SCHOLAR ISLAND
CLOWNS
The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet its inhabitants are strikingly unhappy. Accordingly, we present to the rest of mankind, on a planet rife with suffering and tragedy, the spectacle of a clown civilization. Sustained on a clown diet rich in sugar and fat, we have developed a clown physiognomy. We dress like clowns. We move about a landscape filled with cartoon buildings in clownmobiles, absorbed in clownish activities. We fill our idle hours enjoying the canned antics of professional clowns. We perceive God to be an elderly comedian. Death, when we acknowledge it, is just another pratfall on the boob tube. Bang! You’re dead!
James Howard Kunstler
Home from Nowhere
"Life in the U.S.A. gizzard had changed. Only a clown could fail to notice. So then, failing to notice would be a possibility."
Thomas McGuane
"Things are bad and getting worse, any fool can see that."
-John Derbyshire
We Are Doomed
"Except as its clown and jester, society does not encourage individuality, and the State abhors it."
-Bernard Berenson
"What is it about clowns? They seem to be a happy enough bunch, delighted to suffer a pie-in-the-face or a seltzer-down-the-pants just to make us laugh. But what dark compulsion drives these men to hide behind their painted-on smiles and big rubber noses? What madness turns a man into a clown?"
Dave Louapre and Dan Sweetman
A Cotton Candy Autopsy
"(The clowns) sounded happy and they acted happy, but it was a happiness that danced on the edge of hysteria, a manic joy that threatened, in a second, to slip over into murderous rage."
Jim Knipfel
Twilight of the Clowns
"I am happy. But every clown is. If one didn't laugh, one would cry wouldn't one?"
David Bowie
"The only thing I hate worse than clowns are clown paintings."
Woody Allen
"There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight."
Lon Chaney
"Too soon we embrace that
Impermanent appetitive flux,
Humorous and hard, which adults fear
Is real and right, the irreverent place,
The clown's cosmos."
-Auden,' The Age of Anxiety'
"Only comedians can talk about death, life, God and Virgin Mary....If I was a tragic actor, I couldn't allow myself, but with this accent I can do it. I can talk with death in person because I am a clown, Yes. and I am proud to be a clown-very much."
-Roberto Benigni
"....Grandfather Clown come in," he said, "much candy."
A woman nodded and smiled at me. "Grandfather Clown do all things funny, upside down, make people laugh."
I smiled back, to show I understood, in part at least, the function of the Clowns. This must be happiness Clown, if he made people laugh. The other clown Amerindians have is Sadness Clown. They serve the same purpose, to lighten the burden of sorrow. Happiness Clown takes away sadness by making people laugh. "He'll dance like crazy till his bloomers fall down." He is the fun-maker, like the Koshare or Kurena, or the Chiffonete, privileged to do or say anything, especially to make fun of authority. The chiffonete "whoop and yell, always with the restrained musical call of the Indian; they run up and down ladders and in and out of houses, bringing laughter wherever they go. All day they run around, making 'wise-cracks'. but they have also great powers of healing and are the performers of the fertility rites.
Sadness Clown is more sacred than happiness Clown and has more power than medicine Man. Sadness Clown 'tries to take away your sadness. if you're sitting there sad or lonely he'll come and sit by you. As he looks at you, you can see him pull the sadness out of you and take it on himself. " In this way he is the eternal scapegoat, the sacrifice.
As I waited in my place on the floor of the Sermony House, I tried to recall what I remembered of clowns and their corrective, cathartic function in all civilizations. They had their origin, or one of their strong tributaries, in Greek comedy, descended from Dionysian rites in which wild choruses like the Koshare dancers, mimed the fertility of the earth with phallic symbols. Then there were the medieval clowns and Kings' jesters, like Henry the First's Rahere, whose ghost walked the chapel built for him in London. Later came Shakespeare's immortal fools, in which he merges the two kinds, happiness and Sadness in one. The French still keep the separate, Pierrot-qui-rit, Pierot qui pleure.
Then comes the further stage, the Clown that becomes the Fool, the Parsifal.
Evelyn Eaton
I Send a Voice
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Book: "Clowns & Tricksters" by Kimberly A. Christen
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