On the Figure of the Clown
“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).“The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.”
“The clown may be the source of mirth, but — who shall make the clown laugh?”
(Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus).
Although the figure of the clown can trace its origins all the way back to ancient Egypt, the modern clown, with its white face paint and flamboyant clothing, originates with Joseph Grimaldi’s innovations in British harlequinade. The life of Grimaldi itself perfectly portrays the evolution of the clown form over the past 200 years or so: after attaining wild success in London, Grimaldi spent the latter years of his life in poverty, alone and depressed, drowning himself in alcohol. He even failed at committing suicide — the ultimate irony.
So Grimaldi’s figure of the clown almost immediately becomes outdated, cringey, even boring. In order to retain his entertainment value, the clown subverts himself and becomes the evil clown. His project is revenge: the evil clown can perhaps be dated to Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “Hop-Frog,” in which a court jester incinerates the king as a way of avenging an insult to his friend. More recently, the evil clown takes the form of the Joker in DC Comics or of Pennywise in Stephen King’s It. The endless remakes which star these characters demonstrate our endless fascination with the warped figure of the clown.
But with the subversion of the clown comes a final Hegelian sublation, which leaves no scars behind. The evil clown takes up his evilness itself as a tool to make you laugh. Who else remembers the “evil clowns” of 2016 who roamed around alleyways the world over, from Los Angeles to Paris, terrorizing passersby (although physically harming none)? They took a representation and made it real. In other words, they created what Guy Debord might call a “situation.” Connecticut’s state police naturally had to release a statement in late 2016: “clown around, get busted.” This by way of a reminder that power is everywhere nothing happens.
The clown always remains silent: he is a mimetic comedian, a mimetic terrorist. It is the same blaring silence seen in the social movements of the past few decades: no words, no demands — but gestures, actions, complicities formed in the shadows. CHAZ/CHOP was a clown society. So was Occupy Wall Street. So is Exarchia in Athens. So is Christiana in Copenhagen. So is most of Chiapas in Mexico. So is the autonomous zone in Syria. They reject representation, in every sense of the word: they reject the Spectacle. They endeavor to create a politics not of representation but of everyday life.
“You can’t defeat the spectacle in a head-on confrontation. Nor is the point simply to disrupt the flow of images to make space for some realer positive message, like the election-day newspaper wraps that some of us enjoy. The point is to render that flow truly incoherent. Positive content is not a luxury we get. Only in moments of actual rupture, moments in which we are free not only to speak but also to hear, will our ethical practices translate to a revolutionary project” (Politics Is Not a Banana, Volume I).
At the very moment when we take the world around us in absolutely grave terms, we stop taking ourselves so seriously. We become clowns, reveling in silence, inducing a terroristic happiness wherever we go. How else can one explain the actions of the college students at Penn State who drunkenly mobilized thousands of bodies in 2016 all in order to “find the clown?” The communal joy that these situations ignite is precisely the situationist clown’s only goal, even if he himself must remain in permanent infamy. He induces joy through terror and invites nothing but a burst of laughter.
But the situationist clown is not the sly, clever, sarcastic jester: the clown is stupid and knows his own stupidity, something like a performance-Socrates (recall that Socrates was prophesied as the wisest in Athens because he was the only one who knew that he knew nothing). Hence, in Shakespeare’s Othello, when Desdemona asks the Clown to search for Cassio, he replies in this peculiarly Socreatean way: “I will catechize the world for him: that is, make questions, and by them answer.”
The jester can posit, but the clown can only negate. He grasps his own stupidity, his own evilness, and precisely because of this he finds his place as the most wise and as the most good. Perhaps this is why Giorgio Agamben was able to write that “the good must be defined as a self-grasping of evil, and salvation as the coming of the place to itself” (The Coming Community).
2020 is ending soon enough. The perfect cherry on top, for October at least, would be the reemergence of the evil clowns which proliferated in 2016. One can only hope that they are still able to make us laugh, and that we are now more capable of clowning around with them in return.
