How to survive as a clown

 How to survive as a clown. This is what I've been doing all my adult life and I'm still doing it.

 

I have spent my whole adult life (40+ years) exploring what clowning is, how it works, how to do it, how to learn it, what it means and what it is for. 

I started performing by accident, and felt it had to be my vocation, without knowing why. 

Then I started studying it, in order to understand how and the why what I was doing was clowning. 

I started teaching it when I was a student, in order to try and work out how to do it better. 

I started researching its history, in order to understand why many of the things I had been told about clowning were wrong, and didn’t work. 

Today, I am still dedicated to exploring this paradoxical and ubiquitous artform which is so often denigrated as low yet so often has pretensions to wisdom. As one of my students recently suggested, clowns are anthropologists, we study humans.

 

My projects include:

-          Collaborate practical research with other clown performers and teachers worldwide

-          Large-scale performances aimed at the widest range of audiences

-          Solo clown acts

-          Directing, mentoring and tutoring clown artists

-          Teaching worldwide, in universities, drama schools, and all kinds of communities

-          Writing books about clowns and clowning, their history and variety across cultures

 

As I grew up and continue to live in a society and culture where everything is monetised, all this exploratory behaviour has come at a cost. 

Sometimes I get paid to do it (teaching, mostly, and sometimes performing). Sometimes I don’t (research, most writing, some performing). On rare occasions, I’ve been paid to think about clowns and clowning (a three-year research fellowship at Central School of Speech and Drama). 

At other times, the research happens under cover of teaching, which for me is always exploratory and asking the question ‘how do we do this thing called clowning?’ and never ‘ok, this is how you do it’. Many times, the cover is blown and the institution prefers to employ someone who will do the latter. But sometimes, I get lucky. 

There have been times when money is tight, but then there is always the street. And again the same question: ‘how to do this thing called clowning … in the street?’ 

Sometimes, people and places are so kind as to offer their resources at little cost. The first instinct when someone gives you something cheap is to offer them more in return. And then the collaborations and the explorations blossom even more. But sometimes, people think that artists are a good source of hire income, whilst simultaneously expecting them to offer their experience cheaply, in the name of accessibility.   

Maybe we can’t instantly transform our monetised societies into kinder places where everyone can get on with doing what they are good at in peace and with the security of having their basic needs met. Maybe we can’t suddenly make clowning sacred instead of precarious. But we can keep looking for better ways.

Clowning post-lots-of-things

As we return to being with each other in person, doing things like we did two years ago seems absurd. The world has moved, we have all changed. Old ways of understanding clowning seem even more out of date than before (and a lot of them were already decades past their best, dating from the early 1960s).

Online clowning during lockdown responded to urgent circumstances, when many of us were eager to find ways of being together and not alone. The online space did that intensely. Following that needy period, the online classes have become an option, convenient for many who cannot attend an in-person class, whether that's because of location or time or money. 

So let's ask ‘how do we do this now?’. Our unique new historical circumstances (post-BLM, post-Covid, in the midst of war) are the foundation for understanding our artform. Let’s innovate, respond and look to the future rather than rehashing tired ideas about ‘the clown’ as if it were a thing that exists in isolation to the world all around us. After all, clowning is nothing more nor less than a part of the society we live in here and now. It neither holds great universal truths nor is it irrelevant or disconnected to what ever real-life priorities press down upon us.

One way we can imagine this is to "flip the teaching".

Rather than students trying to work out what the teacher is wanting (or trying) to teach, how about if teachers wondered what the student already knows? 

This might help erase the belief that teachers have some kind of knowledge that they are here to impart to students. Those phrases that begin, “The clown … etc etc etc” in particular produce this kind of student/teacher relationship, since such pronouncements assume that “the clown” is a “thing” that exists in its own right, like some kind of “pure artform”. And if it exists then it would be discoverable, right? And some very clever people will have discovered it, and then be worth paying money to if you’re not clever enough to discover it. Then the teacher seems like a master/guru. “Masters” can get away with selling this product for a long time past its useful sell-by date. They can even sell it to other cultures, who will likely already have their own knowledge and practices, but still buy into the “power of knowledge”, as long as it’s got a red nose attached to it or labelled “masterclass”. 

But what if this “the clown” was just a silly mirage? What if clowns were just different ways people have of making fun of, mocking and disrupting their own beliefs and norms? (of course, that last sentence is full of its own assumptions about what clowns theoretically are!) In that case, we would all already know how to clown before setting foot in any masterclass. We wouldn’t need to be “stripped bare” and learn “neutral mask” as some kind of baptism prior to being re-educated in the correct way. We would just bring our own clownishness to the party and maybe have someone with some empathy and awareness facilitate a cultivation of what we already know. Or maybe we wouldn’t even need the “facilitator” at all. We could just come together and agree to clown. No money involved. Amateur. Because we want to.  The end of clown workshops as we know them. 

Then maybe we would have all manner of clowns made visible. Not just reproductions which are identifiable as having studied with teacher X or Y. these clowns would have begun their learning in their own families, peer groups, cultures, relationships (intimate ones, work ones, school ones). They would be diverse and different to each other. A new kind of “personal clown”? Perhaps, but not that theoretical personal clown based on the teaching method of vulnerability enforced by the teacher playing a “boss clown” (whether the latter is done cruelly or playfully is irrelevant, the structure is the same). Perhaps these new clowns would be “hyper-personal”. They would certainly be celebratory, confident a freely choosing to clown, rather than being doomed by ideas of failure, marginalisation and powerlessness.

Clowns are not always good

For many years I’ve protested about the suffocating ideologies of wholeness and goodness and claims to truth in the world of clowning. The words and practices of clown teachers, their students and even unknowledgeable journalists and promoters who regurgitate tales of clowns being universally and homogenously uplifting, sacred or progressive, have always rung false in my experience. My initial rebellion came from knowing that, in my early years of learning clowning, being told to find truth or inner clowns, or freedom, or whatever, was not only utterly useless as a teaching and learning technique, but positively obstructive to learning and understanding. Giving students abstract instructions or formulas that they cannot even begin to try, let alone achieve, sucks strength and hope from them. That’s if it doesn’t create cult members of them. 

So when, over the past year, our global conditions and concerns have forced us to face up to many uncomfortable things, and clowns and clowning too came under the spotlight, I very much welcomed that. Here was a chance to challenge the specious universalism in clowning, for example, and to look for ways to work, teach, learn and create, that acknowledge that clowns and clowning, and even the concept itself, is not universal, and does not erase cultural, historical, ethnic, gender and other differences. My excitement - to challenge our lazy conformism to one ideology of clowning which is, by now, over half a century old and most likely highly inapplicable to today’s world, which has changed radically since the early 1960s (the date of the origin of most of our ideas today about clowns) - this excitement has increased over the last year as I‘ve seen many others ask themselves questions about what we have been doing and about how our practices have often become elitist and isolated in privilege. 

But, please, in our search for more progressive ways to clown and to teach and understand clowning, let’s not dismantle one set of lazy of thinking and then install yet another bit of binary thinking! Because, no! clowns have not always been anti-authoritarian, progressive forces for good. Even if we would like them to be that now. Clowns and clowning have also served reactionary, abusive, discriminatory and harmful forces throughout history and across cultures. Pick a topic for further research from many: blackface, ethnic comic types, famous clowns under the Nazis, erasure of women clowns from historical record, clowns as villains under Stalinism, appropriation of First Nation practices in Canada, neo-colonial export of Western pedagogy and aesthetics, populist right-wing leaders, and a host of clown representations which have been misogynous, racist, ableist or homophobic.

And it’s no use trying to claim that these are not examples of ‘real clowning’. We don’t need to exclude others and privilege ourselves in order to remain critical. If we are to really self-examine, then we must constantly remind ourselves that an artistic or pedagogical practice cannot in itself be ‘good’ or ‘progressive’. It is the use we make of it, the amount of thinking and reflection we can bring to it, that determines the ethics and politics of what we choose to do.  Please let’s not fool ourselves into assuming that, just because we work with clowning, we are ‘good people’.

We, Cowboys - by charlie.translate

'Cinema to Fiction' - Go West (1925) 

by charlie.translate

Clown Studies Course July-September 2020

London Clown School

Women Clowns in Early Cinema - by Giedrė Degutytė

[This project is published together with the comments by Jon Davison, at the request of the author, Giedrė Degutytė.]

"Is it a gag or a stunt? And was Buster Keaton, therefore, a clown or stuntman (or both)?" by Francesca De Sica

Coming soon! Clown Studies

This will be the first of its kind. I started running these classes way back in 2006 when we opened the Barcelona clown school. It felt like an innovation then. No one was really teaching clown history or theory or analysis. To me it seemed self-evident that thinking and knowing about clowning could benefit your performing. Or that it could be a worthwhile study in itself.

Ten years later, and still no one is offering clown studies in this way, anywhere, as far as I am aware: neither in private clown schools nor in universities, despite all their talk of embracing ‘popular performance’.

I flirted with the academy for a number of years (aside from my experience setting up clown workshops myself), teaching and researching at high-level drama schools which had become part of the university system: the Institut del Teatre in Spain and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in Britain. I learned much from my students in Barcelona and had great opportunities to research in London. But I realise that the academy is destined to remain a dead end as far clowning goes, insofar as no one is likely to take the subject seriously enough at an institutional level.

So after years of trying to forge a niche for clowning, either through systematising its teaching or by trying to set up an MA in clowning, I now prefer to put my energies into my independent teaching. Over the last year, the London Clown School Monday workshop has become well-established. We haven't missed a week, not even for Xmas. People come regularly or occasionally, and there is always a mix of old and new faces. Each participant gets to explore as they wish, whether it's discovering the joy of being stupid in front of others, or preparing performance material to try out in public. One of the many advantages of this format is that it avoids the crushingly standardised control of education today with its targets, aims and objectives. So there’s not a hint of "by the end of this course you will have learned x". As a teacher, it’s not my business to bet on what you may learn, nor when you may learn it.

So, now it’s time to offer, in a similar sustained way, an opportunity to explore the other side: the history, theory and analysis of clowning. Every week I receive requests from students needing advice, guidance and tuition for their projects, dissertations and theses investigating clowning. It's hardly surprising, given universities' long-term failure to invest in clowning.

This new initiative will offer a programme of studies in 2 formats:  

- a weekly drop-in class held in London 

- an online class, also following a weekly pattern

I’ll also continue to offer one-to-one tutoring, guidance or supervision either in person or online.

Clown Studies Syllabus

This falls into four broad areas: theory, history, analysis and personal research project.

Theory

General questions - What is clown? What is funny? How can we talk about clown? What is clown’s relationship to comedy? to humour? How do we know what clowns are? What are they for?

History

What is clown’s history? How are clowns specific to their time and place? Why do different meanings become attached to clowns according to their time and place? What is a Shakespearean clown? A circus clown? An auguste clown? A personal clown?

Analysis

Using practical observation of the work of clown performers, live or on video/film, contemporary or historical, how can we talk about them? What is the vocabulary of the clown critic? How can we answer the question ‘why is this (not) funny?’

Projects

Compiling a short project on a theme of your choice, in any presentation format (except clown performance itself) that can be stored or recorded for future clown students to consult.

Provisional expressions of interest:

Please get in touch if you are interested in any of these options and I will keep you posted on developments.

Best wishes,

Jon Davison

London Clown School

www.jondavison.net

info@jondavison.net

The Deconstruction of Clowning

Clowns frequently claim to access authenticity by unmasking social conventions or exposing the workings of performance genres, thus presuming power within society as taboo-breakers and truth-tellers.

Contemporary clown’s version of this tale stresses the dynamics of the ‘flop’ as the gateway to such truth. The performer, admitting failure to convince the audience of his/her competence, seems thereby to reveal a reality behind the mask of convention. By owning one’s flops, one is identified with ‘truth’, since to make a mistake must, by definition, be unintentional (i.e. they escape manipulation).

However, the professionalisation of clowning indicates that this unintentionality is in fact willed, practised and skilled. The ‘flop’ is an ‘authenticity-effect’ which stages ‘reality’. Given that clowns habitually admit to conventions, how might one declare this particular ‘truth-trick’?

Would such a ‘deconstructed clowning’ still seem like clowning and give the same pleasure as that staging of the authentic which clowns presume to do?

‘The Deconstruction of Clowning’ is a performance and discussion which takes place on Thursday 3rd October at 7pm and Friday 4th October at 2pm and 6pm, at Central School of Speech and Drama, London.

http://www.collisionscentral.com/jon-davison/

www.jondavison.net

Jon Davison has been a clown performer, teacher, director and writer for the last 30 years. He is co-Director of Studies at the Escola de Clown de Barcelona and a former AHRC-funded Creative Fellow at CSSD. He has performed at festivals, theatres, tents, streets and bars throughout Europe. His first book, ‘Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice’ was published in 2013 by Palgrave Macmillan, for whom he is now preparing a ‘Clown Theory and Practice’ on clown training.

Please visit our Contact and Bookings page for further information on how to book your free ticket.

If this works, the live video will be available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo4i4yt25ts

Opening Paragraphs from 'Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice'

Here are some of the opening paragraphs from Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice

Preface

The comedian, Bill Hicks, told this story in his show, Sane Man:

I was in Nashville, Tennessee last week and after the show I went to a waffle house, right, and I’m sitting there eating and reading a book, I don’t know anybody and I’m eating and I’m reading a book, and this waitress comes over to me and ‘tut tut tut tut tut! What you reading for?’ I said, ‘Wow, I’ve never been asked that!’ Not, “what am I reading?”, but “what am I reading for?” well, goddammit, you stumped me!’ [...] then this trucker in the next booth gets up, stands over me and goes, ‘Well, looks like we got ourselves a reader!’ (Hicks 1989)

This book, another kind of reader, has all the makings for being turned into a joke. A book about clown, clowns and clowning, and a serious one at that. Olly Double, the stand-up comedian and academic, begins his second book, Getting the Joke (2005), with a section entitled ‘I’ve Got a Degree in Beckhamology’ where he tells of the media reaction to his obtaining a full-time academic post at the University of Kent:

The idea of teaching stand-up comedy at university had all the hallmarks of a silly-season classic, and the press went for the hey-you’ll-never-believe-what-these-crazy-academics-are-up-to-now angle. The Guardian’s piece started:

I say. I say. Did you hear that they’ve hired a clown at Kent University? No, really. He’s going to be teaching the students stand-up comedy. No. Seriously, laze ‘n’ gennermen, he’s got a Ph.D. in it. Actually, Dr Oliver Double is not a clown, but he is a practising stand-up comedian. And he will be teaching third-year drama students who want it — and ooh, we all want it, don’t we, missis! — the art of rambling into a pub microphone and making people choke on their pints with mirth. (Double 2005: 1-2)

Of course, the idea of being serious about something which isn’t serious, like comedy, or clowning, is funny. In fact, being serious about anything, in the clown’s world, is funny. But the idea that we don’t, or can’t, have ideas about clowns is just plain false. When I was researching this book, I wrote some short reviews of clown performances, books, films and other phenomena, as I wanted to find a vocabulary with which to talk about clown on its own terms and not by the criteria of other genres. One clown took offence, not because I had reviewed him negatively (I hadn’t), but because he believed that none of us had the knowledge or the licence to be able to criticise others in the profession. Clowns today may on the whole be mutually supportive, as is to be expected given our present low status, both culturally and economically (it was not always thus), but ideas and beliefs - positive and negative, insightful and banal - about clowns are all around us. It might be useful to draw some of them together so that we know what they are and can think about them.  

Introduction: Clown Ideas

We would expect to begin with a clear definition of the field of enquiry. But defining what a clown is is not a straightforward matter. Just about everyone has ideas, preconceptions or opinions about clowns. Clowns themselves certainly do. There is a surprising variety of ideas around about clowns, especially when you start looking beyond your own time and place.

Some define clown in terms of the dynamics of both laughter: ‘A clown who doesn’t provoke laughter is a shameful mime’ (Gaulier 2007a: 289) and failure: ‘this big idiot who regrets not being funny’ (Gaulier 2007a: 301). Although others disagree: ‘It's okay not to be funny. Clowns do not have to make people laugh‘ (Simon 2009: 31), whilst others believe clowns to be sad or to exhibit ‘shabby melancholy‘ (Stott 2009: XVI).

Some define clown in relation to expected behavior or rules: clowns ‘contradict their context‘ (McManus 2003). ‘The key feature uniting all clowns, therefore, is their ability, skill or stupidity, to break the rules (McManus 2003: 12).

An etymological definition would take us back to the origins of the word clown in 16^th England, referring to those who do not behave like gentlemen, but in ‘clownish or uncivil fashions‘ (French Academy, 1586). Some identify the clown with the red nose, which they consider to be ‘a tiny neutral mask for the clown’ (Wright 2002: 80), which is also ‘a quest for liberation from the “social masks” we all wear‘ (Murray 2003: 79,  on Jacques Lecoq).

Some consider that clowning is a route to spirituality and self-knowledge, via ‘a great joy, a great confidence, a great acceptance of ourselves, and thus of others too‘ (Cenoz 2011); ‘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 see clowning as a means to relieve suffering, ranging in status from ‘respected complementary care providers [and] members of the health care team‘ (Koller and Gryski 2008), to the more humble friend: ‘I would never agree laughter is the best medicine, I’ve never said it. Friendship is clearly the best medicine‘ (Adams 2007).

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), but 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).

At times, 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). Some think that clowns can teach politicians: ’The World Parliament of Clowns will give scientists, politicians, managers and entrepreneurs, artists and religious leaders [...] immunity to say all their thoughts and ideas and to give all their wisdom to the world without the fear of blame and humiliation. One of the rights of clowns is to fail’ (Moshaeva 2006). Others see politicians as clowns: ‘In order for the balance to be harmonious, the President must be a whiteface clown and the Prime Minister an auguste, in their nature as much as in their function’ (Fallois in Rémy 1945: XIX).

Some see clowns in the street: ’skills that are necessary for clowning, such as [...] street theatre’ (Haifa 2006) whilst others do not: ’Dreams of grandeur save the idiot. His ambition isn’t to play in the street (not a very comfortable place) but at the Paris Opera’ (Gaulier 2007a: 291).

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, joyous, melancholic, or as fulfilling any number of social, artistic, cultural or political functions as can be imagined.

Today for some, the clown is a figure that has survived from the past, pre-technological, pre-modern, pre-literate even. For others, clown has undergone a renewal and branched out into new and highly contemporary fields:  the post-Stanislavskian training of performers; therapy and a means to spiritual self-discovery; or a tool to change politics and decision-making in a world racing towards disaster.

All of these views could be shown to be at least partly true, at least at a particular moment in a particular place. The opposites could also be shown to be true, perhaps in other places and at other times. The point is that clowns, though they may be ubiquitous, are just as varied as any other phenomenon. They have a history, indeed many histories. They occur in different cultural contexts. There are often very precise reasons for why they are the way they are. We can usually trace particular characteristics to particular dates, or specific people and places. By looking at a wide range of material on clowns, we can see just how historically and culturally determined they are. If we can see what is specific to times, places and individuals, perhaps we can also see more clearly what clowns have in common, and if there is anything which always holds true for clowns.

[...]

Containing such an array of perspectives, this book is also bound, at some point or another, to go against the grain of what you think you know about clowns. Whatever one’s grain is, it will probably go against it. My own included. And in a way that’s what clowns are, they go against the grain. Whenever I see two people in agreement, my instinct is to disagree with them. Maybe that’s what led me to be a clown. In any case, it’s a useful research tool. A kind of naive scepticism, no malice intended. When two people agree on what clowns are, my ears prick up even more, ready to provide the contrary view if called upon. Or even if not.

So hopefully you will find something in this book that will make you think you might be wrong about clown. Which would be no bad thing, since clowns inevitably end up being wrong. I say to clown students that 93% of our lives and actions are failures and only 7% of it turns out right. That isn’t because I or anyone else has done such a scientific experiment; I took to the idea some years ago after reading that 93% of communication is apparently non-verbal. I liked the idea, though for the life of me I couldn’t see how you could measure such a thing. So given that the scientist in question was, in my opinion, making it up, I thought I might as well do the same. It feels about right to me, as a clown. When I say 93% of our lives, I mean all human beings, not just clowns. One thing one might say about clowns, though, is that they could be happy with such a statistic. Perhaps that is what marks you out as a clown from the rest. This admission of failure is the bedrock upon which most clown training of the last half century has been founded (Gaulier, Cenoz, Clay, etc.). The World Parliament of Clowns promotes the use of failure as a form of intelligence, hoping to influence world policy-makers (Antoschka).

I trust, then, that we will all be happy to give up some of our assumptions about clown throughout the course of this book, and that it will fail to live up to our own prejudices and expectations.

© Jon Davison 2013 Palgrave Macmillan

To buy this book directly from the publisher: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=498885

Clown Training

I don’t subscribe to theories of clown as mask, as play, as physical theatre, as religion, as anything except what it is: clown. Clown is very simple. At most, it is an attitude. An attitude to life, to oneself, to the world. We don’t need techniques, or methods, or psychology, or safe environments, or anything except a desire to invert our habitual fear of ridicule into pleasure in self-ridicule, and to use it to make others laugh.

I don’t like to use too many games, exercises, techniques. These are only ways of fooling us into thinking we are working hard. I prefer just to start. To relate. To look. To listen. To lead students along a path that lets them enjoy their own stupidity and exposing it to their friends.

When you really look, most things are ridiculous: our bodies, our movements, our ideas, our emotions, our words, our relationships, the universe. The only aim is to turn failure into success, fear into laughter, suffering into joy. We don’t need to change ourselves, just look at it all with another perspective. It’s a human thing to do, so anyone can do it. Although only a few will choose to dedicate their lives to it, anyone can experience the clown.

Clown Training often finds itself going in a completely different direction to orthodox concepts of what education is, such as the contemporary obsessions with aims and objectives, learning strategies and pathways, levels and units, achieving potential or acquiring skills. It’s more a kind of anti-education, blurring truth and pretence, intelligence and stupidity, knowledge and ignorance.

Review: "Angels Can Fly", by Alan Clay

This book has been around for a few years now, and I find I do re-visit it occasionally, and recommend it to those who are serious about understanding what is at the heart of clowning. It’s a curious volume in that there are really three books in one here, but not laid out one after the other. Instead, the three interweave and take the reader from practice to philosophy via fiction.

What really kept me reading at first was the novel telling the experiences of a bunch of street performers. Though not strictly clown performers, these characters wrestle with how to “be in the moment”, how to reach the audience through honesty. These are struggles that can rarely be communicated unless you’ve actually been out there and done street performing yourself, and the fictional mode seems to be the best way to get give at least some impression of what it is that drives us to seek out strangers in the street and do silly things for them and then get them to give away their money.

The exercise sections are comparatively sparse, but that is no bad thing. Very rare is the book on clowning that contains vast amounts of good practical advice, but there have been quite a few examples of the genre in recent years that have fallen flat on their face.

The third section brings us a range of thoughts from several other performers as well as Alan himself, and gives the aspiring performer something to ... aspire to!

An Encyclopaedia of Clown

[This is a lengthy piece of work, so I thought I'd publish it bit by bit. Here are the first two entries to be going on with.]

50 ways or elements (a kind of clown periodic table, perhaps?) to understand how clown works and how to generate material.

We used the Encyclopaedia to devise a short demonstration show for the Festival Of… at CSSD in September 2009, designed to test, compare and demonstrate the wide variety of forms and structures in clown performance.

To read more about how we compiled the Encyclopaedia, see my paper ‘The Dramaturgy of Clown or “What do clowns do?”’

1. Breaking the written rules of the game.

By “rules of the game”, we mean any norms of behaviour stated explicitly, and which are designed to generate a particular activity in an orderly way. Evidently the breaking of these norms will threaten or even destroy the activity. Donald McManus defines clown’s role as contradicting the context: “Clown logic does not have an essential meaning other than to contradict the environment in which the clown appears” (McManus 2003: 17).

We commonly use words like “cheating” or “disobeying” to denote these disruptive behaviours, but perhaps the most radical way is to “refuse to play”. The Olympic 100-metre runner who takes drugs (cheats) is abhorred by the sporting community, but is ultimately understood, as their behaviour is motivated by the ethic of winning the game, and thus shares the same values as sporting society. But the runner who strolls down the track instead of trying to win is an affront to the community’s ideals that cannot be assimilated within its value-system. The clown’s role thus situates him/her as an outsider, one who knows that: “There are no rules that require us to obey rules. If there were, there would have to be a rule for these rules, and so on” (Carse 1986: 10).

We all have the impulse to disobey, as well as the impulse to maintain order. Both are key elements in clown.

2. Breaking the unwritten rules of social cohesion.

By “rules of social cohesion” we mean any norms of behaviour not stated explicitly, but which are implicitly applied by mutual agreement of a group. As with the above entry, the breaking of these rules leads to the threatened or actual unravelling of the pretended order. Relationships between people, and between people and objects, start to fail.

In order to know when we are breaking the rules, we need to know and acknowledge what the correct behaviour would be. For example, we know how to use a chair properly: we can sit in it or stand up from it. We can move it or stack it, offer it or accept a seat in it.

Improper uses might be: standing on it, pulling it away when someone sits, or fighting with it. All these uses are common and logical, but remain improper in the sense that we or the chair fails to comply with the primary use it was intended for.

Going still further, we can find fanciful or tertiary uses: taming a lion, balancing it on your forehead, a chair which collapses, a chair made of paper.

Clowning thus engages directly with material and social reality, first and foremost. It sees things “as they are”. In spite of our constant breaking of the unwritten rules that surround us in our activities, those rules never go away. They may change, but new ones are continuously appearing. The goal of eliminating them is an unattainable utopia. Clowns are content to play infinitely with the rules, and thus take up no permanent political or ideological position. They are constantly responding to and contradicting the context, which is constantly changing.

I think this is a salutary lesson at our own historical moment in clown in the West. Clown is far simpler than those who equate it with self-expression, or creativity, would have it. It does not consist in having far-fetched ideas that bear no relation to reality. In brief, clown is not a short-cut to escapism. Only by accepting and coming to terms with reality does the clown truly free him/herself from the weight of materiality. You can’t change reality – it will always remain reality. This acceptance parallels the recognition of the flop in performance, when one accepts one has failed, and the audience duly laugh.

Paul Bouissac argues that not only do clown routines depend on playing with the real, but they actually serve to define what is perceived to be real and unreal. According to Bouissac, clowns thus reveal and demonstrate the tacit principles underlying society, and are thereby the producers of a kind of socio-anthropological theory-in-practice: “circus clown performances demonstrate the basic but unwritten rules on which our construction of a culturally bound meaningful universe rests” (Paul Bouissac 1997:195).

Bouissac goes further: “Profanation is not so much the breaking of a rule made explicit in a legal code as the exposure of the rule of the rules, the principle or principles that are so fundamental for the holding together of the regulative system that they cannot be formulated. For instance to make explicit and to publicize the following rule, “it is forbidden to British subjects to sneak into the Queen’s bedroom unannounced at dawn,” is unthinkable, in terms of the system, because it would imply that this action is indeed a possibility… it seems obvious that the nature of the rule transgressed, not the quantity of the transgressions, distinguishes profanation from simple rule breaking. It is as if a cultural system with all the prescriptive and prohibitive rules which form its body were actually relying on a few crucial but unformulatable rules, some sort of culturally tacit axioms or silent dogmas from which all the other rules are derived and justified but which are themselves undemonstrable, unjustifiable and ultimately impotent…. In a way we could say, metaphorically, that every morning a clown sits on the Queen’s bed, at the risk of losing his passport.... Founding rules cannot be justified by the rules they generate. In this sense, any society hangs from an unsupported hook.... I would like to lay down for discussion the claim that profanation denotes a class of actions which question these tacit principles through the selective transgression of some of the rules that are derived from them or by exhibiting some behavior which implies a system of rules that would be derived from the negation of these cultural axioms; circus clowns would then specialize in such demonstrative actions performed in the ritualistic mode which is the only way in which the unthinkable and unspeakable can be actualized within the system” (Bouissac 1997: 197-9).

3. Objects or people are in the wrong place

Paul Bouissac splits what he calls profanation into five categories. His first one goes like this: “a particular object assigned to a certain place or position is moved to and placed in an inappropriate place or position” (Bouissac 1997). To simplify, I would say: “objects are in the wrong place”. And to this I would add the category of people.

To illustrate this principle, here are some examples:

- Someone sits on a chair placed in front of the door
- A lifeguard in the desert
- A little rubber duck in someone’s mouth
- A clown is in the audience

Another sub-category of this is the absence of an object where it should have been:

- A coat hook is missing, so the coat hung falls to the ground
- A teacher is asleep in bed while his students sit in the classroom

A similar analysis to Bouissac’s has been made by Rowan Atkinson, in his TV programme, Laughing Matters, in which he discusses the rules of comedy. According to Atkinson, “an object or person becomes funny by being in an unexpected place”.

4. Objects used by the wrong person

This follows the first part of Bouissac’s second category: “an object that should be manipulated in a certain manner (or simply be seen) by a particular person or class of persons, is manipulated in this manner (or is seen) by an unqualified person…” (Bouissac 1997).

- A baby drives a car
- A business man sucking a dummy
- A bald woman uses a hair-drier
- A granny uses a pneumatic drill

A simple way of coming up with ideas of this kind is to ask the question, “ what’s the worst birthday present you could give someone?”

5. Objects used wrongly

I have separated this category out from Bouissac’s second, which continued thus: “… or is manipulated in an inappropriate manner” (Bouissac 1997).

- A hammer to break an egg
- Wipe your nose on your sleeve (while holding a hankie)
- A dining fork to dig the garden
- Drying your hair with a bike pump
- Eating a shoe

6. Action done by the wrong person

- A tramp unveils a new shopping centre
- The Queen does a car insurance advert

The same kinds of people keep coming up when we think of examples of people out of place. Favourites are: the Queen, tramps, the Pope, babies and animals.

This group covers those actions that are not so strictly attached to a particular object and its inappropriate use.

The word ‘inappropriate’ is quite a good one here, but it does sound too euphemistic to me. That’s why I use the word ‘wrong’. We all know when something is wrong, or right.

7. Action done for the wrong person

Bouissac’s third category is: “a patterned behaviour that should be performed in the presence of an object or person is performed in the presence of an inappropriate object or person”.

- A wheelchair is wheel-clamped
- A conductor conducts the audience
- A comedian tells jokes to dogs

8. Action done when you shouldn’t

The first part of Bouissac’s category number 4: “a patterned behaviour that is prescribed in a specific context is performed in another context…”

- TV news reader falls asleep
- Laughing at bad news

Most bodily functions have such socially restricted correct contexts that they easily lend themselves to being done when you shouldn’t: farting, peeing, shitting, burping, yawning breastfeeding, having sex, and dying are comedy classics!

9. Action not done when it should have been done

And now the end of Bouissac’s number 4: “… or is not performed in the prescribed context”.

- Bride doesn’t say “I do”
- Doctor stands by
- Forget to open the door in order to go out
- Suicide bomb fails to explode
- Sun doesn’t set
- Parachute doesn’t open

10. Misunderstood words

Bouissac’s number 5 is: “a word or text to which a prescribed interpretation is attached, is interpreted in another manner or, still worse, the consequences of this new interpretation are actually implemented”.

The following are some famous examples. A prize for anyone who knows who said them.

- “I’ve got one, too”
- “Who’s on first base”
- “Four candles”

Other routes to verbal chaos are through:

- speech impediments
- foreign languages
- deafness

Works cited

Atkinson, Rowan (1993) Laughing Matters, Tiger Television for the BBC.

Bouissac, Paul (1997) The profanation of the sacred in circus clown performances, in Richard Schechner and W. Appel (eds.), By Means of Performance, Cambridge: CUP.

Carse, James P. (1986) Finite and Infinite Games, New York: Random House.

McManus, Donald (2003) No Kidding! Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theater, Newark: University of Delaware Press.