Clown

Todd Phillips’s 2019 movie 'Joker' reconfigures and actualizes body aesthetics and performance traditions—eccentric movements and so-called 'epileptic dancing'—celebrated around 1900 on the popular stage and in early film. This body language, consisting of bizarre contortions, dislocations, jerking, and gesticulating, is linked to medical discourses about the nervous system, and can be traced in popular theater throughout the twentieth century. This paper examines how it emerges in Arthur Fleck, aka the Joker.
+++ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01472526.2020.1816740

Examples taken from the short silent films of Charles Chaplin, specifically the two-reelers he made for Mutual Films in 1916 and 1917, will suggest that slapstick can be usefully understood as a quasi-ritualized and socially-sanctioned expression of proscribed behavior. In addition to arguing that basic elements of slapstick symbolically transgress ideal behavior, the essay will also suggest how the experience of movie-watching in modern western societies approximates the experience of a village-wide audience watching ritual clowning in traditional non-western societies. Viewing Chaplin”s silent slapstick clowning performances with an audience in a movie theater has the potential to create the sense of communitas that Victor Turner argues is part of ritual. Finally, as is the case in the ritual clowning of traditional non-western societies, slapstick clowning potentially subverts as well as conserves the norms of western societies.

The cultural history of the "white clown" Pierrot From the Pedrolino developed in France first the Pierrotto, then 1665 the Pierrot, which led a shadow existence first in the midst of the shimmering universe of the different characters. That did not remain so. Hardly any other character of the Commedia dell'Arte has such a lasting effect on the art scene as Pierrot. Although he was not so popular on the street stages at the heyday of the Commedia due to his slowness, he later met the zeitgeist of Romanticism and in the early 19th century became a mysterious and multi-layered star on the peep-box stages of the now built theatres of the emerging bourgeoisie. The situation on a closed stage, where one can direct the audience's gaze through spotlights, was very much in tune with the Pierrot's playing style and slowness. On the loud and turbulent stages of the street theatre, he was always left behind. Pierrot was slow, clumsy and silent. He was always unhappily in love and dreamed of a better future in the arms of his adored Kolombine. He often tried to conquer them with gifts, but no flower bouquet was beautiful enough-and he could not afford jewelry. So it happened that he became a criminal in order to get a suitable present for his beloved. Out of desperation, he was not only able to steal, but also to become really coarse. But only rarely was he heard. Usually, Kolombine didn't even know of his affection-and had long been over the mountains with Harlekino, when Pierrot finally stood at her door with his gift. He first became famous through Simone da Bologna, a moonstruck actor, who ran a grocery store full-time and called himself Pedrole, the Italian form of Pierrot. He became unpredictable at full moon, invented new things and turns like in trance, played and improvised virtuosically and often grew beyond himself. Word spread quickly. Simone was a wondrous actor who could always give a new and unexpected expression to his rapturous longing at the full moon. On the said days or rather nights of the full moon, spectators from everywhere soon came to see him play; his fans were said to have traveled up to 100km to admire him in the light of the full moon! These unforgettable performances are the origin of the meanwhile commercially widespread kitsch picture of "Pierrot with the Moon".

Dentro de las características que puede tener
el oficio del clown existe una que parece ser
inherente a los sujetos que deciden dedicarse
a este tipo de actividad lúdica: la tristeza.
Preguntarse acerca de las percepciones que
se tienen del payaso como un ser sufriente,
implica hacer un cuestionamiento a las evidencias
ideológicas1 que el imaginario2 social
tiene de éste como un ser arrojado a la precariedad,
la nostalgia, el hambre o la desilusión.

Article publié dans les Actes du colloque international Le rire du pauvre, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, 21-23 novembre 2013. Y est abordé la question de la récupération des figures traditionnelles du divertissement populaire que sont clowns et saltimbanques par les artistes contemporains, en particulier Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux et Maurizio Cattelan.

Este estudo busca perceber a importância da inserção artística e pedagógica no ambiente hospitalar a partir dos projetos: Doutores da Alegria e Cinema no Hospital? A proposta é analisar como, dentro da complexidade do ambiente hospitalar, estes projetos, através de práticas culturais focadas na saúde psicoemocional da criança e do adolescente, possibilitam-lhes a condição de alegria (potência de viver), liberdade (individualidade) e socialização (coletividade). Os referenciais teóricos estão baseados nos trabalhos de Sigmund Freud, Baruch de Spinoza, Michel Foucault, Morgana Masetti e Alain Bergala para ajudar a compreender como os dois projetos estão calcados em afetos potencializadores da vida e da ação, refletindo dentro dos hospitais novas perspectivas e possibilidades de encontros; relações; pedagogias criativas; liberdade; igualdade; experimentação e produção cultural, prismatizando e ampliando os novos conceitos de saúde com crianças e adolescentes hospitalizados.

El texto aquí presente se plantea con el objetivo de dar respuesta a la pregunta ¿Cómo reivindicar derechos humanos a través del arte del clown? En primer lugar hemos  realizado una identificación de la función social del payaso y su implicación con la toma de conciencia y la sensibilización. Una vez identificada la función social se describen diferentes experiencias de payasos sociales llegado a establecer una relación con los Derechos Humanos. Encontramos en el payaso una excelente figura para la creación de lazos de reconocimiento y mutua preocupación hacia otras personas en condiciones de vulnerabilidad.
http://www.eduso.net/res/20/articulo/como-reivindicar-derechos-humanos-a-traves-del-arte-del-clown-la-funcion-social-en-el-payaso-

La acción socioeducativa y el arte clown necesitan de una plataforma que permita un desarrollo conjunto. Este texto plantea las bases para crear una formación y una Escuela que permita formar profesionales especialistas en clown socioeducativo.
El documento contempla desde los antecedes identificables en la literatura, a las formas futuras de sistematización y desarrollo de esta disciplina.  Además describe características, dimensiones, experiencias y finalidades.
Existen numerosas experiencias de clown socioeducativo, pero el futuro pasa por analizar y construir conocimiento que permita avanzar y generar nuevas iniciativas.

This chapter considers the circus, in all its exquisite horror and repulsive intrigue, as an ideal heterotopia, the cinematic representations of which offer us titillating—indeed, necessary—semi-fantastic zones for subjective and cultural evaluation. As a heterotopia at the center of so many understood ideologies, the circus acts as a dynamic landscape where internal and external experiences overlap, and where bodily and psychological limits are rendered inoperative. The experiential inversion of reality and fantasy unique to the circus thus engenders similar incursions of subject and object, self and Other. Focusing primarily, therefore, on circus films that prominently feature clowns or other doubles, this chapter considers the uniquely subversive power of the cinematic circus to function as a critical mirror through which to scrutinize the social paradigms present in the real world that constructs them, as well as how spectrality and spectatorship interact to complicate that construction. It assesses the ability of the circus experience to negate these delineations, allowing circus-going subjects to reorient themselves more firmly in their own senses of self, and more broadly, of their senses of self within their real worlds.

Although nonbinary sex/gender has seen some attention in recent years in academia and popular culture, it is mostly seen through the lens of modernity, which views trans as a straight movement from one "gender identity" to another. This article aims to tell a story that is different from this narrative of modern trans identity. It is, therefore, written as an autoethnodrama rooted in the author's own embodied experience of (un)becoming genderqueer in a postsocialist borderland. The main theoretical threads are border epistemologies and the monstrous process of (un)becoming self/other, specified through the figuration of the genderqueer clown. The first scene of this drama is about orientation and clowning in a post-Soviet space in the 1990s. The second scene is about failing gender and failing the West/East divide in front of a public bathroom in 2019. The research-drama ends with drifting, drowning, and getting lost in a stream of body liquids. This opens up possibilities for affection and compassion in failing together with all the creatures who are filling that stream.

It is not an easy task to understand the nature of carnival as it is shown by the many failures of the last century after Mikhail Bakhtin’s work became generally known. My book is an attempt to define carnival in relation to another entity that is always and necessarily associated with the carnival, still, easier to identify. The “Clown or Fool par excellence” embodies the carnival’s topsy-turvy attitude and transgresses all borders of reason and social order. Moreover, her repeated jumps to recover bear ritual laughter mocking the figure of Death. This is how the phenomenology of the clown par excellence and the carnival are ontologically related to each other. But, parallel to the strange fate of the clown “on stage” the carnival can become problematic as well. This is clearly visible in the Early Modern theatre of Shakespeare. The resentful exit of Malvolio leaves us confused in Twelfth Night. When the Fool disappears, others have to take on in the stormy night of King Lear. While the gravedigger and his friend, in Hamlet, are mockingly clowning, the grounds spits back a skull that already whispers: “God is dead.” This is how in Shakespeare’s plays the “decarnivalization of the world” is present on the Early Modern stage. I discuss and develop the concept of decarnivalization in order to reinterpret Shakespeare’s dramatic art.

El fenómeno clown nos permite ver parte significativa de la importancia que el juego tiene en la vida social de los grupos populares, específicamente como una figura oblicua cuyo poder permite ejercer una reflexividad en torno a los presupuestos ideológicos de ciertos sectores sociales. A través de los payasos teatrales y actores de Comparsa la Bulla observaremos en sus experiencias performativas su particular visión de la calle, del humor en la cultura urbana popular y de la construcción de un cuerpo extra-cotidiano como arma de resistencia.

The riddle is one of the least studied genres of oral literature and with this book I bring to your desk a recording of riddle act with active audiences. By focusing on the performer of the riddle, this study departs from earlier studies that presented riddles as short alphabetized lists of questions-and-answers.

El quinto capítulo (Entre narices rojas: Antropología fracasada del humor y la risa) es producto de una estancia en el terreno de cuatro meses de duración, entre enero y mayo de 2010, en la ciudad francesa
de Burdeos. Mi trabajo de campo multisituado me lleva esta vez a integrarme en el seno de una “brigada” de payasos activistas, a partir de un primer contacto hecho en la contracumbre de Copenhague, en
diciembre de 2009, tras seguir en varias acciones al “ejército” de CIRCA, la red internacional de payasos rebeldes. Entre narices rojas, analizaré los procesos de reinvención de la acción colectiva, escudriñando el
humor situado y las situaciones del humor, su instrumentalización política y sus múltiples significados. Participando activamente entre payasos y como un payaso más, recurriré a la observación interna y al
diálogo etnográfico para repensar, a través de un juego de espejos, el papel del antropólogo, revalorizando de algún modo la importancia de sus fracasos. Al interior de la brigada, una suerte de comunidad
emocional que envolvía la entrada en cierto estado mental, explicaré sus rituales de resistencia y de rebelión, expondré la condición liminal del clown y de las acciones de “combate” de la tropa, y estudiaré
la historia y las funciones socioculturales del humor y la risa, así como sus usos políticos entre los movimientos.

Besides the doltishly clumsy, amusingly simple and happily idiotic type of clown, there is the evil violent clown. Violent clowns can be traced back to the (circus-)pantomimes of the nineteenth century, to circus tradition and circus literature. Thus, on the basis of the popular corpo-eccentric clown-theatre presented by the French Théâtre des Funambules between 1819 and 1846, as well as the pantomimes of the brothers Hanlon-Lee, this article presents Batman’s Joker as descendant of a specifically violent circus tradition and its reflection in literature. Baudelaire and Adorno understand the aesthetic of violence characteristic of these circus pantomime clowns as the essence of modernity. The appearance and playful rearrangement, montage and reinterpretation of historical (circus) clown elements are typical for Batman’s Joker. Thus, he can be described as a neo-modern clown of violence.


Jürgens, A.-S. (2014): The Joker, a neo-modern clown of violence, in: Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5/4, 441–454.

¿De qué se habla cuando se dice comedia física?
Comedia física, o comedia visual, es la técnica para actores y actrices depurada de payasos y comediantes de todos los tiempos y tradiciones.
En esta técnica de exploración cada ejercicio es un numero en si mismo, porque e practico. Usamos la Fí sica en vez del Fí sico para abordarlo. Por eso se llama Comedia Fí sica, los principios de la fí sica newtoniana (y otros más) son nuestro medio para comprender y ejecutar limpiamente el trabajo del comportamiento humano en la torpeza y la brutalidad, por ejemplo en vez de Golpes hacemos Empujes, en vez de choques, encuentros, en vez de dolor sonido y movimiento. Física… y algo más.

The Blacks: A Clown Show by Jean Genet is a play written as a postwar and post-colonial satire in 1958. The play discusses ideas such as race, the black and white binary, racial prejudice and stereotypes as well as the reification of those socially imposed stereotypes. What makes the play so remarkable is its complicated structure and the many inversions of these concepts manifested through a meta-theatrical form, the "play-within-a-play". It is precisely because of the use of meta-theatrical elements that the play is able to unfold and take its course. Important to note is that the play was written for an all-black cast and an all-white audience, juxtaposing the actors with the spectators in reality just as much as they are juxtaposed within the actual play. The usage of masks makes it possible for the actors to slip into the role of white post-colonialists, allowing them to play with the idea of performativity on several layers, since the mask is used both as a tool and a symbol.

This chapter looks at the role of music in Twelfth Night,
exploring the dose of melancholy it often adds to the play’s
festivity. It investigates the three different forms in which
music is employed in the play: as song, which combines melody
and poetry – a tension that has its own additional resonance; as
wordless instrumental performance, where music contributes to the play’s sound; and as verbal description, where music is part of the play’s text. Considering traces of an earlier version of Twelfth Night, perhaps closer to the play’s probable Twelfth Night performance, it asks what Twelfth Night gained and lost as it moved away from its point of origin.

A través de los caminos del clown recorreremos la lógica del juego en la cultura, o de la cultura entendida en tanto juego. En base a una aproximación etnográfica y experimental al mundo del circo y del clown, usaremos este texto para comprender las formas de resistencia que surgen de lo más íntimo. Los caminos del clown nos llevarán de la carpa a la calle, de lo privado a lo público, analizando las prácticas del juego que definen al payaso como formas de relación, comunicación y aprendizaje. Tras la máscara o el maquillaje, yace la producción de nuevos sujetos, una re-subjetivización que incorporan a sus proclamas los nuevos movimientos sociales, quienes convierten al circo o al carnaval en nuevos territorios lúdicos de experiencia, proclamas y libertad.

The clown as a pragmatic doer. A clown is what a clown does. Principles of practice defining the art of clowning. A Heideggerean approach to the clown. Missfitness as an ontological condition and the clown as its quintessential representative.

My Practice-­as-­Research MFA Thesis explores the intersection of the theatrical styles known as Clown and Melodrama through the collaborative creation of an original performative project entitled 'Visions of A Crying Girl', created and performed by Cleo DeOrio and myself, Jordan Rosin. The project capstones three years of intense practical training as an Actor­-Creator as part of the MFA in Ensemble-­Based Physical Theatre at Dell'Arte International. The investigation is situated at the nexus of acting & choreography, dance & theatre and draws techniques and inspiration also from my 26 years as a theatrical performer, as well as my undergraduate training in acting from Syracuse University.

The creative practice yielded substantial insights regarding how the articulation of research questions can predispose a practice-­as-­research process to succeed, fail, or change direction; how the styles of Clown and Melodrama intersect; as well as how Viewpoints and subtext can be used as tools to create theatrical work within an ensemble.

This MFA Thesis comprises two examinable outcomes; the live stage production, Visions of A Crying Girl, (an archival video of which can be found on YouTube) and this brief written report, which situates our project within a lineage of practice, articulates a conceptual theory for the project, provides a brief account of our process, and summarizes key insights and conclusions from the research as well as plans for future investigation.

The scholarship of Donna Haraway conducts a searing polemic against essentialist theorizing in feminist and gender studies by relying upon a novel methodology, which neither rejects the trappings of a culture addicted to technoscience, nor embraces them tout court; but, rather, inhabits said positions critically through irony, hyperbole, and iconoclasm. This approach is christened here as hypercommandeering: a neologism combining the hyper affinity of surplus, decadence, and overproduction in postmodernity with the blitzkrieg political connotations of commandeering necessary to survive in such a context. As such, this project dances and swerves between and among tropes insofar as, given the underlying trickster ontology, exaggerating and inverting meaning reveals more of the truth than a linear argument, which belies an assumed metalanguage and is therefore imperialistic. This is a path of generativity, not of final ends - of being able to speak all possible languages through the methodology’s heteroglossia from which it derives a political stance of neither anarchism nor imperialism, but of a Janus head. Trickster strategies can flank the iron curtain of metonymy and breach it through artifice. An example of hypercommandeering is given via a reading of the avant-garde fashion designer Alexander McQueen’s 2001 spring / summer show VOSS.

No Kidding! Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theater examines the way clown was transformed into a serious character in twentieth-century theater. Modernist theater practitioners recognized that clown's approach to performance is profoundly different from other modes of theatrical representation. The paradox of clown, a traditionally marginal, comic character thrust into center stage as the focus of the agon, provided a stimulating new way to renovate tragedy. Experiments with clown by Jean Cocteau, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Giorgio Strehler, Dario Fo, and Roberto Benigni are examined as a means of exploring how and why clown became, in contemporary theater and film, a character from whom audiences expect philosophizing, angst, or political criticism as much as physical comedy and fractured language.

The chapter traces the imprints of the evil clown in Western popular cultural history. Taking the Joker from the Batman franchise, Alex from Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange, and Pennywise from Stephen King’s IT as significant signposts, this study showcases how the evil clown image works as both a trope of horror and hilarity. As theoretical framework, Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque provides a starting point to view the evil clown phenomenon as an expression of the cynical enjoyment of moral decline that postmodern culture has taught us.

"Deleuze for beginners". Texte de présentation pour le colloque "Gilles Deleuze : virtuel, machines, lignes de fuite" à Cerisy-la-Salle, août 2015.

Comme Diogène Laërce nous l’a appris, une anecdote de vie suffit pour condenser l’esprit de toute une philosophie. À propos de Deleuze, quelle est l’anecdote qui peut nous faire pénétrer au cœur du système ? Elle est livrée au cours d’une conversation avec Claire Parnet pour l’Abécédaire, de manière digressive. À la lettre « P comme Professeur », alors qu’il raconte savoureusement ses premières années d’enseignement au lycée d’Amiens, Deleuze évoque les démonstrations de scie musicale qu’il faisait en cours. Ce papier essaie d'élever la Scie musicale au rang de blason deleuzien.