Circus Clown Research Articles

Send in the Clowness: The Problematic Origins of Female Circus Clowns

Historically, clowns have always been trained “on the job”: one was born or adopted into a circus dynasty or else ran away to join the circus, serving an apprenticeship. Breaking with the long tradition that performers learn on the job, after World War II, national circuses in the Communist bloc created their own academies; they were followed in 1974 by the École nationale de cirque founded in Paris by Annie Fratellini and Pierre Étaix, now the Académie Fratellini, and in 1982 by the Escola Nacional de Circo in Brazil. These examples led to the teaching of circus skills in universities, enabling breaches in the gender barriers between types of circus acts. For example, six years after Ringling Brothers founded a clown college in 1968, Peggy Williams was the first woman to graduate with a contract. At first she felt out of place. In an interview series for the Ringling Museum of Art, she stated that early in her training she had presumed that clowns were gender neutral: “I didn't know there weren't girl clowns. I thought being a clown was being a clown. You could be a man or woman. I had no idea what was heading my way because of gender.” Although she learned under the auspices of great clowns such as Lou Jacobs, she was left to her own devices to craft a clown that reflected her allegedly female nature.

The Imperturbable Seriousness of the Circus Buffoon: The Shakespearean Clown on the Threshold of Modern Comedy

Abstract Around the middle of the nineteenth century, there arose a type of circus performer in England called ‘Shakespearean clowns’. These clowns constituted a transitory figure between the age of Georgian pantomime clowns and the establishment of the typical circus clown in the later part of the century. One of the more neglected representatives of the genre was James Clement Boswell, who enjoyed a brief period of success in England before becoming a sensation in Paris during the 1850s. Although he was universally praised, his clowning also evoked bafflement. This article studies reviews of and periodical articles on Boswell in order to get a picture of his performances and clown persona, and of how critics perceived him and turned him into an example of the melancholy clown trope. The resistance that Boswell’s act and persona offered to the writers, however, illustrates that he was part of a change in the figure of the clown from its early nineteenth century incarnation to the twentieth-century clown and comic. Boswell’s clowning prefigures the irony and deadpan comedy that would become more prevalent in modern comedy. He is also illustrative of the increasing detachment of the clown figure from representations of a social reality, and the creation of the modern circus clown as an essentially unreal character that epitomizes a separate outlook on life.

Federico Fellini (1920–2020), special issue of Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, vol 9, no. 1, 2021

Federico Fellini (1920–2020), special issue of <i>Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies,</i> vol 9, no. 1, 2021

A Mutual Parody of Meaning in Circus Clown and Ethnographic Discourse

This article traces some of the conversations between a European circus clown named Pipo and myself in order to draw out the characteristics of intertextuality that I argue are key features of the ethnographic endeavour. Central to our conversations was a concern with our mutual productions of identity as clown artist and ethnographer. I explore how ambiguous, parodic, and subversive such productions can be. Along the way Pipo taught me a few good jokes and something of how to tell them and I try them out on modernist anthropology in an effort to make this “body” of knowledge/power parodic.

FEATURES GENRE CLOUNADY. SPECIFIC WORK OF THE DIRECTOR

Determine the characteristics and specifics of the circus genre of clowning. Clarify the specific features of forms, techniques, expressive features and the creation of an artistic image, as well as emphasize the work of the director in creating a stage representation. Based on the results of the study and analysis of historical materials, articles, books, methodological developments, consider clownery as the original genre of pop and circus art, trace the origins of the formation, formation and development of the genre, identify the differences between pop and circus clowns, determine the specifics of directing the genre, the main provisions of the director’s work with a comedic actor. Key words: circus art, circus genres, aerial gymnastics, circus trick

Battles, blows and blood: pleasure and terror in the performance of clown violence

This article will explore the performative structures of comic violence enacted by, and on, clown bodies, drawing on filmic examples such as Chaplin’s The Kid (1920) and The Circus (1928), Fellini’s The Clowns (1970) and McMahon’s Stitches (2012). Focusing on trips, falls and blows and the exaggeration of these through repetition, escalation and sound effects the article will examine the way violence can be constructed and presented as comedy. Comedy violence has a long and colourful history in popular performance and is performed by clowns with joyful anarchy, gifting the audience the vicarious pleasure of witnessing scenes that they would be unlikely to enact. However there is also a darker side to clown violence which can be found in parodies of the horror film genre. The 2012 film Stitches, directed by Conor McMahon, provides examples of clown violence blended with exaggerated horror effects in terms of blood and suspense. The forms of mild violence perpetrated on the titular clown, Stitches, prior to his accidental death echo the comic violence of circus clowns but the violence he perpetrates as he seeks posthumous revenge are much more violent whilst still echoing the techniques of repetition and escalation found in earlier more joyful incarnations of clown violence. This article will, therefore, explore the ways in which clown violence can be read as joyful transgression or as threatening anarchy which speaks more to trauma than pleasure and how these positions relate to the society in which the violence was created.

Sublime and grotesque: exploring the liminal positioning of clowns between oppositional aesthetic categories

The horror clown is a potential rooted in the liminalities that are an integral part of the clown figure per se. Drawing on anthropological work and the study of popular culture, this paper argues that clowns can be placed between different dualistic frames such as the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the grotesque, and fear and disgust. This positioning and the ways in which clowns operate between these categories are transmitted aesthetically. In this paper the dualistic aesthetics and violent potential of clowns is examined through three different clown examples: the ritual clown, the circus clown and the horror clown. Field observations made by Keisalo of the Chapayeka rituals clowns in Sonora, Mexico in 2004, 2006 and 2007 are contrasted with a case description of circus clowns provided by Paul Bouissac and a well-known example of a horror clown, Stephen Kings Clown Pennywise in the novel It. While these clowns serve different purposes and represent different cultural contexts, we claim that they all occupy a liminal space that can be analysed in aesthetic terms.

Smash and Laugh: A philosophical analysis on the relationship between humour and violence

This article focuses on the relationship between humour and violence from a philosophical perspective. It is necessary to analyze different forms of violence and humour to understand in which ways humour can be violent and violence humorous. This will be done through a rigorous conceptual analysis based on both classical and modern philosophers. Humour is understood in the light of incongruity theory (e.g. Raskin 2008) as an umbrella concept for various subgenres of humour, like farce, satire, irony, tomfoolery, pranks etc. Laughter refers to laughter triggered by humour, and not, for instance, by tickling or intoxication. Because this special themed journal issue focuses on clowns, they will have a special role in this paper, too. How is it possible that clowns, the epitomes of humour and bringers of joy, can do the most horrible deeds? In the article, clowns will be treated as an embodiment of humour and champions of the peculiar relationship between violence and humour. The main argument is that clowns reveal the inherent violent nature of humour in various ways. The term ‘clown’ is understood in its broadest manner. It includes besides jocular circus clowns, also sad clowns, ancient ‘ritual clowns’, as well as hospital clowns and evil clowns of popular fiction. Clowns are treated as a symbol which means that actual professional clowns are left aside from this analysis. In short, this article is first and foremost a conceptual analysis motivated by an empirical phenomenon. The guiding questions are, what it means if humour is violent or if violence is humorous.

A Heterogeneous Character – Opera, Circus and Kitsch in Filip Bajon’s Film Aria for an Athlete

Analysing Filip Bajon’s film Aria for an Athlete, the author focuses on the relationship between opera and circus, paying attention primarily to their interrelationship and not the differences. According to the author, the category common to both types of performance is kitsch. Any kind of art has in its history a phase of kitsch, yet what is derived from the kitsch can become the beginning of art. While describing the coexistence of opera and circus, the author makes a study of three characters in the film: Władysław Góralewicz, Max the clown and the tenor Baptisto Messalini. In her opinion, these representatives of the world of circus and the opera, respectively, have a number of attributes that allow to assigning them the culture which is alien to them. Max, a circus clown, elevates kitsch, but also shows a duality of nature of both commedia dell’arte and film, Góralewicz, the artist- -wrestler rooted in the circus, longs for the opera, the singer Messalini, whose profession is to create culture, brings kitsch to life.

Жанры городской скульптуры в контексте мегаполиса, Москва, Цветной бульвар

The article examines multivariate saturation of limited locations (Tsvetnoy Boulevard) executed at different times and diff erent in the image and style of the sculptural works. Due to this Boulevard space takes the value exhibition area for the testing, presents not only free conglomeration of forms, but also time-varying ideas about the place of sculpture in the urban environment and its communication capabilities. A description and analysis of selected monuments of the second half of 20th – beginning of 21st century («Song», «Yuri Nikulin», «Circus Clown») in terms of their own aesthetic value, as well as interaction with the surrounding environmental context, enables create panoramic deployed in time and space idea of some aspects of the general problem.

Bohater heterogeniczny – opera, cyrk i kicz w filmie Filipa Bajona „Aria dla atlety”

The author analyzing Filip Bajon’s film Aria for an Athlete focuses on the relationship between opera and circus, paying attention primarily to their interrelationship and not the differences. According to the author, the category common to both shows is kitsch. Any kind of art has in its history phase of kitsch, yet what is derived from the kitsch can become the beginning of art. While describing the coexistence of opera and circus, author makes a study of three movie characters: Władysław Góralewicz, clown Max and tenor Babtisto Messalini. In her opinion, these representatives of respectively the world of circus or the opera, have a number of attributes that allow to assign them the culture which is alien to them. Max, circus clown, elevates kitsch, but also shows a duality of nature of both commedia dell’arte and film, Góralewicz, artist-wrestler rooted in the circus, longs for the opera, singer Messalini, whose profession is to create a culture, brings to life kitsch.

Slovensko fôkselj (m.), gen. -na in sorodne besede

Ker je v nemščini izpričano Faxe (f.) 'šala ', Faxer (m.), gen. -s 'cirkuški klovn', v švabski nemščini faxen 'uganjati norčije', v koroški nemščini pa fax (m.), gen. -es 'šaljivec ', se ugotavlja, da so slovenske besede fôkselj, fôksne, fôksler, fôksner izposojene iz bavarske nemščine. Ustreznih predlog za vse omenjene izposojenke v nemščini ni bilo mogoče najti, zato se izposoja dokazuje z nemškim besedotvor-jem in s priponsko enakimi izposojenkami v slovenščini, ki imajo ustrezne nemške predloge.

Teasing and clowning in infancy

Summary "… do not take from me your laughter..... it opens for me all the doors of life "— Pablo NerudaBefore they speak or walk or crawl, infants joke. Infant laughter captured the attention of Aristotle, who thought it was the sign of the entry of the soul into the body, and of Darwin, who noted its emergence in the fourth month of life. Darwin saw such laughter as the early appreciation of humour, the presence at this age of which should not surprise us too much, given the early emergence of play in other mammals. In the twentieth century, however, these observations faded from scientific attention; humour began to be seen as an intellectual achievement requiring complex cognitive abilities, with infant laughter seen merely as a reaction to external stimuli. Recent research, however, has uncovered remarkable cognitive and emotional sensitivities in very young infants. And, as it turns out, humour and laughter in infants offer a rich source of insights into their understanding of the world, and indeed for our understanding of infants. The study of infant humour is no joke.

This Is a Test of the System

This Is a Test of the System Thomas Israel Hopkins (bio) I’m in the office of floyd flander, headmaster of Pinkness Prep, the private all-boys school where I teach. We’re having an informal conference. Floyd considers me a confidant. I secretly think Floyd is a bozo. But I let him continue to think of me this way; my theory is that a man has to be something of a bozo not only to want to run a prep school in the first place, but to actually land the job and hold on to it. A cocktail of prerequisites: part circus clown, part lap dog. “I’m tired of busting people,” the headmaster says, standing by the window, sloshing his Scotch and ice around in his glass. Floyd’s definition of informal conference means Scotch at ten in the morning, during the all-campus midmorning break. Floyd is a bozo, but I don’t resist this either; I slosh my Scotch and ice too. When in Rome. “They’re not people,” I say. “They’re teenagers.” “I don’t even know if you can call them that,” Floyd says. “More like monkeys.” He’s looking out the window at a gang of about seven or eight of them on the center quad, building something that looks like the beginnings of a funeral pyre. It’s a beautiful spring day. They’ve been at it for a few hours already this morning. They’re methodical and ambitious. “They’re probably smarter than monkeys, Flander,” I say. “I can’t take it anymore,” Floyd says. “I really can’t, I really can’t. This is the worst.” He whistles into his Scotch, ruffling the bottom edge of his salt-and-pepper mustache, rippling the liquid over the surface of the ice. He always says this, always does this—no matter what it is, specifically, that he thinks he can’t take. Ever since he got the job five years ago, after Algie White took his own life jumping off the footbridge into the Hale River. Although it’s not really a river, more like a trickle; a tough body of water to drown in. Like a half-full sink. “À la guerre comme à la guerre,” I say, trying to be helpful. Floyd doesn’t hear me. “And to top it off now, physical plant tells me they’ve got snags with the nuclear emergency system. Did you notice they haven’t had a test for quite a while now?” “That’s been something of a relief, actually,” I say. Is it the worst this time, though, as he says? [End Page 122] “I hate that siren as much as the next fellow, but holy moly,” he says. “What to do, Wheezer?” Every single student, to a boy, on the campus of this elite New England prep school, gone completely AWOL — gone anarchic, gone wild — does that qualify as the worst? It might. “Mrs. Buttonweiser’s locked herself in on the second floor of Gatling,” I say. “That’s always been my favorite building on campus,” he says. He looks nostalgic, bleary, spent. He keeps watching the fire starters outside. “Did I ever tell you that?” I’m at the top of the stairs of Gatling House, sitting on the landing by the door to the corridor, the door behind which my wife has locked herself. “Penny?” I say. I knock on the bottom panel: tap, tap, tap. The wood is scarred and scuffed by the generations of well-bred sixteen-year-olds who have been through this place. “Pen, honey? You’ve got to come out.” “Westmoreland says they’re winning at Khe Sanh,” she says, her voice muffled. “He said so this morning. But they’ve been winning Khe Sanh for just months now, haven’t they?” “It’s starting to look embarrassing,” I say. “There’s a faculty dinner tonight.” “And Tet? I have not been keen on Tet,” she says. “Not keen at all. Where does it all end? How far do they get?” Penny and I got married one year ago. We’d known each other nine months before that. I’m fifteen years her senior. I...

The irreparable and the imprevidible: fathers and failures at Joyce's family circus

This paper reconsiders ideas of the father in Joyce's writing. It does so by examining in detail those ideas as they are elucidated through circus anecdote and imagery. The focus rests decisively on Ulysses (1922), but references to Joyce's earlier writing and to Finnegans Wake (1939) demonstrate the enduring popularity of the circus as image or metaphor for the author. The paper works broadly to contextualise hitherto overlooked circus references within the history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular culture – Joyce is here connected to circus clown Johnny Patterson, music hall star Henry Clifton, and artist Jack B. Yeats. Through this history, it appears that Joyce imitates others in placing male authorities within both actual and invented circus rings to question legitimate influence in local domestic and wider social settings. It moves between these two locations to assess disquieting consequences of imagining political authority within this particular performance space in the fraught period of Irish history from 1904 to 1922.

Batman’s Joker, a neo-modern clown of violence

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.

An investigation of the emotions elicited by hospital clowns in comparison to circus clowns and nursing staff

The present research aims at identifying emotional states induced in observers of hospital clown interventions utilizing a list of clown-specific ratings, the 29 Clown Emotion List (CLEM-29, Auerbach et al. 2012a). Study 1 investigated whether hospital clowns elicit emotional states other than those already covered by scales representing existing models of emotional states. One hundred and nineteen adults watched videos of hospital clowns and circus clowns and, after each video, completed a general mood scale, a humour-related mood scale, and the CLEM-29, and indicated the global intensity of positive and negative feelings towards each video. Results showed that emotional states elicited by hospital clowns go beyond states represented in general mood scales. Some elements of the CLEM-29 relating to humour and amusement overlapped with existing models of mood, but many other emotional qualities like “feeling connected to the clown” or feeling “appreciated” were not well represented. Some of the clown-specific ratings best predicted the positive experiences towards the videos. In Study 2, 183 adults watched 15 videos of hospital clown interventions, circus clown performances and nurse-patient interactions, and filled in the CLEM-29. Four factors emerged from a factor analysis of the ratings: amusement, transcendence, arousal, and uneasiness . Both circus and hospital clowns elicited amusement, but only the hospital clowns additionally elicited feelings of transcendence (i.e., feeling privileged and appreciated). Nurses also elicited transcendent experiences without being amusing. This research shows that prior studies underestimated emotional states elicited by hospital clowns, which go beyond a typical humour response.

The Love House

The Love House Ken Poyner (bio) The house had always been on the hill. Dark image: brooding like a mother about to scold children caught playing with cigarettes behind the garage. It was said to have no sex, and no face anyone could remember. Its staircases were supposedly all circular. The assumption was that gnomes and trolls, dragons and politicians lived there, eating light for breakfast and dropping dark out of their windows; that it had no bathrooms, only outhouses; and that the ghosts of dogs buried the bones of lost children in the back yard. Interestingly enough, had it been down in the hollow, we would not have wasted a visited. Low places can be malevolent and still fit in. High places that are evil scare us with their flaunting of the universal order of events: all the more we want to climb up the porch, bang the huge gargoyle knocker, and see what misshapen errand boy of underworld disharmony answers. You expect someone like that down in the hollow. On the hill, poking its eye into the tangle of God’s beard, it makes a statement. After an afternoon of torturing insects with a magnifying glass and the great goodness of the sun, the five of us that most closely ran together as the proud neighborhood terrors decided that someone needed to see if the house were more than a painted façade placed on the hill to give our town character. No doubt, in other generations others had climbed to the shadowed porch: circus clowns had goaded brave boys into disappearing into the house’s peep show dark; whimsy girls in see-through gowns had drawn thoughtless teen-aged boys onto man eating mattresses carelessly dragged into the sweetly clinging hallway. I started up the hill, my four companions at least a dozen steps back as we leaned forward into the never-used driveway. Each switchback was an opportunity for dread, for discovery of axe wielding midgets, murderous geese or the corpse of last year’s junior high prom demimondaine. The higher we climbed, the darker it got: the base of the hill full afternoon, but the top nearing midnight. The house twisted on its natural angles like the snarled shadows of competing cathedrals pushing drearily into the night. My plan was to start at the right side of the house, hug the brick at the base of the porch, run up the eight or ten steps of the stoop, and bang on the door with the blunt end of a long stick I had picked up days before for the effort. My friends would stand still on the driveway, waiting just slightly off center, to [End Page 70] the right and back a few paces. Their unoccupied minds would be filled with visions from late-night movies, with remembrances of family funerals, with the eyes of Laura when she fell from her uneven bicycle and one breast popped entirely from her summer top. They would be dancing on one leg no matter how still they stood. Up the stoop and extend the stick. Poke. Poke. Poke. No one surely had been home for twenty years, no one would answer the door. I would be back down the stoop, celebrated, proud to be at an age when I could imagine using that extra inch of penis such a move would embolden. I knew the feat would fade, but it would begin a reputation. I stood there, the pole in my hand, leaning forward just under the lip of the lurid dark deepened by the porch roof. My heart simply beat, unable to master a fitting rhythm. My eyes adjusting to the murk, I drew back the stick to make my plea incessant. The door began to fall back, to slide ever so slightly open. From the window behind the door, across the whole thin length of the house, I could see the dark, less dark than the rest of the house, flooding in: and I was running, having missed the steps of the stoop entirely, having forgotten the driveway, grass to my knees wet and holding and expecting me to stay or fall, but I kept my...

Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown’s Play

Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown’s Play

A influência do palhaço na obra de Samuel Beckett como pista para uma poética do ator

Neste artigo, discutiremos a presença do palhaço na obra de Samuel Beckett como indício de uma poética cênica. Analisando exemplos do teatro e da prosa do autor, veremos como as descrições físicas dos personagens e o seu comportamento se assemelham e radicalizam características do palhaço de circo, acentuando, sobretudo, o seu caráter grotesco. O caráter trágico do palhaço seria reforçado pela condição em que o ator é colocado em cena. No teatro de Beckett o ator é colocado num estado de risco similar ao do palhaço através das repetições e da imobilidade impostas pelas rigorosas rubricas do autor.