What is a clown? According to dictionary.com, a clown is:
a comic performer, as in a circus, theatrical production, or the like, who wears an outlandish costume and makeup and entertains by pantomiming common situations or actions in exaggerated or ridiculous fashion, by juggling or tumbling, etc.
I find this to be a very limited definition.
The clown does not necessarily have to wear white makeup, a red nose or the floppy shoes that are commonly associated with the American circus or birthday clown. These costume images are specific to American popular culture, and each has its roots in European popular tradition. You can read up on the early European Circuses HERE.
Kimberly Christen, writes in the introduction of her extensively researched Clowns and Tricksters: An Encyclopedia of Tradition and Culture that clowns are “identified as ridiculous looking, disobedient, obscene, backward, disrespectful, funny, powerful, or paradoxical. […] [T]hey personify the ability to be both respected and condemned by a society” (Christen xii). For their child-like fearlessness they are respected. For their nerve and tactlessness, for their habit of disrupting the order of things, they are condemned.
When I am asked the question, “What is a clown?” I say something like: Clowns come in all kinds of forms. They can wear red noses or not, where makeup or not, talk or not, have curly blue hair or not, honk horns or not, be funny or not! Yes, it’s true…clowns don’t always have to produce laughter. They may be very poetic and create beauty instead. Or they might be very political and inspire thought provoking inner turmoil. To me, a clown is the authentic essence of a person or culture exaggerated. In that sense, anyone can be a clown.
The clown has the advantage of possessing the child-like naiveté to act on first impulse regardless of societal taboo. She may seem foolish to the minds of the established order because everything she does challenges their finite idea of existence: the ideas, for example, of social etiquette – that one must be quiet in church, not touch the artwork in museums, not eat food in the theatre or sit on the grass in the Public Garden. The clown challenges the “way things are” and gets away with it because her intention is not one of resistance or “sticking it to the man” but one of play and delight. Some divine spirit moves the clown from her seat and insists she yell “Alleluia!” Yes, I have found myself doing that. She has to caress the marble statue that stands in the center of the gallery because its curves beckon to be touched. Yes, I have also done that. She brings food into the theatre because she is hungry. I too have done that but was discreet. And she wants to throw it on stage if the play is mediocre. Well, I restrained myself…but if I was in pure clown I would likely have not. She steps on the grass because its brilliant color overtakes her heart. And she throws off her shoes and sits on the ground because her body craves the crust of the earth. Of course I have done that! People presently and throughout history have resisted the established order of things only to be put to death. How is it that the clown has survived the executioner’s ax? From the spirit of joy, the clown moves. This spirit, I proclaim, is responsible for the clown’s survival. In cultures throughout the world the clown is the delight-maker. Who can resist the maker of light and laughter? Even if the clown is a sad clown or an angry clown, there is some underlying essence that takes joy in being sad or angry and that underlying current (if done well) may be transmitted subliminally to onlookers.
The clown is a free spirit whose disregard for authority is granted considerable license. However this license does not dismiss him from “being chased and punished” for his offense (Hyers 132). Thus, the identity of the clown is full of contradictions. They are
so childlike, yet so adult; so human, yet so nonhuman; so vivid, yet so unreal; so oversexed, yet so asexual; so bold, yet so easily scared away…at their best they are hilarious, but with a touch of sadness and perhaps wearing a tear or frown. Clowns move somewhere between order and disorder, life and death, hope and despair. (Hyers 132)
The clown is a human being as well as a delight-maker. Embodying the many aspects of the human condition, he performs for the community from which he was created.