The Fool
A blog piece from an independent expert in clowning and fooling touches on the distinction between Clowning and Fooling. For her, Clowning is anchored in vulnerability and seeks connection while Fooling is solo improvisation where a mask of internal characters take whatever form is necessary to speak the truth.
Fellini’s film The Clowns reminds me of Albert Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus because both hinge upon the absurd. Camus is trying to answer the ultimate question –what is this all about?– with something not dissimilar to the buzzword ‘radical acceptance’. Sisyphus is an absurd hero because he knows he is pointlessly rolling a rock up a hill for it to fall back down but that’s his thing, he does it anyway. Sam Woolfe’s excellent essay asks us to expand Camus by imagining Sisyphus laughing in defiant revolt, not just to cope with, but to fundamentally improve life. Camus wanted us to imagine Sisyphus happy, not specifically laughing. To Woolfe, the difference is that laughter is easier to elicit; particularly from the defiant strength of the trickster archetype which lives in all our psyches. Tricksters carry a certain resilience and willingness to play sometimes meaningless games in strange circumstances; embodying the absurd.
Sam Woolfe also talks about a not very well known and sort of depressed sounding author, Peter Wessel Zapffe, who wrote an essay called ‘The Last Messiah’ in 1933. Frankly, the title alone compels me to avoid it. Zapffe seems to argue that we are existentially depressed because our intellect is too evolved, which makes me smile because I regularly invest considerable effort in avoiding activities that bring contentment; even when they’re easy, free, and ask little of me. I think about why an evolved intellect would work so hard to circumvent its own joy.
Zapffe thinks that humans have four coping mechanisms: isolation, anchoring, distraction and sublimation. The first seems to explain the slack-jawed masses that the malls in Pakistan are teeming with – sometimes people simply don’t think about being alive. I don’t feel great about saying this, but I feel honest. The second talks about anchors like God, faith, morality and such that give people framing, ideals to live by. The third is about the meme below, where we drown ourselves out by pumping multi-channel entertainment into brains that reward and become dependent on convenience. The last one is particularly embarrassing, because it’s about turning the pain of living into valuable experiences: something like, painting pretty pictures because the world is harsh nonsense. He says this is the rarest of protective mechanisms, which may make other artists feel smug if they are also small-minded.
Clowning seems to sit in between sublimation and distraction depending on whether you are artist or audience. I’m not saying clowns don’t make us laugh anymore, but that their static image is probably tied to self-expression instead of humor. When you are rolling the rock up the hill, it is harder if you do not laugh, it changes everything and nothing about it all. The absurdity is the point.
The other thing about clowning is that it’s very easy to learn more about, because something about clowns is universally compelling enough to elicit a spectrum of reactions from fear to personal identification. The rarest reaction to clown imagery these days is laughter, which is funny because there’s supposed to be a contrast between the Joker’s makeup and the way he murdered Murray on live TV. The subversiveness probably comes from how clowns are rarely supposed to be malicious, or intentionally harmful, but a lot of people find clowns creepy, unsettling. When I was walking around the Mall of Lahore, I saw two very skinny Auguste clowns outside the Baskin Robbins, and one of them tilted their head and waved at me. This did not elicit fear, but it did make me and my cousin laugh, because it was so creepy.
What is interesting is that many personal websites writing about clowns are deeply philosophical; the Fool Moon blog pitching clowns as the ‘eternal child’ inside: a constrained physical performance that allows people to access facets of themselves more directly. Like posting certain genres of memes on your Instagram story can tell your friends how or what you’re feeling, clowning uses rules of physicality and expression that allow you to better see your truest self. Clowning allows residence in ambivalence; asking no particular questions and holding many possible answers.
Clowning allows residence in ambivalence; asking no particular questions and holding many possible answers.
Pierrot or similar white clowns have become an icon for misunderstood artists, painted by Cezanne, Picasso; featured in a Russian rendition of Pinocchio, Les Enfants Terribles. Pierrot-core tells people, I know who Pierrot is and I find the absurd interesting, I am sad, but it is kind of funny, I am funny, it is kind of pathetic, I am yearning for something, I am kind of blue, lonesome, prone to being manipulated. These aspects make him alluring, it makes the sadness slightly chic. These days all genres of music blur into one another, movies become musical-thriller-romcoms-undefinable, genre agnostic, so do clowns; they bleed into Fools, tarot aesthetics, Jesters, fairgrounds and circuses. Well, that’s what I glean from scrolling through Pinterest.
Contrast makes art compelling and visually arresting. Auguste clowns eliciting negatively valenced emotions are interesting because they’re incongruent: you should surely tone down your outfit if you’re so sad. Pierrot in his traditional, raggedy, minimal outfit, falling all over the place is compelling because like Sisyphus, he’s resigned to his fate. He loses out to Harlequin every time, if he’s happy it is ephemeral, he is rarely admired in canon but adored in the audience, whom he doesn’t know about. Iterations of Pierrot make me stop in my tracks because he’s either very ugly, very innocent, very chic, very raggedly dressed – but always forlorn. Painting clowns allows me to render a world in garish, bright, saccharine, shouting color holding very quiet messages for those looking long enough. Clowns are inherently vulnerable because they are obvious in the masks they are wearing. In some sense the lie of it all is more honest than the truth. This is captivating because when watching clowns, it feels like we are seeing something we shouldn’t be able to see.
In The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning, Paul Bouissac terms the clown’s makeup an algorithm, replicated exactly in the same series of moves. The constraints of traditional clowning are like Georgia o’Keeffe’s door painted many times, always different. The sameness of subject is what lets you really make it your own.
As to whether clowning is a metaphor for the human condition; ask yourself if this meme is funny.