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Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts

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Failure as Success: On clowns and laughing bodies

Eric Weitz Version of record first published: 14 Feb 2012.

To cite this article: Eric Weitz (2012): Failure as Success: On clowns and laughing bodies, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17:1, 79-87 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2012.651867

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Failure as Success
On clowns and laughing bodies
ERIC WEITZ

Laughter literally rocks the body. And if you believe, like twentieth-century philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that there exists a reversible link between ones inner life and its outer traces, a performer who has an audience rolling in the aisles will have reached inside those laughing bodies to exert a formidable effect. Viewed in such a way, the performer brings about this sudden bodyquake by rumpling the spectators fabric of bodied knowledge, the full measure of which includes a complex weave of thought, feeling, social codes, cultural conceits and anything else that comprises the psycho-physical activity of a human life. For embodied practices that prioritize the laughter response, there can be little doubt about their potential as effective techniques for deep-tissue persuasion. Clowns and clowning refer to a broad range of such laughter-centric applications across cultures and through time, including ritual figures and officially sanctioned mockery as well as performance strategies for social critique and political intervention. This discussion will focus on the Western, circus-inspired solo clown, one of the first avowedly comic figures a Western child is likely to meet and early escort into realms of humorous discourse. Clowns and clown-like figures may help introduce children to the very idea of a performer-spectator relationship and, perhaps, hook them on laughter as a response, to which certain kinds of events are dedicated. It is thus worth contemplating as a particularly revealing act of transfer, supplying young audience members with the basic transactional apparatus for reading comic performance as it installs cultural schemas in their growing

bodies. For fledgling spectators physical comedy represents a useful initiation to humorous utterance, not requiring the same level of linguistic or cultural sophistication as verbal joking. Its bodied style renders thought and feeling with a boldness of performative outline, so that carriage, gesture and facial expression stand to catch the attention as playful exaggeration even (or especially) for young humans learning their bodies. This elasticized, enriched manifestation of human response becomes genre cue for clowning intent as well as specially tuned instrument for fantastic riffs on bodied being. It can be seen to issue its joking appeal pointedly to the perceiving body, which knows without thinking the workings, limits and capabilities of corporeal existence. As suggested above, when we find laughter provocation as a definitive design element of a conventional social exchange, opportunity is ripe for psychic coercion. It is arguable that far from a guileless mode of childlike entertainment, clowns and clown-like performances take responsibility for both the establishment and early exploitation of humour, one of humankinds most ubiquitous and potent interpersonal exchanges. With its prime directive of causing laughter, clowning in a broadest possible sense draws upon whatever comic mechanisms it may, including parody, illusion, absurdity and, in postmodern times, toying with notions of existential being and performance itself. It remains apparent, though, that the prototypical clowning engine, derived from Western origins in the nave or simple country bumpkin, is fuelled by culturally sponsored conceits about physical, intellectual and social incompetence.

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Anyone of a certain age in Western culture knows in their bones Wolfgang Isers characterization of clown metaphysics: Everything he does goes wrong, but he persists, as if the repetition denotes constant success (Iser 1992: 56). Isers formulation, which at first glance might seem to describe a pathologically pathetic condition, actually captures an amusing disjunction at the heart of clowning: they dont usually act like theyre failing, in fact, quite the opposite. This can, of course, be perceived as the clowns ridiculous or pitiable inability to assume the disappointment and shame appropriate to failure. But it is also possible to read the clowns buoyant attitude toward setback as somehow liberating, shrugging off social expectation to shoulder the weight of the world playfully. Susanne K. Langer sees in clownlike figures a personification of the lan vital, and this epitomization of irrepressible spirit and alternative problem-solving in the face of deflection contributes a countervaling current to the conservative tendencies of mainstream comedy in general. The clown participates in the cultural care and feeding of ideas about success and failure, at the same time imparting shadow advice about a useful spirit in which to approach the frustrations of everyday living. Ambiguity abounds in the world of clowns, as it does for their alter-egos, the rest of us, and this may well comprise one of the main learning points for young people being taught how to process the world. With competing incitements towards normativity and alternative thinking, there arise the potential for myriad textures of feeling owing to the precise terms of engagement between performative embodiment and spectator. Clowns fail hopelessly, imaginatively, unluckily, triumphantly, heartbreakingly and barely and if, perchance, they succeed, it happens by accident or misdirection. The clown or clown-like performers success at causing laughter bases itself upon a special competence for failure, a practical lesson that remains evident in vintage routines by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, in the television antics of Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy, in Ricky Gervaiss characters in The Office and Extras

and in the animated exploits of Peter Griffin in Family Guy. Serving as an agent of cultural inscription, clown-related performance impresses upon young spectators socially valued notions of honesty, propriety, caution, diligence and worthy endeavour, often through actions that provide playful demonstration of failures to adopt or uphold them or the misfortunes that sometimes undermine best efforts. By way of a simple text for inspection, contemporary clown Bill Irwin has demonstrated a routine he says garnered laughter around the globe; it would also seem to presume little more than entry-level bodied knowledge for processing: Irwin cheerfully begins running around in a circle, trips at a certain point and falls down; he gets up, dusts himself off and sets off eagerly around the same imaginary circle, only to trip and fall at the same point; the third time around, he slows upon approach to the tripping point and, emphasizing for the viewer his incipient cleverness, steps over it successfully; then, triumphantly launching back into his run, he trips and falls once again. It goes without saying that, despite generic likenesses and habitual behaviours, clowns are not transparent ciphers, rendering neutral images of failure and incompetence. They are made from the stuff of people, with their own physical features, comic sensibilities and personal chemistries permeating the clowning membrane. In the above routine, Irwins performative aura of good-natured diffidence, his technical skill in outlining the sudden interruption of sprightly athleticism by some unflattering opposite, and his third eye upon the audience, controlling the interplay of expectation and surprise, co-presently form the joking material and the means by which it articulates humorous utterance. This short routine provides an example of clowning at a most basic level, establishing an efficient, easy-to-read and self-contained narrative. It invites laughter at each of the three falls, the third reversing upon the momentary taste of success at finally having avoided the insidious obstacle. The routine adopts

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a common comic strategy, in which two similar or comparable elements project a pattern, and then the next in the series supplies a reversal of some kind (the so-called Rule of Three), which, in this case, is itself reversed upon for the punch line. The comic trigger, of course, ties to the unceremonious fall from competence embodied by tripping and falling, which, in the physical vernacular of clown performance, is both controlled and distorted so as to present a sudden spectacle of failure to maintain a social standing (literally). The routine offers gently comic warnings about excesses of selfcongratulation and that the cosmos usually gets the last laugh. Children, one would think, cannot but apprehend the performers kernel of humanity, so that this introductory form of humorous embodiment allows for at least a whiff of the sobering implications of comic debasement. As Enid Welsford observes in her seminal study of fools and clown figures published in 1935, the momentary relief from the pressure of sympathy and fear is surely one of the secrets of comedy (Welsford 1935: 51). This is a secret everyone comes to know, whether or not they realize, and would explain the varied and complex ranges of response to clown performance, from endearment to revulsion and the breadth of points in between. The clown engages in a pedagogy not only of socio-cultural comportment but of the attending attitudes and their consequences. Bodied carriage, facial expression and vocal tone (if used) display airs of social behaviour like arrogance, humility, guile and innocence and begin to suggest eventualities they might court. If the bare action involves a pratfall, for example, the sudden conversion of strutting confidence to chastened heap renders a narrative reversal in starkly bodied terms. Delivery of comeuppance to the exceedingly upright (overly confident? conceited? pompous? pretentious?) body becomes a joy to behold in the present and a warning for the future. Herein lies the basic physics behind the clowning machinery, the dual-charged perception of other and self, with failure as linchpin.

This brings us to a closer look at the element of the humour transaction that supplies its coercive traction what has been called variously its prejudice, bias or judgement but refers to laughing in some sense as laughing at. The Superiority Theory in humour studies is most famously captured by Thomas Hobbess sense of sudden glory over another person or ones former self, which spurs the laughter response. While Hobbess phrasing may be overly narrow, it calls attention to the fact that all jokes are made at someones or somethings expense, even if the butt is so widely accepted as a target for ridicule as to seem invisible from the inefficiencies of language exposed by simple punning to the mundane challenges of marriage lampooned by many a comic scenario. This becomes the first step on a slippery slope, as we progress to other harmless joking targets, beginning with lawyers and in-laws and eventually happening upon buxom women and people from other countries. (One school of thought would claim that a joke cannot be any good unless it stands to offend somebody.) In a popular performance text like the yearly Christmas panto, casting by physical types for joking purposes, uses of bodied styles and dialects to signal comic characters worthy of preemptive ridicule, and glimpses of presumed communal sentiment mined for all manner of gags together provide a telling snapshot of a cultures implicitly endorsed leanings and attitudes. Clown performance impresses things upon young bodies and, in a way, assists at their induction into a grown-ups sense of laughing at other people or their misfortunes (the reason some people have never really cared for clowns). As characterized by Henri Bergson, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers (Bergson 1980: 64). The pleasure of laughter furnishes an undeniable bodily reward for being one of the group, serving as a most convincing incentive for behaviour modification and remaining inseparable from its lessons. One can see how this feel-good confirmation of shared in-group thought and feeling both

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introduces and exploits a potent ideological tool for defining and maintaining parameters of desirable behaviour. Technically, humorous utterance thrives on surprise, attempting to pull the rug from under the listeners or spectators grasp of bodied knowledge. Obliged to surprise us continually and with increasing audacity, clowns tend to redraw the contours of earthly experience, the better to spring upon us the silly image or perfectly improbable result through some reconception of physics, biology, logic or social graces. We know what to anticipate under reallife conditions, but clown worlds are rigged to sidestep expectations. For young spectators (and others) this sense of throwing out the rulebook can be disconcerting and liberating in equal measure. The fanciful distortion of the world as we know it throws open new horizons of possibility for the clowns adventures in failure even as it leads away from the familiar and comforting another level at which ambiguity sponsors the clowning project. Sigmund Freuds characterization of the uncanny (unheimlich) as the familiar made strange or unsettling lends an intriguing lens for inspection of the psycho-emotional texture attending clown performance, especially in the formative chapters of childhood (Freud 2003: 124). In a clown, the perceiving subject meets a human other with face, body and movement modelled along familiar lines, yet blatantly different and clearly seeking purchase upon its bodied being. (It may, in fact, dispense with customary fourth-wall niceties and pose a palpable threat to private spaces.) This daunting other appears to live in thrall to an other-worldly matrix of cause and effect, whisking a bouquet of flowers from thin air, heaving confetti from a presumed pail of water, knocked flat by a swinging board and then snapping back upright. It engages with objects that arent there and makes a spectacle of everything it does, incompetently, wondrously, sadly, sweetly and always with a fullness of feeling. The clown can be seen as Freuds uncanny other within, a strange and astute performance guise, simultaneously

occupying positions of laughable other and stand-in for the spectator, and so offering up both warning and empathy. Admittedly, Freuds ruminations pertain primarily to literary and narrative effects that serve to frighten, but our processing of performance texts has everything to do with framing, and it is interesting to observe how a slight refocus reveals that elements of the uncanny map directly to the comic (an adjacency to which Freud alludes but doesnt pursue). Freud calls attention to various workings of the uncanny defamiliarization, doubling and repetition, imagination versus reality, the hidden come to light, a dichotomy between the mechanical and the living (famously postulated in humour theory by Henri Bergson) all of which also describe common devices of comic worlds. Freuds essay unwittingly reminds us that clown rhythms rely on an orchestration of expectation and surprise enhanced by the fact that we can never be quite sure what the rules or possibilities are. The uncanny and its less-threatening neighbour, the marvellous, course through the veins of clown performance. Their jostling of realitys confidence in business as usual provides a fertile environment for the quick switches to alternative framings that drive clown worlds; as intimated above, it is the need to keep an audience simultaneously hooked and off-balance through a series of unexpected frame ambushes that contributes to the shape of escalating outrageousness associated with clowning narratives. It is arguable that there is a further Freudian aspect to clown-related laughter, that in some regard it taps into psychic energy born by surges of relief that any threats have momentarily evaporated into merely humorous reversals. Success and failure remain somehow tethered to this tension between laughter and fear in the nature of comic performance itself. There is always the possibility, even in the presence of accomplished performers, that the frame will disappear or break down, through, for example, forgotten lines, physical mishaps or collapsing sets. This threat is nowhere more

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pronounced than for a performance contract that comes with a clear joking obligation and the fulfillment of which relies unrelentingly upon virtuosic execution and timing. The performance relationship is by nature fragile, with the spectator asked not simply to watch, process, understand and feel but to take active part through repeated eruptions of a quasi-involuntary response based on the deft manipulation of expectation and surprise. Avowedly comic performance issues a ruthless ultimatum that equates robust laughter with success and anything less with a sliding scale of failure. While waves of laughter knit to the fabric of performance and supply an affective propulsion of their own, the marked absence of desired response to joking intention can cause each failed gag to fizzle or implode, causing anything from mild embarrassment to palpable hostility. Hired clowns at childrens parties and buskers on the street sign on for unenviable challenges, as spectators of any age are liable to have an equal and opposite reaction to the full force of a desperately solicitous body. In light of this uncompromising demand, the clowns own negotation of success and failure across interlacing planes of performance becomes a multi-level balancing act. With a fuller view of the clowns playing field established let us return to the act itself, first with a variation on a classic scenario. Louise Peacock, in her book Serious Play: Modern clown performance, describes a representative example of ways in which contemporary routines still admit to the blueprints of old-school clowning in the Spaghetti Entre (entre meaning set piece, rather than main course), performed by the clown Henri for Billy Smarts Circus in 2005. A more complex routine compared to Irwins, above, it comprises a series of sub-bits, each with its own point of focus, yet linked by an overarching situation. Henri assumes the role of a waiter, which establishes him in a subservient position to the customer, in this case played by a non-clown straight man or foil (and I have seen this role filled by an audience member in other incarnations). This socially constructed subservience incurs and emphasizes a focus

on success and competence, not to mention the eventuality of consequences for failure. The comic servant is as old as Western comedy and the potent food-serving setup captured from the commedia dellarte by Carlo Goldoni in Arlecchino servitore di due padroni (Servant of Two Masters, recently reborn in London as One Man, Two Guvnors by Richard Bean). Peacock describes Henris act as follows:
He tries to open a bottle of wine and for a long time cannot succeed. When it does open he spills some of the contents. Then he gets his finger stuck in the neck of the bottle. Once he extracts his finger he moves on to cleaning a glass. He blows his nose and then uses the cloth to clean the glass. He drinks some of the wine and then sprays it onto the customer and the audience. (Peacock 2009: 46)

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Henri then brings out a plate of spaghetti, in which the customer finds a sock. Henri puts on the sock, drinks some more wine and things get progressively out of hand, with the clowns wig coming off, spaghetti flying into the audience, and a custard pie seemingly destined for the audience before being intercepted by the customer, who redirects it to the clowns face. The sequence draws on a recognizable social scenario that evokes clear expectations with regard to relationship and conduct. It is not that many of these things couldnt happen in real life but this is a world fashioned for the express enjoyment of unlikely happenstance and disapproved behaviour, not to mention capricious variations on biology, physics and logic. Although it proceeds through a series of smaller bits, its overall topology involves a continual intensification of incompetence and impropriety through periodic upshifts in audacity and extravagance. Individual steps in Henris attempt to uncork the bottle are not described in this account, but we can assume that they include broad physicality and unorthodox methodology along the way. The clowns sleight-of-frame game plan allows for repeated changes of tack in a variety of comedy-friendly directions: incompetence (spilling wine), misfortune (finger stuck in the bottle), blithe disregard (cleaning the glass

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with a freshly used handkerchief), violation of social frames (drinking the customers wine) and of the protected status usually accorded the spectator (wine spraying the audience), random incongruity (sock in the spaghetti) and reversal (waiter puts on the sock, rather than any conceivable realistic response), snowballing momentum (everything else), puncturing of theatre convention (wig comes off), setup of identifiable stock gag (appearance of custard pie) and a crowning reversal, no doubt executed by deft timing between clown and customer (pie ends up in clowns face). What is notable, even from such a provisional listing, is the gamut of gag types a clown world relies upon and supports, the continual shuffling and expansion of which the genre commands in a continual need for surprise all lining up in the general vicinity of failure and incompetence. In the above routine, the clown courts laughter by leaping across accepted boundaries waiter/customer, character/performer, stage/ audience often by ignorance, ineptitude or happenstance. The clowns penchant for failure trades upon a belittling of otherness or incompetence. As suggested above, humours edge by nature furthers the cause of the sponsoring group, and in the clowns case encourages the spectator to hop on the ideological bandwagon for the price of a laugh. Children become practised in processing the pattern, which reinforces circuitry among thought, feeling and body as well as a connection to the regard of socio-cultural guidelines and behaviours. In mainstream contexts meaning those in which the practitioner seeks laughter from a largest possible audience the vectors of political force surely favour prejudices of the status quo or dominant discourse. It should be noted that mainstream clown performance can admit to further inscriptive influence regarding class-related, gendered and other subcultural bodied style and gesture, not to mention instruction upon approved models for comportment and respectability. The clown or clown-like figure of Western performance tradition thus serves as a cultural instructor,

possibly buttressing establishment projects by inviting pleasurable reactions to emphasize deviations from the approved centres of sociocultural practice. (The historical disproportion between male and female clowns, for example, is both striking and unsurprising.) It should be obvious how much the dominant discourse maintains an investment in defining social standards and the concepts of success and competence, and how the mainstream clown cannot help but reify binaries like compliance and deviation, if only by calling attention to them. Lest there be any doubt, funniness is not a quality that resides in people, things or ideas; it is in the eye (which is to say, the body) of the beholder and owes in no small measure to socio-cultural formatting. As acts of transfer, clown performances also impart a bodied palette and a gestural dialect for physical comedy. Given the chance, they etch upon young receptors the comic credentials of repetition, exaggeration, inversion and a metaphysics of the fantastic. They confirm the extent to which the laughing body can assert dominance, solidify the precepts of approved living, ridicule those outside it and, conceivably, turn its force back upon those same social tides. Luckily, for those of us who have faith in the strength of comic discourse, the patterns and meanings of the clowns poetics of failure become hard-wired into our spectating apparatus to the extent that the vectors of influence can be made to rebound against cultural assumptions or symbols of power. The most potent humorous utterances hook into the here-and-now of the cultural moment in historical conversation with comic motifs. In order to stay ahead of the audience, the astute clowning practitioner seeks to pinpoint and mine current signifiers and attitudes while avoiding predictable replication of comic forms. As a result, comic performance craves innovation, and any new or topical defamiliarization begins a steady drift toward clich. In addition, the practitioners psychoemotional response to something in the air

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breeds a distinctive quality of feeling within which the failure motif may resonate. The effect of the so-called global economic downturn upon the mood in post-EU-IMF bailout Ireland and the particular hit taken by the arts community can be felt in a performance piece titled City of Clowns, which premiered in Dublin in 2010 and continues to be pop up here and there. Keane wears a red nose, and he outlines with body and any use of voice the performative bearing that endows clowning action with playful design. Here, he presents a clown who appears utterly terrified to find himself in front of an audience. This is not the shyness or selfeffacement sometimes adopted as a clowning strategy to earn pre-emptive favour with an audience. Fibrils genuinely cannot face the spectators and tries to escape with all visible avenues blocked by audience, boxes or walls, he runs through a gap at the back and out of sight. We hear audible reports of his panicked efforts to get away, rattling of doors and chains and a terrified cry of I want out! I just want out! the only clearly uttered words in the piece (at other times, Keane uses a sort of hooded mumbling

with key recognizable sounds or words to transmit verbal intent). Fibrils returns to view and sets about trying to turn off the lights by pulling the plugs at several successive outlets, even climbing a ladder to disconnect them on the overhead grid each time they go off, only to flicker back on. The pattern of failure to get away, to disappear from sight is familiar clown territory, as are the narrative hooks for some of the sub-sequences: trapped in a cardboard box; an interlude with a mannequin and the trick transfer of a jacket from one wearer to another; direct interaction with the audience, including an onstage spectator; and a scene with a doll as scene partner. But the piece uses clowning practice as starting point for the kinds of reversals, extensions and refinements comic invention continually requires if one is to avoid sinking into banality and predictability. This clown tries desperately to flee his raison dtre an audience and, well, fails, thereby succeeding at his definitive purpose. There is, of course, laughter, but there is also an emotional undertow that nudges the

Raymond Keane as Fibrils in City of Clowns.

By permission of Barabbas the Company. Photo by J. Kielbowicz

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atmosphere noticeably towards the uncanny. Fibrils harbours a bone sadness, deeper than the traditional trope of the figure with a painted smile. Finally discovering a new sense of purpose by putting on the mannequins jacket, he finds a baby (doll) in a small box who becomes sick and dies. The piece, in fact, takes failure and disappointment unflinchingly to heart in an attempt to explore existential refusals of the happy ending that Western culture dangles before our eyes, even after the try, try again, which it guarantees as the path to eventual success. Fibrils tries in desolation to set fire to his world (and fails), whereupon he is rescued by the appearance of a child clown (a young girl when I saw it, but subject to change on tour). She beckons Fibrils to follow her, and both lead the audience to an adjacent space a large, warehouse-like room. The space is inhabited by some thirty-plus clowns, each occupying a patch of the room and engaged in a fragment of activity Keane calls an obsession. The show is built for travel, and at each geographical stop, Keane runs a day of workshops for local volunteers to cultivate clowning loops for the nights performance. In Dublin, one clown stood in a corner, beginning to write something very important on a post-it note, then stopped, crumpled it and dropped it to the floor to begin again. A rolling stair unit had clowns with suitcases queued on each step, with the topmost clown periodically rotating to the end. One clown surrounded himself with single shoes; another stood on a ledge shifting back and forth between Will I? and Wont I? A handful of learning clowns were corralled behind a barrier, not yet ready for the world beyond. Failure, disappointment, incompleteness define all of them; if they do evoke laughter it is surely of a minor key. The circular form of these obsessions establishes putative goals while denying their completion, contributing to an air of, if not quite failure, something palpably shy of success. These groups of clowns and the process by which Keane readies them for performance offer an interesting side glance upon contemporary

practice. Much clown workshopping seeks to assist the participant in peeling away veneer to find the utterly individual, on the premise that it will expose a facet of the universal. It often undertakes to dismantle the clown students deepest personal imperatives with regard to success: Renowned clown Angela de Castro has called her master classes How To Be A Stupid; Eli Simon exhorts would-be clowns to try impossible acts, experience devastating failures, become vulnerable and find resolution through clown fortitude (Simon 2009: 50). Interestingly this approach positions clowning as a path to mutually enabling self-discovery and liberation; extended to performance it offers for display the soft inside of one persons outer crust acquired through inculcation of just those binaries like success and failure. If we laugh, it is together with the attending clown at the expense of our inescapably human vulnerabilities, perhaps our collective saving grace when all is said and done. City of Clowns may not pretend joy at the realization that the universe appears not to have signed on to Western civilizations guarantee that good things coming to those who wait, but its pragmatic undercurrent is somehow more life-affirming (in the manner of Waiting for Godot, with regard to which Iser made the above observation about clowns). The bass note of feeling rendered by Keane following his initial panic attains a sense of nobility under fire from those well-known slings and arrows. Not broadly comic, the performing body here approaches real behaviour from an orbit just that wink of an eye from the thing itself. It is difficult, in fact, to ignore the spirit of play that seeps through the skins of the performers and their serious doings. Perhaps the soul of clowning, it serves as psychic buffer for lifes wilful vacillation between elation and despair, fortune and disaster, success and failure. There is a slightly other kind of being in the City of Clowns milieu, and that is the youngster who arrives to conduct Keane and the audience to the neighbouring space. This unexpected rescuer establishes with Keane a rapport of kindred naifs while reversing the

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customary dominion of adult over child. She shows us a junior human not yet fully inducted into the culture of judgements, expectations and boundaries, her performing body natural and as yet unpreoccupied by the clowning project. Evocative indeed of Waiting for Godot, the child enters upon a grownup looking desperately for answers. This time, however, she offers deliverance from the poor grownups beleaguered insulation, accompanying him to a world at large, in which people persist in poignant industry, and where the emphasis is on the doing, not the attainment. Ultimately, the lessons learned from clown performance betray the same political ambivalences rehearsed in debates about the comic at large. Although the idea of clown as shrewd subverter and daring truth-teller remains the sentimental favourite among many humour scholars, it is hard to argue against the fact that however much is seen to be subverted or gotten away with along the way, the status quo reasserts its primacy in the end, with the reins still firmly in the hands of the dominant discourse yes, weve had a good laugh, but what has changed? There can be no doubt that the embodied practice of clown performance carries out profound operations upon the perceiving body, and that its favours incline towards the bidding of mainstream thought and values. It becomes hard to maintain, however, that any disruptive effects remain confined discreetly to the length of the laughter itself, even if we cant quite put our fingers on the extent or nature of those counter-cultural consequences. Those of us who champion humours capacity as worthy advocate for liberation and change latch onto the notion that once the ideological barn door has been opened, you can never quite get the whole horse back inside. Clowns with resilient dedication invite us to laugh at their failures, and at their persistent, varied and sometimes fantastic incompetence. They remind us however, not to become ensnared by rigid thinking and rote response and that they are, after all, only human; the clown-like imagination, unfettered by earthly logic, urges

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us to entertain unlikely avenues of thought and action. Clowns can be seen to celebrate the habit of human being to fail proudly in conforming to logical thought and externally imposed order, embodying comic evidence that controlling frameworks fracture and backfire under pressure from bodied experience. Whatever else they do, clowns seem to acknowledge from behind their masks of ineptitude the resolute untidiness of being human, and they advise us to keep playing at all costs.
ReFeRences
Bergson, Henri (1980 [1900]) Laughter, in W. Sypher (ed.) Comedy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, pp. 58180. Freud, Sigmund (2003 [1919]), The Uncanny in A. Phillips (ed.), trans. D. McClintock, The Uncanny, New York: Penguin, pp. 12162. Iser, Wolfgang (1992) Counter-sensical comedy and audience response in Becketts Waiting for Godot, in S. Conner (ed.) New Casebooks: Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Houndmills: Macmillan, pp. 5570. Langer, Susanne K., Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1953) Peacock, Louise (2009) Serious Play: Modern clown performance, Bristol: Intellect. Simon, Eli (2009) The Art of Clowning, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Welsford, Enid (1935) The Fool: His social and literary history, London: Faber and Faber.

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