clown

clown The word comes from Low German, and originally described the peasant through uncomplimentary association with the soil that he tilled. ‘Clown’ meant ‘clod, clot, lump’, with more acerbic overtones of ‘clumsy, loutish, lumpish fellow’ and a female ‘hoyden or lusty bouncing girl’. A clown was someone with rude manners, undisciplined physicality, and an inability to control appetites or impulses. The uncivilized nature of such a rustic stereotype was sometimes symbolized by wild acrobatic dancing, as in Chaucer's Hous of Fame:Tho come ther leapynge in a route
And gunne choppen al aboute
Every man upon the crowne
That al the halle gan to sowne
and in the Scots poem, ‘Cocklebie Sow’:Thay movit in thair mad muting …
For merrit was thair menstralis …
For thay hard speik of men gud
And small thairof vndirstud
Bot hurlit furth vpoun heid


Despite moral disapproval, which until the sixteenth century led to the more common title of ‘fool’, their energetic antics were popular and the clown was a box-office draw when professional theatres began in 1576. One clown, William Kemp, danced his way, in nine days, from London to Norwich in 1600, probably to rebuild his fame after being sacked from Shakespeare's Company for speaking more than was set down for him. (See Hamlet III.ii.45–7.) In Shakespeare's and Jonson's plays, the term ‘clown’ is often pejorative.

Clowning became more fashionable in the mid seventeenth century when interest in spectacle superceded that for dialogue. Added to the traditional features of clown behaviour — slapstick, rude gestures, and physical distortions — performers vied for success through energetic novelties. The Dutchman, Brederode, mentioned the lusty spring, the spinning, twirling, and turning of English comic dancers. The rope dancer, Jacob Hall, sometimes played straight, turning somersaults on a rope suspended over naked rapiers; as in circuses today the threat that his agility might end in disaster gave vicarious excitement. But sometimes he added an element of clown's satire on his spectators' motives, by suspending the rope over their heads; presumably they rose to the challenge.

After two centuries of being fashionable, physical comedy became respectable in the 1790s through the ‘total clowning’ of Joseph Grimaldi, which he claimed had resulted in every bone in his body having been broken during his professional life. After his early retirement it was regretted thatGone is the stride, four steps across the stage
Gone is the light vault o'er a turnpike gate.


Grimaldi astonished his audiences by his ability to make seemingly impossible physical movements. Comic innovation around 1800 also included a satiric reflection of the brutal physicality in the humour of Regency society bucks. Stage directions to Thomas Dibdin's Harlequin Hoax read:
To meet Columbine at the street door Harlequin throws himself out of a window and is caught with his head in a lamp iron; the lamplighter pours a gallon of oil down his throat … and sticks a lighted wick in his mouth, and a set of drunken bucks, having no better business on earth than to break lamps, knock his nob to shivers.

By a strange coincidence, Tom and Jerry were the names given to two such Regency buffoons in Pierce Egan's Life in London.

To a certain extent pantomime curbed the clown's physical expressiveness by pinning him down again with dialogue, but in silent pictures, where the only communication was through action, various comic techniques emerged. Chaplin reversed the brutalized humour Grimaldi lived with through the success of the little tramp in overcoming bullies with intelligent agility. And in Modern Times his athleticism was put to the test inside a machine adversary. But the greatest accolade for acrobatics, invention, and physical courage has to go to Harold Lloyd — ‘king of daredevil comedy’ — with his clownish climb up the skyscraper in Safety Last. This did involve a safety platform out of sight of the camera, but far enough below to make the use of it itself a hazard. During one ‘take’ Lloyd thought he might slip, so chose to fall deliberately so as to be able to aim for the centre and avoid bouncing off into the real void below. Despite the invitation to total trickery which filming allows, Safety Last retained a fair proportion of the traditional combination: clowning with risk-taking, particularly in the shots of Lloyd hanging off the clock face.

Circuses which excelled in this in the 1980s and 1990s were Circus Oz and Archaeos. Their acts included sitting and eating upside down on the theatre ceiling, sliding head first down a pole and coming to a halt inches before crashing into the floor, and playing with power machines. As the Circus owner, Signor Truzi, said to Coco the Clown, every clown has first to be an acrobat, then a trapeze artist and a tumbler; he must be able to do everything, and then he can think about being a clown. Such daring is partly in order to be noticed, but the great clown's ability to act out situations which combine comedy with danger are also a way of satirizing the most extreme and ludicrous possibilities thrown up by the society he lives in. The professional's talent in the twentieth century has been to appear incompetent in the face of overwhelming odds but to overcome these by the character's persistence and the performer's physical abilities.

Have we yet to see an astronaut variety?

Sandra Billington

Bibliography

Baskervill, C. R. (1965). The Elizabethan Jig. University of Chicago Press, New York.
Dardis, T. (1983). Harold Lloyd, the man on the clock. Viking Penguin, New York.
Findlater, R. (1955). Grimaldi King of Clowns. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.