Clown-power in the time of covfefe
Tom Whyman, October 11
Offense Lords
SOME YEARS AGO I LISTENED to a radio documentary presented by the stand-up comedian Stewart Lee, which informed me that once a year in Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, there is a day when the clowns come to town. Half-naked, covered in black-and-white striped makeup so that they look like cartoon burglars, the clowns emerge from the landscape whooping hellishly, ready to violate every ostensibly stable social norm. In a performance as threatening as it is ridiculous, the clowns drink urine, eat mud, attempt to copulate with the elderly, and throw small children in the river. Everything is turned into its opposite: every safe certainty is transgressed, and everything holy is profaned. And then, at sunset, the clowns leave, and the small, adobe town is returned to normal again.
What most struck me in this documentary, the findings of which I lack either the experience or the expertise to really confirm, were the anthropological accounts claiming that the Pueblo clowns’ unsettling performance has an essentially sacred function. According to these academics, the clowns preserve social order by giving people an image of how cruel and offensive society would be if all the unspoken norms holding it together were overturned. A child thrown into the river by a Pueblo clown receives a very direct lesson in how not to behave: you have to respect all these rules, or society will collapse. The clown becomes a cop.
But it also struck me that the clowns are doing something deeper than just setting an example via negativa. By giving people an image of what society would look like if every norm were transgressed, the clowns act, as it were, to delineate the scope of critical inquiry. Laughter happens at the bounds of sense, beyond there yawns an abyss. Perhaps this is why babies are always laughing: lacking object-permanence, the abyss, for them, lies everywhere. The clowns give people a complete image of a world at its extremes. By doing what we would never dream of doing, the clown gives us a map of what we might do. The Pueblo clown is thus a kind of social commentator.
The idea that clowning can be a sort of social commentary is one that clown theorists are, unsurprisingly, very keen on. The joke shows us something: an impossible possibility, perhaps, or a possible impossibility. The “bouffon” genre of clowning, pioneered by Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier, considers the purpose of the clown to be to mock society by representing the powerful in an exaggerated, distorted way—provoking both laughter and outrage toward the fundamental institutions that structure our world. Indeed, just as with the Pueblo clowns, for the bouffon the audience is also fair game: the bouffon aspires to make the audience members aware of their own complicity in the power structures being parodied. Some practitioners, I am told, even aim to push this to the point that their audience will leave the show contemplating suicide.
More:
https://thebaffler.com/latest/right-wing-clowns-whyman
