Clowning around 🤡

On the principles of clowning. "The most basic technique of the clown is to create and maintain rapport."

Comedian Grayson Morris, who sometimes teaches clown, was kind enough to pass along these thoughts about clowning…

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Grayson Morris
Subject: Re: is there somewhere someone could learn more about the principles of clowning?

This inspired me to want to read about principles of clowning and a google search provided some interesting & diverse answers. Yes, I think like any art form, to understand it, you must go to school for it & no list of principles will suffice. But since I sometimes teach clown, & I’m developing my own pedagogy, here’s my list, just for fun:

1 The clown lives to have fun and the clown lives to please the audience. If the clown’s fun displeases the audience, the clown is sorry. 

2 The clown relishes in their body and what it can do, especially what it can do that pleases the audience. 

3 The clown is always real, open, present with, and vulnerable to the audience and the audience’s feelings. 

4 The clown offers energy and fun for the audience to enjoy. The clown is additionally energized by the audience when they like the clown.

5 The clown has high hopes that they can do something that might be interesting or bring them some status or please the audience. They make promises beyond their abilities and take risks in their endless desire to please the audience. When they inevitably fail, they admit it and are truly sorry. 

6 The clown knows how to make an entrance for the audience and how to make an exit for the audience. 

This is all called the red nose clown—the cute lil dumb dumb. But there are other ways of being dumb, like being outrageous and fucking with people, or being so dumb on purpose that you make people reflect on social norms or question reality. 

Eric Andre and Sacha Baron Cohen and Amy Sedaris are bouffons—the  other kind of dumb dumb—a freak who makes you think. (Also my troupe Mil Grus was bouffon). 

There are Zen monks who have used absurdity to teach their pupils existential principles. And throughout history and all over the world there are concepts of the fool or the wise fool or the trickster—the jester that is so silly and harmless that only he is allowed to whisper into the king’s ear…

Here’s a list of clown principles from Avner the Eccentric, a more classic European style red nose clown.

1. The body tells the story.

2. Be interested, not interesting.

3. The work happens on stage. The effect happens in the minds and bodies of the audience.

4. We paint a picture in the minds of the audience using their paint and their canvas; we are the brush.

5. The most basic technique of the clown is to create and maintain rapport.

6. Everything can be seen as a problem to be solved, a knot to be unravelled.

7. Everyone needs to breathe all the time, even when on stage. The audience unconsciously breathes with you.

8. Don’t tell or show the audience or your partners what to think, do, or feel.

9. Have an emotional reaction and invite the audience to join in your experience.

10. Tension without release undermines your performance.

11. The clown enters the stage to accomplish a task, not to get laughs. If there are laughs it is an interruption.

12. Find simple ways to accomplish complicated tasks, and complicated ways to accomplish simple tasks.

13. Don't leave your comfort zone. Make your comfort zone bigger.

14. A clown is costume and makeup. Clowning is a verb.

And here’s an explanation from John Gilkey, a more cutting edge clown/idiot who deals with the more esoteric timeless intercultural concept of a fool/trickster (also a white man tho): 

The Idiot is the most serious and important of all performance mödes…The Idiot rests on the truth of paradox and all things in between.  Imagine a hammock. Now a turtle farting. The distribution of wealth in a classist society. The play of opposition provides the balance pole for a wire walking Idiot who is endlessly falling upward. A string stretched between two continents and plucked by a virgin resonates at the same frequency as a sperm whale chuckling to hermself. The Idiot is the answer to all problems which do not exist.

❤️❤️❤️