Failing clown school

A late night article to make sure I go to sleep.

In ordinary times I run semiotics training workshops. I also get asked to speak at events and I am never far from presenting something somewhere to a room full of somebody or other.

I shun the rules of presenting. I'm a free spirit, a special case, a bit off-kilter. I enjoy the unpredictability of going in with no fixed ideas about what will come out.

Last year I did a big stretch in Canada running training workshops, and when I got back I decided to treat myself to some corporate training. It was time I learned something rather than teaching something. I needed to invest in my professional life and do some of that up-skilling that successful professional people do.

So I paid the fee and joined an internationally renowned clown school for a three week intensive course. Yes you heard me right I joined a clown school. Three week intensive course. Corporate training.

If you have a clear idea in your mind about what a clown is, you're wrong. It's not the man with the wig and the nose and funny trousers. That is also a clown in the popular consciousness, true, but it is only an interpretation of a clown. a sub-genre. A popular take on a very old theme. It is not the definition of what clowns are.

Clowning is a very old, very deeply philosophical art form. If you think that a clown is somebody who gets up on stage, adopts a persona, and tries to make people laugh you are mistaken. That is almost the opposite of what a clown is.

True clowning in its purest form embodies two paradoxes. The first paradox is that if you place yourself in front of an audience and try to make them laugh, that's not a clown. If you place yourself in front of an audience and make them laugh by doing something that is funny you are an entertainer or a comedian perhaps, but not a clown.

A clown is somebody who goes in front of an audience and fails to make them laugh. Because when you fail to make them laugh you have flopped. You are a failure. At your failure, they may laugh. If they laugh at your failure, then you are a clown. Comedians succeed. They tell a funny joke, if you laugh, haha, they succeeded. A clown fails. They get on stage and tell a funny joke, but if you laugh, they have failed to be a clown. If the joke is not funny, and nobody laughs, the clown is exposed and looks like a fool. People might laugh at that. If so, they are now a clown. Just like that.

Comedians and entertainers elevate themselves via their talents to a position above the audience. They are showing the audience their talent and their skill. This is not clowning. A clown shows the audience their failings and their vulnerability. When you fail, you are a clown. You are below the audience. The audience laughs in a completely different way. They laugh because you failed and your failure is funny. That is true clowning. However, there is a catch...

If you fail, you have flopped, and you can only flop when you have failed. But if your failure isn't funny, you have also failed. You can only succeed when your failure is funny. Here's the catch; you cannot fake the flop. The audience can smell a fake flop from 100 miles away. We saw that time and time again on the course. All of us students at one time or another would secretly pre-plan to fail, just a little bit, just a bit of planning, a little attempt at controlling the outcome for success. That's not clowning. That's deception. You cannot plan to fail, and you cannot aim for success, because that is not clowning. That is manipulation, and humans are so perceptive they know it immediately, and if you are not being honest and your true self, then there is nobody's vulnerability there for the audience to laugh at, so the planned flop fails.

So, you cannot contrive to flop, because it will fail. You have to fail genuinely. You have to be brave enough and humble enough to stand there and be truly yourself, and be the failure that you are, and that has to be funny. If it is not funny, you have failed to flop, and you are not a clown. You have to relinquish all control and accept that you cannot master failure. Failure has the upper hand at all times. It is on the generosity of failure that a clown's success depends.

If you present yourself in front of an audience with the intention of making them laugh, you are a comedian. if you fail, you are a just a failure. If you fail and that makes the audience laugh at you, then you are a clown. It is not your choice.

This is the next paradox. If you present yourself in front of an audience as an entertainer, or a comedian, or a clown, then you are acting and adopting a persona. It's not you but an act. You are an actor acting the part of a clown, but not a clown. So if you have an act to perform, you have failed as a clown. A clown is the real you. What is funny about a clown is what is funny about the real person. You cannot hide safely behind an assumed identity as a clown, because if you do you are a coward and the audience will know you are hiding from them, and when you flop it will have no value because an avatar flopped, not a person.

So in order to be an effective clown, you have to be only yourself.

In order to be a clown you have to be your true authentic self, and you have to be trying very hard to be the best you can be, but you must fail, and in your failure, you must be funny. If you fail to do all of these things in the right order, you will not be remembered as a clown, you will only be forgotten as an embarrassment.

So suddenly, a clown has very little left to work with. Just a real person, being their real self, with no jokes, no set-ups, no plans, no tools... nothing. All a clown has to work with is a desire to be the best they can be, and a desire to make people happy. That's all they have. A true clown can stand in front of 10,000 people with only that and nothing else, and all 10,000 will feel happier for it.

Some of the best clowns are also actors, they take on a role in a play or a piece of theatrical art. So here is another paradox of clowning. Because clowning isn't acting. In acting, an actor becomes the role as convincingly as possible. The clown has to be more complicated than that. A clown has to be himself being a clown, pretending to be an actor, who is pretending to be a character in a play. When you watch a clown being an actor in a play, the magic of the clown is in the fact that you in the audience can see the clown trying to be the actor trying to be the character. Actors would struggle with that level of nesting.

Clowns are considered by the general public to be one of the lowest, crudest art forms. That's a public perception only, based on the most popular archetype of what a clown is. The most accomplished actors, as great as they are, would not have the requisite skill to be a clown.

I went to clown school because I like to make my talks and workshops and presentations interesting, engaging, unpredictable in their own way, and therefore worth remembering. I thought I would be a natural at clowning. I thought it would be a breeze. I thought I would succeed.

After two weeks of clown school I was so upset and broken down by the impossibility of it that I asked to leave. I couldn't take it anymore. I could not be my authentic self. I could not be the best I could possibly be. I could not do the simple thing of just being myself, presenting my true flaws and imperfections, and then failing in the exact way that is required for true and authentic failure to be truly and authentically funny.

I had a bit of an episode trying to fight the entire philosophical framework. I lost my tempter and shouted angrily. I shouted in frustration in a room full of clowns and nobody laughed at that because it was not funny to be shouting in clown school. My failure was painfully laid bare, and it was so unfunny it was as though I had been stripped naked on a busy high street.

I could no longer go on. My failure to fail had got the better of me. I was a broken man. In a stroke of incredible good luck however, a deadly global pandemic broke out on exactly the same day that I wanted to quit, so I was spared the humiliation of quitting clown school and I got to lock myself away from the world for perfectly legitimate reasons. I count my blessings even to this day. I am the luckiest man alive.

Learning to be a clown is by far the hardest, most challenging, most brutally honest thing I have ever tried to to. Since I did the course, whenever I hear people say "I feel like a failure", I want to tell them they're deluding themselves, and that they would be terrible at failure, and to stick to success instead because it is so much easier to achieve. Failing is very hard to do. Failing properly and authentically, and then being funny when you do it without meaning to be funny is not a skill most of us will ever master, in fact it's way beyond mere skill, it is a gift.

The man that taught me about clowning wanted to be a very serious and highly respected actor. He discovered he couldn't ever be that because he had been born with the clown gene. No matter how well and how seriously he acted, people thought it was funny. So he failed to be a serious classical actor. He had no other choice but to be a clown instead. As a clown he is his authentic self, being the best classical actor he can be, and failing at it. He doesn't know why people laugh at him. He doesn't know. He just accepts the career and tries to hide how annoyed he is about it, and he continues trying to be a highly respected classical actor, and failing. His name is Aitor Basauri. People laugh at him when he is trying to be serious.

Clowning is a rare skill reserved for the rarest of people... people without armour, without ego, without an agenda or motives. People who want nothing more from their lives than to make other people feel happy. People who are willing to be their most authentic and very best selves and to fail hopelessly in exactly the right way that makes everybody else feel immeasurably better than they did before.

Don't be afraid of failure. I've seen real failure and I can tell you right now, you should aim your sights a little bit lower because you couldn't fail properly if you tried.