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Documenting clown training

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Documenting clown training

Jon Davison

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 COMEDY STUDIES, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2040610X.2016.1139795

Documenting clown training

Jon Davison
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Over the last half-century, clown workshops and training, since Clown; clowning; flop; failure;
Jacques Lecoq’s experiments teaching clowning in the early 1960s, document; documentation
have gained considerable status within the field of performer
training. A new-found boost in the value assigned to clown training
and its practitioners has also visibly filtered into the public arena,
Downloaded by [Jon Davison] at 00:40 03 March 2016

via tributes paid by household names such as Sacha Baron-Cohen,

or Edinburgh Perrier award-winner Phil Burgers (Dr Brown) and
others, to master clown teachers such as Philippe Gaulier. However,
clown training remains a relatively isolated niche in the wider
worlds of acting or comedy and, outside the confines of the clown
workshop, very little is known about just what the value of clown
training might be, or indeed what it is. Are the experiences of
students and teachers of clowning alike, which are often reported
to be ‘life-changing’, destined to lie neglected as traces in the
personal memories of participants? Or can they be documented
and disseminated in such a way that a wider audience might share
their insights?

I want to ask some questions about the nature of clowning, or a particular part of it, which
arise when we consider the relationship between clown performance and its
possible documentation. By doing so I will also reflect upon the nature of documentation
itself.

What do we mean by clowning?

What do we include? Exclude? The term is multi-connotational and sometimes hotly dis-
puted. It depends on who you ask, clowns or clowning are:
 ‘A clown who doesn’t provoke laughter is a shameful mime’ (Gaulier 2007, 289).
 ‘It’s okay not to be funny. Clowns do not have to make people laugh’ (Simon 2009,
31).
 Clowns are sad and exhibit ‘shabby melancholy’ (Stott 2009, XVI).
 ’The key feature uniting all clowns is their ability, skill or stupidity, to break the rules’
(McManus 2003, 12).
 Etymologically, in 16th England, clowns those who do not behave like gentlemen,
but in 'uncivil fashions’ (French Academy, 1586 in Wiles 1987: 62).

CONTACT Jon Davison info@jondavison.net

© 2016 Taylor & Francis

 2 J. DAVISON

 ‘A quest for liberation from the “social masks” we all wear’ (Murray 2003, 79, on
Jacques Lecoq).
 ‘The main similarity between clown and Zen is that if you are you are thinking, then
you are not where you want to be’ (Cohen 2005).
 ‘Clowning is about the freedom that comes from a state of total, unconditional
acceptance of our most authentic selves’ (Henderson 2008).
 Some believe clowns are responsible for bringing rain to the crops: ‘they also fast,
mortify themselves, and pray to Those Above that every kind of fruit may ripen in its
time, even the fruit in woman’s womb’ (Bandolier 1890, 34).
 Some ascribe such powers to their taboo-breaking: ‘This “wisdom” magically
acquired shows well that this is a question of the breaking of a taboo’ (Makarius
1974, 63).
 Some think that clowns are a socially useful way to control traffic, since they ‘can
achieve what traffic police cannot achieve using warning and sanctions […] by
employing artistic and peaceful actions’ (Toothaker 2011).
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 Others believe that to be a clown is to sink below human dignity: ‘I’m going to earn
something, even if it’s as a clown’ (Partido del Trabajo de Mexico 2009).
 Some have believed clowns could stop wars: ‘The laughter of Bim and Bom almost
stopped the Russian Revolution’ (Schechter 1998, 33).
 Alternatively, they might find themselves on the side of governments: ‘Nikulin
replied: “Who will be the subject of our parody? The government is marvellous”’
(Schechter 1998, 15 16).
The list is much longer. Clowns have been seen as revolutionary, reactionary, avant-garde,
universal, marginal, irrelevant, fundamental, dangerous, harmless, immoral, exemplary,
skilled, chaotic, wealthy, poor, innocent, cruel, scary, joyous, melancholic or as fulfilling
any number of social, artistic, cultural or political functions as can be imagined.
There is one particular definition of clowning I want to look at here. It has its contempo-
rary source in the experiments by Jacques Lecoq with clowning in the early 1960s: the
flop … the eliciting and re-eliciting of laughter. Laughter as a response to the failure of the
clown to make us laugh, which is the job, the agreed contract between clown and audi-
ence. And that this laughter should be as a result of our finding the clown himself the joke.
This definition or practice has been hugely influential, indeed dominant, over the last
half century of contemporary clowning, and forms a pillar of clown training, in many,
though not all, clown pedagogies.
Over the last half century, clown workshops and training, since Jacques Lecoq’s experi-
ments teaching clown in the early 1960s, have arguably gained prominence over clown
performance itself. Clown teachers command international respect and power, aesthetic
and financial, which very few clown performers can aspire to. In the workshop, theories,
orthodoxies and philosophies have become established which often make transcendent
claims to ‘truth’, in a manner that general actor training has done for some time.
Despite remaining a relatively isolated niche in the fields of performer training and
comedy performance, this new-found boost in the value assigned to clown training and
its practitioners has also visibly filtered into the public arena, via tributes paid by house-
hold names such as Sacha Baron-Cohen, or Edinburgh Perrier award-winner Phil Burgers
(Dr Brown) and others to master clown teachers such as Philippe Gaulier.
 COMEDY STUDIES 3

However, outside the confines of the clown workshop, very little is known about just
what the value of clown training might be. Are the experiences of students and teachers
of clowning alike, which are often reported to be ‘life-changing’, destined to lie neglected
as traces in the personal memories of participants? Or can they be documented and
disseminated in such a way that a wider audience might share their insights?)
So, how can we document this clowning? How can we document a flop? Before
addressing that question, I want to briefly ask what a document is.

What is a document/documentation?
Etymologically, a document means (early 15c) ‘teaching, instruction’, from Old French doc-
ument (13c.)’; ‘lesson, written evidence’, from Latin documentum; ‘example, proof, lesson,
in Medieval Latin; “official written instrument,” from docere; “to show, teach” (see doctor
(n.)). Meaning ‘something written that provides proof or evidence is from early 18c.
document (v.)
1640s, “to teach;” see document (n.). Meaning “to support by documentary evidence” is
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from 1711.

In Library and Information Science

A document is, according to Suzanne Briet’s influential ‘What is documentation?’’ (Briet,
Suzanne (1951) a theoretical construct, ‘evidence in support of a fact’. (Buckland, Michael
(1998). ‘What is a digital document?’)

In a Court of Law
I have to provide proofs, or documents, to convince you of the probability of my argu-
ment. These might be material evidence signed papers, photographs, audio recordings,
bus tickets, phone bills, scientific experiments, forensic tests or witness statements con-
verted into written and signed statements.
Either way, the document’s function is to aid proof of an argument.

Clown documentation
If we take this sense of a document as only being a document as such when it serves the
purpose of demonstrating, or proving, something, how does this then apply to clown
documentation?
Imagine this: I have witnessed some clowning, some good clowning, but a friend of
mine wasn’t there to see it. How will I explain and convince my friend of the value of the
clowning? How can I show to those who were not present why it was good, or why it was
clowning, or perhaps more objectively, why, or when we laughed?
If you’ve ever done, seen or trained in clowning, you may have had the experience of
trying to recount your experience to someone who wasn’t there. ‘Oh it was so funny what
they did, one of them was smiling then he stopped and we all laughed, then the other
one left and it was hilarious!’
At times, while teaching clowning, I venture to suggest that this undocumentability, or
more precisely, this undisseminatability, is a good indication that good clowning has
 4 J. DAVISON

taken place. If clowning, at least of this type, is about you, the clown, being the joke, then
how could I possibly transmit or explain ‘you’? If on the other hand the pleasure was in
the jokes, as in other kinds of non-clown comedy, or the farcical situation, or in the charac-
ters, then I would be more likely to be able to convey, to recount to retell the jokes, the
stories or the situations to my friend. Even if I couldn’t tell the jokes as funnily as the come-
dian, my friend would at least have seen that, in the hands of a professional, this material
might well elicit laughter. That would be enough to convince my friend that when I say I
laughed a lot when I saw that show, I am not lying, nor am I completely mad.
Gaulier argues precisely this, that clowning is not about having good jokes, but the
opposite
A question:
‘Why do clowns choose bad jokes?’

If the jokes were good, they would be comic actors. They wouldn’t meet Monsieur Flop. They
wouldn’t perform with the feeling of having committed a blunder. (Gaulier 2007, 307 308)
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The audience doesn’t laugh at the gag, but at the imbecile who has a moronic idea. (Gaulier
2007, 308)

How can I convey the essence of the clown’s comedy by retelling some bad jokes? Con-
versely, if the jokes are too bad to be retold, does that demonstrate that they were clown
jokes, or at least that any laughter provoked by them in the show was a result not of the
quality of the material, but of the quality, if you like, of the clowning?
In short: if clowns have shit material, what can we document? What document, what
proof can convince my friend that it was indeed funny and that they really should have
been there?
You may say here that I should have just videoed the performance on my phone so I
could share it afterwards, with ALL my friends. But will the video be a good enough docu-
ment for the clowning to hold up in court?
Or, should we just be happy with no documentation? The idea that clowning might be
by its nature that which cannot be documented might indeed be appealing… but is it
strictly true? Or is it just a bit of rhetoric designed to claim for clowning that unmediated
presence so sought after by performance practitioners and scholars?

Video
I want to address the issue of video briefly and perhaps throw a spanner into the works of
my argument so far. A few years ago at a performance conference I was presenting a
paper entitled ‘describing clowning’. I had been wrestling with how to describe my own
practice in order to then make arguments about that practice as evidenced in the descrip-
tions. I wanted to keep at bay any temptation on my part to impose my own preconcep-
tions about the meaning and effect of my own performance work. Searching for a
‘rigorous methodology’ to do this, I had recourse to Gilbert Ryle’s notion of thin and thick
descriptions. Grossly oversimplifying, thin descriptions tell us what happened in an event,
thick descriptions also tell us what those happenings might mean. By dispensing with
thick description I hoped to remove all trace of my pre-interpretations of the event.
 COMEDY STUDIES 5

Up until that point I had written several thick and thin descriptions of my performances
but had not been convinced of the value of this exercise. During the paper presenta-
tion I had planned to show a short video clip of my own clown performance, in order
to support my argument about the dynamics of laughter in clowning. When I came to
the part where I was going to show the video, I felt that those present would most
likely find this boring: watching a YouTube clip on a distant projector screen in poor
lighting, with poor sound, no context and no sense of what the performance event
had actually felt like. That event had taken place in a room crammed full of spectators
sitting on the floor and anywhere they could find, in a circus community in London. In
an instant there came to mind so many occasions when I had shown to friends and
family a bit of video of a show I had done, only to be disappointed by the blank looks
on their faces as they tried to figure out what was going on in this little 2D rectangle,
and most importantly, just when or why they were supposed to laugh. Excruciating.
So I made a quick decision to dispense with the video. In its place I elected to read
the thin description of the same event shown in the video clip. Before commenting
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further on this, I will now repeat that reading.

Thin description of a performance…

The compere says, ‘okay, and so for our next act, please bring your hands together and
welcome Jon’, and exits the stage.
The audience applauds.
One second later I enter, taking one step onto the performing area, in the upstage right
corner. I am wearing a black suit, a white shirt, black tie, black shoes with white laces.
Looking at the audience, I am smiling. I remain there. I bring my hands together in front
of me then return them to my sides. Silence for six seconds. The audience applauds again.
I adjust my tie a little, after which it is slightly longer than before. I say, ‘Thank you’. Silence
for six seconds, during which my smile disappears.
There follow a couple of small laughs from the audience. I smile and take one more
step onto the stage, in a diagonal line towards centre stage. Silence for six seconds. A
beer bottle in the audience is heard rolling onto the floor. Six seconds of silence. I turn
towards the exit, smiling and saying, ‘bye!’ The audience laughs loudly. I turn back and
take another step towards them. In amongst that laugh is a faint single voice which sighs
‘oh!’ I stand, smiling and say: ‘Thanks’. More audience laughter, patchy. I take one more
step forwards, and repeat ‘thanks’. More patchy laughter. I take another step as the audi-
ence laughs and some applaud. Stopping, I drop my smile and look down at my tie, which
I adjust, leaving it longer than before. Silence, six seconds, then more applause (no
laughs), I elongate my tie more. Some of the audience laughs, in spurts. I take a step whilst
saying thanks. Four seconds silence, audience laugh, I step and say thanks. This again, a
laugh and step, then I also laugh, a single burst that ends in a snort. A one second pause
and a single hysterical-type laugh from the audience. I look quizzical. I laugh again and
say: ‘oh, thank you very much’. A big laugh from both the audience and myself, which I
end by faking the laugh. More audience laughs, as I step towards them.
A few more steps follow similarly, I laugh, the audience laughs. I look at the front row to
my left, who aren’t laughing. Looking at them, my smile drops, my mouth becomes down-
turned.
 6 J. DAVISON

[The Hive, Hackney Wick, London, on 09/03/13. A video of the performance can be
viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?vDSnnRhMRViSQ].
The semiotician of circus and clowning, Paul Bouissac, repeatedly bemoans the fact
that when commentators talk about clowning, they mostly restrict themselves to a few
well-worn clich es about what clowns are deemed to engage in (Bouissac 2015).
What Bouissac wants, instead, are detailed descriptions of what particular clowns actu-
ally did. Thin descriptions, in other words. His own publications have repeatedly tried to
redress this imbalance. Only when we have an accurate description of a routine, Bouissac
claims, can we begin to analyse and interpret how the meaning is constructed in a clown
performance.
This also chimes with what the clown and fool expert and teacher, Franki Anderson, has
to say about observation. One of her exercises consists in one student showing a small
performance of themselves as themselves, while their companions (their audience)
observe and then recount to them what they saw. Two types of observation are suggested
by Anderson; subjective and objective, which coincide with the thick/thin binary.
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Although not universally so, what many report is that the objective/thin description is the
one which offers the descriptee the most useful information. By useful here I mean that
this kind of description gives the descriptee the potential to: 1. Recall the action (a kind of
rehearsal notes, or script). 2. Recall how it felt to do this performance, and maybe how to
regain that feeling when re-performing (a kind of mnemonic for reencountering the clown
state, or however you want to call it). What seems surprising about this is that the subjec-
tive description does not give the descriptee the tools to rediscover the feeling or state,
despite, or perhaps because of, subjectivity’s aim being precisely to capture emotions,
states, intentions and motivations.
Could it be, then, that a kind of Beckettian script is what serves clown documentation
best? Perhaps. Though I’m not sure that the next time I see a clown show and then try to
tell a friend in a pub how funny it was, that I will begin by saying… a tall figure, sex unde-
terminable, enters and stands upstage right, left foot first … !

Conclusions
This all finally brings us back to the flop, and to Gaulier. In his book, ‘The Tormentor’, Gau-
lier uses a character named ‘Victor Francois’ to illustrate typically clownish behaviour. This
Victor resorts to joke shops and, crucially, a written document in his drive to be funny:
Joke shops sell vulgar half-masks, big hooked noses, with (or without) a moustache, big
potato-shaped noses, with (or without) glasses, alongside squeaking cheeses, exploding
sweets, fake brandy, plastic turds and the Encyclopaedia of Jokes.
I know someone who goes to these shops regularly on Fridays after work. He opens the
door and looks along the shelves. He considers carefully. How will I be funny tomorrow?
He buys this and that: not too much but just enough to make his friends burst out laugh-
ing. He knows exactly what to choose. He longs for tomorrow evening. He has to learn
three gags by heart from his Encyclopaedia of Jokes. Ah, his Encyclopaedia! He bought it
thirty-five years ago. He has never lost it or left it anywhere. The Encyclopaedia has pride
of place on his bedside table. In the evening he reads it before going to sleep. According
to his wife, he often chuckles when he’s asleep. […] His favourite joke is the story of the
 COMEDY STUDIES 7

archbishop who … he has told it too often. It’s got worn to death… Three new jokes
tomorrow.

[…] He admitted to me he was better on the visual and dramatic front, rather than with jokes.
He forgets them.
’You understand? I begin. It’s OK. Then, little by little, I flounder. I tie myself in knots. I forget
the punch line or say it too soon. The surprise effect is lost. I say I’m sorry I got it wrong. Every-
one laughs. Unfortunately they don’t laugh at the joke. They laugh at my stupidity. (290)

And so, the encyclopaedia of jokes is the clown’s greatest prop. The idea that one can
pluck a joke from a document and then make people laugh with it, is, frankly, funny!

Notes on contributor
Jon Davison is a clown performer, teacher, director, researcher, writer and musician with 30 years’
Downloaded by [Jon Davison] at 00:40 03 March 2016

experience. He has toured festivals, theatres, tents, streets and bars throughout Europe from Sicily

to the Arctic. He trained at the Ecole Philippe Gaulier and Fool Time Circus School (Bristol). In addition
to performing solo, he is an artistic director of the clown/circus/pantomime company, Stupididity. He
was co-founder of the Escola de Clown de Barcelona, one of the world’s leading centres offering com-
prehensive clown training programmes covering both practical and theoretical aspects of the clown
arts. He previously taught clown, impro and acting at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona from 1996-
2006, and was a Research Fellow investigating clown training at Royal Central School of Speech and
Drama (University of London), where he is now a visiting lecturer as well as working towards his PhD
degree on clown performance. He is the author of Clown Readings in Theatre Practice and Clown
Training, a practical guide, both published by Palgrave Macmillan.

References
Bandolier, Adolf. 1890. The Delight Makers. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.
Bouissac, Paul. 2015. The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning. London: Bloomsbury.
Briet, Suzanne. 1951. “What is Documentation?” In What is a Digital Document?, edited by Michael
Buckland (1998). http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/»buckland/digdoc.html.
Cohen, Moshe. 2005. A Short Look at Clown and Zen. http://www.clownzen.com/it/clownand
zen2005.html.
Gaulier, Philippe. 2007. The Tormentor. Paris: Editions Filmiko.
Henderson, Jan. 2008. Philosophy of Clown. http://foolmoon.org/clownAndMask/clownPhilosophy.
Makarius, Laura Levi. 1974. Le sacre et la violation des interdits [The sacred and the violation of taboos].
Paris: Editions Payot.
McManus, Donald. 2003. No Kidding!: Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theater. Newark:
Delaware.
Murray, Simon. 2003. Jacques Lecoq. London: Routledge.
Partido del Trabajo de Mexico. 2009. Party Political Broadcast. http://www.youtube.com/
watch?vDqZq9qBqT9Qk&NRD1.
Schechter, Joel. 1998. The Congress of Clowns and Other Russian Circus Acts. San Francisco: AK Press.
Simon, Eli. 2009. The Art of Clowning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stott, Andrew McConnell. 2009. The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.
Toothaker, Christopher. 2011. “Shhh! Mimes tackle traffic chaos in Venezuela.” Associated Press,
8 October. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9886059.
Wiles, David. 1987. Shakespeare’s Clown. Cambridge: CUP.
 8 J. DAVISON

Appendix 1: Jokes as documentation

This observation might lead us even further, into the territory of jokes, comic material and
indeed theatre in general. The pattern is: event, observe event, retell event/re-perform
event. Until now I have taken the event to be the original clown performance; the obser-
vation being my own in the moment and then in notes plus watching the video after-
wards and annotating it or going to see a show then telling a friend about it - or, in
Bouissac’s case, going to the circus several times until he has a detailed description for
the purposes of semiotic analysis.
But we can also begin from a non-performance event. Let’s say, my mother-in-law said
something to me last Tuesday… and so on. The observation is simply me remembering
what happened. And the retelling becomes, you guessed it!: a joke. ‘My mother-in-law…’
[Cite joke:
The doorbell rang this morning. When I opened the door, there was my mother-in-law
on the front step.
She said, 'Can I stay here for a few days?‘ I said, 'Sure you can.’ And shut the door in her
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face.]
This is the standard staging of this kind of joke: a presumed event retold.
Of course, it is also the standard pattern for joke-stealing! Watch a comedian, write
down the joke, tell it next night. And not just stand-ups. The Fratellinis tell of how their
competitors would be lurking in the audience on first nights, paper in hand, ready to steal
their new routines and reproduce them tomorrow, in the same bill as themselves, but ear-
lier, thus sabotaging their act.
Of course, according to Brecht, this is also the nature of theatre: a retelling of an event,
in such a way as to allow for new interpretations and meanings. Brecht’s image of the wit-
ness here also brings us back to the heart of documentation: the purpose of which is to
‘prove’ (in court) the truth or otherwise of a particular interpretation of the meaning of
someone’s acts. In the case of the mother-in-law joke, what, we might ask, would be
proved by this ‘document’? That all mothers-in-law are x, y, z… .. of course!
This perspective on the nature of comedic material gets us away from obsessing over
punchlines and how they work (incongruence, rhythm, timing, etc.) such an ‘ontology’ of
comic material fits the pattern even better in the case of the less structured or formulaic
format of observational comedy. In this light, Jerry Seinfeld is the ‘witness’, and the case
to be proved is that, well, isn’t the world a funny place?

Appendix 2: Lenny Bruce

Here is an example which confounds both the nature of performance documentation and
the status of performance as proof in a court of law.
Bruce used courtroom transcripts, about the alleged obscenity of his act, in his act, tell-
ing the story of how a policeman would come to see his act and make notes on the rude
things he said, to be reproduced in front of the judge as evidence in a case.
[This was Bruce’s penultimate stand-up performance of his life, soon after he was con-
victed, virtually banned from performing, and died of an overdose.]
Edited clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?vDa49ytI0TW5Y&featureDyoutube.
Whole clip is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?vDSt0Y8-1BlCc

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