As I head on my way to France for a 6-week clown course, I thought it would make sense to address what a clown actually is. It’s a question that I’ve, understandably, been asked by a lot of people recently.

Right now, I am sitting on a plane. It isn’t moving. We have been sitting here for some time and it was looking like we would be here for hours…

…but now (literally as I’ve started writing this) we are allowed to move from air traffic control. So I’ll finish this later…

… and we’re back. We got an air traffic slot and left sooner than expected.

Now we’re in the air.

That’s the way to do it! Decide to get your laptop out for the 1.5 hour wait and no doubt you’ll set off sooner. It’s like the rule that, I hear, as soon as you light up a cigarette while waiting at a bus stop, the bus will arrive.

Anyway, what the hell is clown?

When I say to people I’m going on an “intensive clown course” most people don’t know what that means.

They think it means a circus clown with makeup or a children’s entertainer.

Which is understandable.

Would I have known what clown was before I started doing it 3 years ago?

Not really. All I knew was that my mum (who is also my voice teacher) said she thought it’d be good for me.

But what is is then, if it’s not about the makeup and being silly?

Clown, from my perspective, is about honesty.

So often in this world, we are encouraged to be dishonest. We are told “how to do something” (say, in the sphere of performance, which is where this effect is very clear) and what we are told to do promotes dishonesty.

The biggest culprits for this, I think, are those people that claim to teach people “authenticity.”

It really pisses me off how so many people that claim to teach “authentic presentation skills”, for example, are peddling the most useless, bullshit advice about how to “speak authentically.”

I’ve railed about this a bunch on my presentation blog CreateClarifyArticulate.com so I won’t repeat my favourite tirade again just now.

Suffice to say, what people *think* produces authenticity often doesn’t.

As a performer or speaker (the latter group who don’t often like the label performer, though we are performers) what many performers think makes you authentic on stage often doesn’t.

The problem is that the things that *do* make you more authentic on stage are fucking difficult to explain.

Why?

Because they are about *doing* and NOT *saying* or *thinking.* This is a problem because most of us in this world tend to over-intellectualize things to the point of uselessness.

I know I certainly do.

I can pontificate about an idea for weeks, finding more and more ways to explain intellectually why it is the case…

Then I try to put that idea into practice *in the body* (a phrase my dad often uses that I’ve adopted) and find that all my pontificating was just an exercise in futility.

Clowning (from my perspective) is a training of all the subtle *doing* things that make a great performer into a great performer.

The Gaulier school I’m going to this month has been attended previously by heaps of famous actors, stand-up comedians, circus performers, musicians, speakers, and practitioners of any type of performance that involves communication that you can think of.

Clowning is applicable to everything.

Because it is about how to communicate authentically with an audience (aka whoever you are trying to communicate with).

The training for clowning is deceptively simple (at least the training I’ve received so far).

It goes: play and make people laugh.

Why do clowns try to make people laugh?

Making people laugh is an instinctive form of communication with clear feedback. Either you make someone laugh out loud or you don’t.

A clown could also make someone cry. Or make someone experience joy. Or any other strong, fundamental emotion. It would still be clowning.

But laughter is clear. It’s immediate feedback. You know immediately whether what you do on stage is working or whether it isn’t.

You might think that stand-up comedy is the same. Isn’t stand-up also about making people laugh?…

Well, yes. And that’s why there is an overlap.

But so many stand-ups “cut themselves off” from the audience. They come on stage with their list of prepared jokes and they deliver them.

Sure, they might notice when the audience laughs, but they are tied to their material, their written jokes.

With clowning, one thing I learned early on is “everything is material.”

Maybe you pick up a cup from a table in a slightly unusual way. You didn’t plan it, it just happened. For whatever reason, this makes somebody laugh…

What you have here is the start to some potential “material”.

Something you did evoked an instinctual reaction in that person — a laugh.

Most people will ignore the laugh. In normal life, we pretend it didn’t happen.

Sometimes you’ll feel sheepish. Embarrassed that you picked up a cup in a “weird” way.

As a clown, you learn to recognize the situation for what it was — for whatever reason, nobody knows why (least of all you), you did something that the other person enjoyed.

As a clown, you learn how to take those little moments and turn them into larger moments of connection.

As a clown, you learn how to actually listen to the rest of the world and respond to all the millions of tiny moments of potential connection that arise all the time in life.

This is stupidly simple, on paper.

But it’s extremely difficult.

If I say “clowning makes you a good listener” you have some bullshit intellectual explanation somewhere floating around in your non-conscious mind that distorts my words.

If I say “clowning gives you presence” another set of bullshit buzzword definitions distorts those words too.

In fact, it’s almost impossible to explain in words what clowning is…

… because it is specifically about communicating *without words.*

Sure, you can speak as a clown.

You don’t need to mime.

But words are just a flavouring. They don’t really matter.

With most forms of modern communication, words are the star of the show. Everything revolves around the words.

With clowning, words are often distracting. They confuse the communication rather than clarifying it.

So, what the hell is clowning? That was the question behind this blog post.

I think I’ve probably failed to answer that question…

That doesn’t bode well for reporting on my learnings in this course!

Oh well.

<shrugs>