clown, the poetry of being human
you got this...and also you don’t have it at all
i’m making my weekly pilgrimage to the corner of leland and bayshore, an otherwise nondescript building were it not for a couple of neon signs hanging in the first floor windows.
“church of clown?” my lyft driver exclaims by way of confirming our destination. “what kind of church is that!”
ernie has a lot of questions. so many that the gps has to reroute us once, then twice, because we keep missing turns.
based on a very scientific sampling of conversations i’ve had in the past few months, when people hear you’re taking a clown class they assume you’re learning how to be either:
ronald mcdonald (45%)
the creature from it (45%)
someone hired to make balloon animals at kids’ birthday parties (10%)
clowns—like prunes, opera, polyester, televangelists, and fast food fish sandwiches1—are in need of a rebrand. (whether they care about an image makeover is debatable.)
one of my favorite things about sf has always been its openness to woo—the squishy pockets of life sustained by intuition, faith, a desire to surrender to magic2. this is a place, after all, where the fog disappears and reappears whole neighborhoods; where seekers pushing west finally had to stop because the continental shelf runs into the pacific ocean. it’s also a town that prides itself on welcoming weirdos and misfits. clown sits right in the venn diagram overlap between woo and weird, which may explain why the bay area has a rich history of the art form.
our curiosity about the mystical makes the dominant vibe of the bay—an analytical mind bent towards technological progress—more interesting and bearable. from one of my notebook scribbles: “what’s the opposite of ai?” and below that, with the last bullet point circled:
nuzzling a baby’s foot
snorting while laughing
cold plunging
the anticipation before you’re about to kiss someone
witnessing a total eclipse
the involuntary whole body shiver when you walk into a place of worship
musicians improvising
clown!!
the earliest breadcrumb that led me to clown was a slim volume called impro by keith johnstone, a pioneer of improvisational theater. the book left a deep groove in my psyche and remains one of the few i still reference years after reading it. the chapter on mask and trance, in particular…entranced me. i was fascinated by the idea that donning a simple red nose could unlock what felt like a wholly different personality in the human wearing it. what sorcery was this??
my teacher at church of clown once said, “nothing would be funny if we weren’t all going to die. it’s funny because we’re laughing in the face of death.” being human is a fundamentally absurd experience, a truth that children innately respond to (no one has to teach a kid how to clown). many of us lose connection with this truth as we grow older. but if we’re lucky enough to keep living turns around the sun and more rounds of mash, we often regain appreciation for all the ways life is wild, all the moments where you can only shake your head and go “this shit is bananas.”
for many of us, myself included, the pandemic kicked off a series of “this shit is (truly) bananas.” so much of the past four years has been just about surviving—dragging myself through the day after another anxious night chasing sleep, an ever elusive lover. towards the end of last year i finally found a patch of relative stability where my nervous system could begin to down regulate. one of the desires that emerged was for spaces where i could answer honestly when asked “how are you?” instead of a reflexive okay or fine or alright. where i could be messy and ugly and someone who was definitely going through something. spaces that not only acknowledge, but revel in, the absurdity and the brokenness of what it means to be human.
i’ve always used art as a means of making sense of my life and processing its emotional currents. as my own healing work has shifted towards more somatic modalities, so have the creative mediums i’m drawn to. what’s special about clown as an art form (and perhaps why a teacher talks about clowns as descendants of shamans), is its potential for healing. clown combines two ingredients vital for the healing process, especially if the trauma is alive in the body: physical expression and a relational container that encourages vulnerability.
ok, but what actually happens in a clown class…
it’s hard to describe this without first asking, why do clowns exist? what’s their appeal? a simple answer is “they make people laugh.” but there are a lot of performers who try to do the same thing—comedians, improvisers. what sets clowns apart?
a slightly more nuanced take might be “they make people laugh by behaving in outrageously silly, mostly physical ways.” outrageously silly gets at a defining feature of the form: a level of commitment to absurdity that relinquishes ideas of being clever or cool. in clown, exaggeration is a way of metabolizing the (too) “muchness” of life.
another distinguishing quality of clown is its middle finger attitude towards rules, norms, and expectations. there’s a kind of catharsis in watching a clown do their thing: people want to be as free as the clown is; they want to indulge impulse the way the clown does3. the part of me that’s annoyed when i fulfill a stereotype, that delights in the surprise on someone’s face when i subvert their expectation, that resists being legible to others—that part of me loves clown.
when you’re not explicitly trying to be clever or cool, there’s room for other kinds of emotional experiences to emerge. in clown, what often fills the space is moments of raw aliveness, awkwardness, wonder. “the only rule of clown is that you tell the truth,” a teacher liked to say. one way clowns tell the truth is by surrendering to the present moment. the pacing of a clown act usually involves extra pauses where the performer (in a reversal of roles) is watching and tuning into the audience to gauge what to do next4. letting those extra beats go by can get uncomfortable; it means the only possible response is spontaneity.
staying with what is true in the present moment means that when it comes to different kinds of live performance, clown is probably the most direct energy transfer between performer and audience. even in prepared acts where the clown knows her character proposal(s) and the major beats she wants to hit, there’s often a significant amount of improvisation, including audience participation and co-creation. that special “let’s mess around and find out” energy at a clown show comes from the performer opening herself up to a heart channel conversation with the audience.
more than other types of performance, clown asks the question, “what happens when you let yourself be perceived, really seen, by an audience?” another teacher once described their craft as “spirit, amplified.” when i watch someone clown, it feels like i’m getting a glimpse into their soul.
in most storytelling mediums, the main way characters change is via the plot and interacting with other characters. but a clown also allows herself to be changed by the audience; this is partly what lends the form its vulnerability and intimacy. the willingness to be shaped by another—is that not an act of love?
…back to what actually happens in a clown class. a common template for an exercise is to combine a physical action with an emotional mood—for example, completing a routine task (like making a sandwich) where halfway through you morph into an animal (say, a flamingo). or imbuing a body part with a mind of its own and then getting into a “fight” with that body part (maybe a foot that won’t stop tap dancing or a finger that keeps trying to pick your nose). one of my favorites, emotional scales, was the simplest: the teacher would call out a core emotion—joy, fear, sadness, anger, disgust, wonder/awe—and a number from one to ten, and we clowned that emotion at that level of intensity.
sometimes we did partner exercises that focused on presence and attunement with the other person. an example:
mill around the room until you make eye contact with someone
approach each other and, without talking, decide when to jump at the same time
when you land, grunt at each other
“vibe check” / follow the flow of whatever’s alive between the two of you in the moment
bid each other goodbye
repeat with a new partner
a goal of all these exercises is helping you discover your will to delight the audience, by first delighting yourself (this is another way of defining the art of clown). people want to hang around when they sense you enjoy your own company. maybe you find an emotion or a physicality that’s fun for you to tap into, and from there you start to build a character proposal.
the boring little secret of clown (and every physical practice) is also its most important lesson: ~don’t~forget~to~breath~. (the more somatic things i try the more i realize it’s the same core teaching applied to different contexts—return to the body, and specifically the breath, as an access point to the present moment. both of these things cannot exist in the past or future; they can only be in the present.) i lost track of the number of times the teacher would give a performer the note, “take a breath,” and the immediate effect that had not just on them but on the audience as well, who was often holding its breath in a subconscious mirroring of the person on stage.
there are so many reasons to take a clown class: you want to feel more delight and play and wonder; you want to be more in your body; you want to have more genuine connections with other human beings; you have trauma to heal; life is wild and being human is absurd. the better question is, why not clown?
in clown, as in life, it’s about going out on stage believing two contradictory truths at the same time: “you got this…and also you don’t have it at all.”
i’ll leave you with a recording from a dress rehearsal where we were workshopping short acts for our class show. around 1:30, i start to feel stuck and if you listen closely, you can hear me plea, mild panic in my voice, “how do we get out of this??” 🥹
many things that fall under the woo umbrella could also be described as “centuries of cultural & traditional wisdom that science is just starting to replicate”
trump is someone who intuitively harnesses the transgressive appeal of clown in his public persona
this is something that sets clowns apart from actors—a clown always has a point of view about the character they’re playing that’s legible to the audience; they’re in on the joke and conspiring with the people watching
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