The audience erupts! What kind of sounds are they making?
Is it polite, knowing guffaws, which indicate sophistication and an intelligent and nuanced understanding of the subtext of the joke?
Or do they laugh just to hear the noise they make together, and to lose their minds for just a moment and indulge in a collective moment of shameless pleasure?
In this text I hope to describe a kind of absurdist, decentralized variety of novel humour, distinct from other kinds which boast (dark and unfun?) ulterior motives. I will selfishly advocate for this kind of delirious foolery and make a loosey goosey argument in favour of it. Examples will be built around British Shakespearean theatre, a time when the archetype of the fool solidified and evolved over the course of the Age of Enlightenment.
The word Clown was first recorded in England around the year 1560, meaning someone who is rustic, boorish, and a peasant. In Shakespeare’s Othello and The Winter Tale, the fool characters were referred to as clowns for the first time. However, clown-like roles have been recorded as early as 2400 BC in Egypt01, and traditionally served a socio-religious role. British-born Joseph Grimaldi made the position mainstream in the early 1800s, popularising his iconic whiteface makeup look.
The comedy that clowns perform is usually in the role of a fool whose everyday actions and tasks become extraordinary—and for whom the ridiculous, for a short while, becomes ordinary.02
The Clown is a character archetype without normative boundaries. Within the context of the theater or performance space, every action they perform exists simultaneously within both the realm of absurdity, and that of acceptable and rational action - normativity. The axis of acceptable/unacceptable action becomes a circular, cyclical graph, whereupon traveling far enough in one direction, one will end up on the other side of the binary. A truly clownish action has the effect of oscillating so quickly along this xy axis, that the overall effect, to the human eye, is a perception of complete tranquility, harmony, rationality, and balance. Unlike a kind of peaceful harmony that is static and eternal, the rapidly honking oscillations between chaos and order feel more sincere and imperfect in nature - a kind of domestic, achievable Oneness that does not demand any kind of transcendence or appeal to a higher power. Historically, the roles of priest and clown would be filled by the same person within a community.03
The clown’s image also plays a role in this phenomenon. They take the appearance of a person, a human, whose features have been dramatically exaggerated. At the same time, their mouth is still a mouth, and their nose is still a nose. Grimaldi’s iconic clown face featured red triangles at the corner of the mouth, representing pie filling left over from a mischievous and hungry child, however the origins of clown visages in the West are disputed as being born out of a variety of anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-other sentiments. Clowns effectively dress up as a caricature of a person, which conversely is a subtle indication that that is not what they originally are. This image later becomes more directly linked to racializations and anti-immigrant attitudes throughout history in many different forms, despite its sacred, community-building origins in a variety of indigenous cultures. The Pueblo peoples, a group of native Americans indigenous to the Southwestern US, are among the first well documented groups to perform ritualistic actions and humorous social commentary led by an anonymous clown-like figure04. Generally, this costume allows clowns to slip and slide through the liminal spaces of the human psyche, as being a performer allows one to safely explore parts of oneself as an individual, and one's experience as a community, that aren’t normally readily accessible.
During the Renaissance period in England, comedy was instrumental in affirming/validating the erroneous nature of humans compared to the divine, that there might be a kind of endearing quality in our human imperfection that could be celebrated. As humanism proliferated, there came a newfound appreciation for folly.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet famously had nothing but disdain for cheap laughs, and didn’t consider it a worthwhile pursuit within theater or otherwise. “[L]et those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. …That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it”.05 There exists a paradox in Shakespeare’s fools and clowns, in that their humble lowliness is allowed to necessarily coexist with their sharply intelligent wit and political savviness. Kings and fools go well together as they are frequently swapping roles with each other - the character of The Fool in King Lear shows such a noble loyalty towards the King after his banishment, which serves to emphasize Lear’s descent into madness. When the King is sane and rational, then the Fool can be roguish and silly. Thus the XY axis of acceptable/unacceptable action is maintained, and the play has a sense of harmony. Comedy often necessarily requires friction in order to really hit the mark.
Even the term ‘comic relief’ was born out of disdain - one of the first notable uses was by George Bernard Shaw in 1921, a playwright who hated the works of Shakespeare passionately. “The Shakespearian-Dickensian consolation of laughter at mischief, accurately called comic relief.”06 The idea that we need to be relieved of the weight of too much serious, plot-furthering content was despised by Shaw, who apparently thought that wasn’t giving enough credit to the audience. This also betrays the paradigm shift that occurred during this period, where the theater was no longer to be enjoyed by people from every class background, but rather a luxury that could only be appreciated by a learned, aristocratic audience.
There are many strong associations between clown makeup and early racist representations. Robert Hornback, in his book The English Clown Tradition, notes that scholars have long focused on the early associations of blackness with evil and the devil, that within the realm of early blackface comedy, blackness was associated with degradation, irrationality, ignorance, and above all else, a kind of folly that is wholly unrelated to wit. The role of the fool in these instances was not one of whimsical absurdity, nor one of pointed wit and sharp satire, but rather a manifestation of complete otherness - a scapegoat upon which the majority of negative consequences would both fall on, and be propagated by. These fools would often have physical ‘deformities’ or conspicuous mental illnesses. Hornback argues that such representations in theater preceded, and possibly even propagated, later racist notions by early slavers that Africans were utterly irrational and beastlike, and should be treated as such.
During the Renaissance and the rise of humanism, the devil went from being depicted as a serious threat, to being shown as brutish, ugly, simple, and ridiculous - and thereafter was depicted as black in colour. Foolishness became increasingly seen as being diabolical and sinful, as opposed to being a lighthearted source of comic relief; also as a direct result of the Renaissance and its assertion that intellect was something holy, humanism having largely replaced religion.
Like wine, comedy has a disarming quality which lubricates our mind-body connection, and slickens the passageways so that feelings can more efficiently travel from one pole to the other. It unlocks the subconscious and lowers our guards, which can be a very powerful means of tapping into culture and quietly influencing the perspectives of a large number of people - with lasting, snowballing effects that persist for generations. It is not conclusive for Hornback whether ‘previously ignored fool iconography forged early links in the enslaving fiction of the “Great Chain of Being,” at least adumbrating, if not originating, later racist notions,’07 he argues that examples of proto-racism and colour symbolism in 19th Century theater laid, or helped to lay, thick foundations for the racist theory yet to come.
The cultural importance placed on comedy today, especially within the online zeitgeist, echoes its historical effectiveness at influencing large groups of people, especially in heightening and manipulating perceptions of otherness and exclusivity, resulting in strengthening and proliferating capitalist ideologies. By making a distinction between traditional, utilitarian comedy; and decentralized, absurdist, novelty-focused comedy; it might be possible to reclaim the medium and return it to its inclusive, creative, community-building origins.
Important anti-capitalistic conceptualisations can however also be transmitted through the underappreciated medium of novelty, to great effect; in a society where productivity culture is championed above most else, and where human value is dependent on perceived utility and work ethic, actions which intend only to amuse can be a way of escaping the cycle and reminding us that our only real responsibility is to exist, and to be alive; everything else is frills, bells, and whistles.
Novelty has several official definitions; the quality of being new and unusual; something that has not been experienced before and so is interesting; and a cheap unusual object such as a small toy, often given as a present.08 In relation to cheapness, and it's often negative connotations, it must be asked under which value system this categorization falls. Something cheap can be low in quality and mass-produced unethically and without care; though it can also have more positive connotations, such as being accessible and widely available. The shift of theatre becoming something accessible only to the upper class in 19th and 20th Century England reflects this interpretation.
Satire, on the other hand, can be defined as a way of criticizing people or ideas in a humorous way, especially in order to make a political point, or a piece of writing that uses this style.09 While falling under the comedy umbrella, satire is described more as a means to an end or a device.
There is a deeper intention behind the employment of satire, which is known and understood prior to the execution - conversely, novelty can lack a deeper intention at all, or it can be totally unknown. Satire also kind of alludes to absurdity, but it is a brand of absurdity which is not really absurd at all - it is possible to grasp it, ‘the point’ or intention of the satire, neutralising it. The jester often employs satire, but when the intention is already known, the quality of the critique becomes limited to the capacity of the jester to articulate themselves - whereas a clown’s methods have more to do with throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. In this case, any meaning derived by the absurd acts is limited only by the capacity of the viewer(s) to interpret it, giving it simultaneously a wider and narrower scope of meaning - once again oscillating between two extremes.
In today’s age of oversaturation of moving images and rapid, fleeting thoughts, the clown archetype has the power to seduce and capture the attention of our generation, and hold it fast. Online, everyone is a clown, and comedic content has been elevated to a kind of currency. In the early days of the internet, this served as a great equaliser, where everyone had the same opportunities to be a comedian through the use of early social media platforms. Later this dynamic would be subjugated and eaten up under capitalism, and the previously nonhierarchical platforms would become corporate giants, incentivising content creation - within a set of guidelines - with economic gain as well as notoriety. The early days of Youtube especially reflected the sentiment of novelty and throwing shit at the wall; the only underlying intention was to Broadcast Yourself.
An absurd action, when it is just too quirky, can immediately be subjugated by the ego and pigeonholed into the taxonomy of ‘wow, what a wacky thing I just saw. Anyway…’. A regular, domestic action, like going to the supermarket, can be similarly subjugated into the category of everydayness, and easily overlooked; attuning and fostering a sense of novelty can be an effective means of reclaiming presence and agency in everyday tasks, as exemplified by this often quoted passage by Kurt Vonnegut.
Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something. 10
By embodying The Clown and reclaiming one’s birthright to experience Novelty, and through mindful oscillations between perceiving the everyday and the absurd, it might be possible to disrupt this automatic process of (re)conceptualisation, and arrive at a more sincere experience.
What clown costumes can we wear that will enable us to hold a silly wavy mirror up to life in a way that transcends satire, fosters togetherness, and pays homage to our possibly more-than-human origin?