but the opposite
A question:
‘Why do clowns choose bad
jokes?’
If the jokes were good,
they would be comic actors. They wouldn’t meet Monsieur Flop. They wouldn’t
perform with the feeling of having committed a blunder. (Gaulier: 307-8)
The audience doesn’t
laugh at the gag, but at the imbecile who has a moronic idea. (Gaulier: 308)
How can I convey the essence of the
clown’s comedy by retelling some bad jokes? Conversely, if the jokes are too
bad to be retold, does that demonstrate that they were clown jokes, or at least
that any laughter provoked by them in the show was a result not of the quality
of the material, but of the quality, if you like, of the clowning?
In short: if clowns have shit material,
what can we document? What document, what proof can convince my friend that it
was indeed funny and that they really should have been there?
You may say here that I should have just
videoed the performance on my phone so I could share it afterwards, with ALL my
friends. But will the video be a good enough document for the clowning to hold
up in court?
Or, should we just be happy with no
documentation? The idea that clowning might be by its nature that which cannot
be documented might indeed be appealing... but is it strictly true? Or is it
just a bit of rhetoric designed to claim for clowning that unmediated presence
so sought after by performance practitioners and scholars?
Video
I want to address the issue of video
briefly and perhaps throw a spanner into the works of my argument so far. A few
years ago at a performance conference I was presenting a paper entitled
‘describing clowning’. I had been wrestling with how to describe my own
practice in order to then make arguments about that practice as evidenced in
the descriptions. I wanted to keep at bay any temptation on my part to impose
my own preconceptions about the meaning and effect of my own performance work. Searching
for a ‘rigorous methodology’ to do this, I had
recourse to Gilbert Ryle’s notion of thin and thick descriptions. Grossly
oversimplifying, thin descriptions tell us what happened in an event, thick
descriptions also tell us what those happenings might mean. By dispensing with thick description I hoped
to remove all trace of my pre-interpretations of the event.
Up until that point I had written
several thick and thin descriptions of my performances but had not been
convinced of the value of this exercise. During the paper presentation I had
planned to show a short video clip of my own clown performance, in order to support
my argument about the dynamics of laughter in clowning. When I came to the part
where I was going to show the video, I felt that those present would most
likely find this boring: watching a youtube clip on a distant projector screen
in poor lighting, with poor sound, no context and no sense of what the
performance event had actually felt like. That event had taken place in a room crammed
full of spectators sitting on the floor and anywhere they could find, in a
circus community in London. In an instant there came to mind so many occasions
when I had shown to friends and family a bit of video of a show I had done,
only to be disappointed by the blank looks on their faces as they tried to
figure out what was going on in this little 2D rectangle, and most importantly,
just when or why they were supposed to laugh. Excruciating. So I made a quick
decision to dispense with the video. In its place I elected to read the thin
description of the same event shown in the video clip. Before commenting
further on this, I will now repeat that reading.
Thin
description of a performance....
The compere says,
‘okay, and so for our next act, please bring your hands together and welcome
Jon’, and exits the stage.
The audience applaud.
One second later I enter,
taking one step onto the performing area, in the upstage right corner. I am
wearing a black suit, a white shirt, black tie, black shoes with white laces.
Looking at the audience, I am smiling. I remain there. I bring my hands
together in front of me then return them to my sides. Silence for six seconds.
The audience applauds again. I adjust my tie a little, after which it is
slightly longer than before. I say, ‘Thank you’. Silence for six seconds,
during which my smile disappears.
There follow a couple of
small laughs from the audience. I smile
and take one more step onto the stage, in a diagonal line towards centre stage.
Silence for six seconds. A beer bottle in the audience is heard rolling onto
the floor. Six seconds of silence. I turn towards the exit, smiling and saying,
‘bye!’ The audience laugh loudly. I turn back and take another step towards
them. In amongst that laugh is a faint single voice which sighs ‘oh!’ I stand,
smiling and say: ‘Thanks’. More audience laughter, patchy. I take one more step
forwards, and repeat ‘thanks’. More patchy laughter. I take another step as the
audience laughs and some applaud. Stopping, I drop my smile and look down at my
tie, which I adjust, leaving it longer than before. Silence, six seconds, then
more applause (no laughs), I elongate my tie more. Some of the audience laugh,
in spurts. I take a step whilst saying thanks. Four seconds silence, audience
laugh, I step and say thanks. This again, a laugh and step, then I also laugh,
a single burst that ends in a snort. A one second pause and a single
hysterical-type laugh from the audience. I look quizzical. I laugh again and
say: ‘oh, thank you very much’. A big
laugh from both the audience and myself, which I end by faking the laugh. More
audience laughs, as I step towards them.
A few more steps follow
similarly, I laugh, the audience laughs. I look at the front row to my left,
who aren’t laughing. Looking at them, my smile drops, my mouth becomes
down-turned.
The semiotician of circus and clowning,
Paul Bouissac, repeatedly bemoans the fact that when commentators talk about
clowning, they mostly restrict themselves to a few well-worn clichés about what
clowns are deemed to engage in (Bouissac 2015).
What Bouissac wants, instead, are
detailed descriptions of what particular clowns actually did. Thin
descriptions, in other words. His own publications have repeatedly tried to redress
this imbalance. Only when we have an accurate description of a routine,
Bouissac claims, can we begin to analyse and interpret how the meaning is
constructed in a clown performance.
This also chimes with what the clown and
fool expert and teacher, Franki Anderson, has to say about observation. One of
her exercises consists in one student showing a small performance of themselves
as themselves, while their companions (their audience) observe and then recount
to them what they saw. Two types of observation are suggested by Anderson;
subjective and objective, which coincide with the thick/thin binary. Although
not universally so, what many report is that the objective/thin description is the
one which offers the descriptee the most useful information. By useful here I
mean that this kind of description gives the descriptee the potential to: 1.
Recall the action (a kind of rehearsal notes, or script) 2. Recall how it felt
to do this performance, and maybe how to regain that feeling when re-performing
(a kind of mnemonic for reencountering the clown state, or however you want to
call it). What seems surprising about this is that the subjective description
does not give the descriptee the tools to rediscover the feeling or state,
despite, or perhaps because of, subjectivity’s aim being precisely to capture
emotions, states, intentions and motivations.
Could it be, then, that a kind of
Beckettian script is what serves clown documentation best? Perhaps. Though I’m
not sure that the next time I see a clown show and then try to tell a friend in
a pub how funny it was, that I will begin by saying.... a tall figure, sex
undeterminable, enters and stands upstage right, left foot first. .....!
Conclusions
This all finally brings us back to the
flop, and to Gaulier. In his book, ‘The Tormentor’ Gaulier uses a character
named ‘Victor Francois’ to illustrate typically clownish behaviour. This Victor
resorts to joke shops and, crucially, a written document in his drive to be
funny:
Joke shops sell vulgar
half-masks, big hooked noses, with (or without) a moustache, big potato-shaped
noses, with (or without) glasses, alongside squeaking cheeses, exploding
sweets, fake brandy, plastic turds and the Encyclopaedia of Jokes.
I know someone who goes
to these shops regularly on Fridays after work. He opens the door and looks
along the shelves. He considers carefully. How will I be funny tomorrow? He
buys this and that: not too much but just enough to make his friends burst out
laughing. He knows exactly what to choose. He longs for tomorrow evening. He
has to learn three gags by heart from his Encyclopaedia of Jokes. Ah, his
Encyclopaedia! He bought it thirty-five years ago. He has never lost it or left
it anywhere. The Encyclopaedia has pride of place on his bedside table. In the
evening he reads it before going to sleep. According to his wife, he often
chuckles when he’s asleep. [...] His favourite joke is the story of the
archbishop who ... he has told it too often. It’s got worn to death... Three
new jokes tomorrow.
[...] He admitted to me
he was better on the visual and dramatic front, rather than with jokes.
He forgets them.
‘You understand? I begin.
It’s OK. Then, little by little, I flounder. I tie myself in knots. I forget
the punch line or say it too soon. The surprise effect is lost. I say I’m sorry
I got it wrong. Everyone laughs. Unfortunately they don’t laugh at the joke.
They laugh at my stupidity. (290)
And so, the encyclopaedia of jokes is
the clown’s greatest prop. The idea that one can pluck a joke from a document
and then make people laugh with it, is, frankly, funny!
Appendix
1: jokes as doumentation
This
observation might lead us even further, into the territory of jokes, comic
material and indeed theatre in general. The pattern is: event, observe event,
retell event/re-perform event. Until now I have taken the event to be the
original clown performance; the observation being my own in the moment and then
in notes plus watching the video afterwards and annotating it – or going to see
a show then telling a friend about it - or, in Bouissac’s case, going to the
circus several times until he has a detailed description for the purposes of
semiotic analysis.
But
we can also begin from a non-performance event. Let’s say, my mother-in-law
said something to me last Tuesday... and so on. The observation is simply me
remembering what happened. And the retelling becomes, you guessed it! a joke.
‘my mother-in-law.....[cite joke
The
doorbell rang this morning. When I opened the door, there was my mother-in-law
on the front step.
She said, 'Can I stay here for a few days?' I said, 'Sure you can.' And shut
the door in her face.]
This
is the standard staging of this kind of joke: a presumed event retold.
Of
course, it is also the standard pattern for joke-stealing! Watch a comedian,
write down the joke, tell it next night. And not just stand-ups. The Fratellinis
tell of how their competitors would be lurking in the audience on first nights,
paper in hand, ready to steal their new routines and reproduce them tomorrow,
in the same bill as themselves, but earlier, thus sabotaging their act.
Of
course, according to Brecht, this is also the nature of theatre: a retelling of
an event, in such a way as to allow for new interpretations and meanings.
Brecht’s image of the witness here [cite] also brings us back to the heart of
documentation: the purpose of which is to ‘prove’ (in court) the truth or
otherwise of a particular interpretation of the meaning of someone’s acts. In
the case of the mother-in-law joke, what, we might ask, would be proved by this
‘document’? that all mothers-in-law are x, y, z..... of course!
This
perspective on the nature of comedic material gets us away from obsessing over
punchlines and how they work (incongruence, rhythm, timing etc.) such an
‘ontology’ of comic material fits the pattern even better in the case of the
less structured or formulaic format of observational comedy. In this light,
Jerry Seinfeld is the ‘witness’, and the case to be proved is that, well, isn’t
the world a funny place?
Appendix
2: Lenny Bruce
Here is an example which confounds both
the nature of performance documentation and the status of performance as proof
in a court of law.
Bruce used courtroom transcripts, about
the alleged obscenity of his act, in his act, telling the story of how a
policeman would come to see his act and make notes on the rude things he said,
to be reproduced in front of the judge as evidence in a case.
[This
was Bruce’s penultimate stand-up performance of his life, soon after he was
convicted, virtually banned from performing, and died of an overdose.]
Jon
Davison is artistic director of the
clown-circus-pantomime company, Stupididity,
co-founder of the Escola de Clown de Barcelona, Visiting Lecturer at RCSSD,
author of Clown: Readings in Theatre
Practice, and Clown Training, a practical guide, both published by Palgrave
Macmillan.
