I recently watched a BBC documentary by Nina Conti about clowning. For the film, she courageously gave up her famous ventriloquist act to work in children’s hospital wards as a clown. In order to do this, she underwent a rigorous two year training with an established childrens charity, supported by her own self-directed training regime (with Gaulier and the like). She failed honourably in her training and in doing so got some real glimpses of the elusive essence and mysterious power of clowning. Then she faced an aberration. The word “clown” was banned by the charity she was working with, along with red noses. Effectively clowns were abolished. Even the word “clown”. They were to be “giggle doctors” and without the red nose became, in the words of one of the practitioners, “just annoying adults”. The administrators of the charity were motivated by an apparent phobia of clowns on the part of the their regular funders.
Many people hate clowns. Particularly adults, and, I think, justifiably so. These days the word “clown” evokes images of alcoholic children’s entertainers, or over-dressed passive aggressive circus clowns. People naturally rebel against enforced fun – things like Red Nose Day haven’t really helped the clown image.
So what is clown really? First a disclaimer. Clowns are subversive and unpredictable, and they do not follow our rules. Any definition will inevitably be written by the dread hand of rationalisation and control – two things anathema to clowns. Clowns exist half in the dream world, on the edge of madness. As right thinking cause-and- effect types, we hate this, and will secretly try almost anything to counter it. Even when creating and performing our own clowns, as Nina Conti discovered, we sabotage our own good intentions as we settle too quickly on interpretation, routine, control, technique. Any actor will testify to the mystery of real, joyful comedy. But if you watch my two year old for half an hour, you might get an idea. Like a clown, she is right on the edge of language and consciousness. She has a spontaneous and naïve rhythm of existence, with uninhibited gesture, expression and lightening speed of thought. And she understands clown instinctively – she loves the subversion, and naughtiness – and frequently inspires it in others. Clowns are carnival creatures really, they bring the shadow, the magic, silliness and non-logic of life.
Whoever originally set up the charity that put clowns in children’s hospitals must have known this. Hospitals are super-rational environments and with so much focus on process and safety are miserable places, ruled by absurd bureaucratic procedures and a strangely uncaring sort of spirit. But healing is a mysterious process as well, and we are really only beginning to understand the part that laughter can play. More than just light relief, the clown, with its irrepressible madness, can help create the kind of environment where healing can flourish more readily.
So if laughter really is the best medicine, why ban clowns from hospitals? It seems more and more that in arts and charity funding, money dictates content. Security and predictability are all, which of course is a death knell for clown. Furthermore, there seems to be a growing intolerance of madness in our society. Watching Louis Theroux’s current documentary “By Reason of Insanity” it occurred to me how a combination of modern psychology and law could straitjacket us all into one antisocial or psychological disorder of some kind. I see in today’s paper that councils are now making things like busking, even pigeon feeding. illegal in town centres – anything “messy”. We are being tidied up, put in order. David Graeber in his recent book, The Utopia of Rules speaks of councils, offices, hospitals and the rituals that surround them as “the very machinery of alienation. They are the instruments through which the human imagination is smashed and shattered”.
Twas not always thus. During the Romantic period being mad was seen as a privilege, it allowed access to deeper truths. Freud spoke of “poetic madness” feeding the imagination, Jung of “wisdom and silliness” going “hand in hand”. Chaotic and irreverent, clowns have an almost archaic power to throw open our horizons, inviting intelligence, imagination and healing. In the final sequence of Nina Conti’s documentary, having abandoned her work with the charity, she walked backwards across Westminster Bridge in red nose and full snorkeling gear. Behaviour that may soon be illegal, but for the time being an urgent call to be silly and not succumb to the dead zones of stupidity.
Postscript
I really enjoyed JL Circus performing their showcase Aspirations at Jacksons Lane on Saturday. 10-18 year olds delivering a good dose of fun and serious silliness – impressive acrobatics, dance routines and a chaotic awards ceremony rewarding fabulously bizarre identities crafted from outrageous wigs, animal masks, silly accents and finely delivered schtick before a backdrop of inverted trousers. My two year old loved it.
Posted by Ryan Kiggell
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