Clown, Heal Thyself

I’m not sure that I can tell you what a clown is, I can only try to show you mine.

***

In my fifth-grade science class, the teacher brings in a mollusk for us to dissect. She asks if anyone has an allergy to shellfish. The mollusk lies before us on a metal tray, its fishy smell beginning to permeate the room. Spotting an opportunity, I come up with the inspired idea to fake an allergic reaction to this mollusk. I begin scratching an imaginary rash on my back. A game hatches wherein my friends must stop me from agitating the itch further. I scratch myself more, hoping that by creating red marks it will look like I have a rash anyway. This scene escalates in volume and intensity until my friends and classmates are physically restraining me from itching my “rash,” laughing and shrieking in cacophonous fun. Children are yelling. Someone is crying. Pandemonium ensues. The teacher has officially lost control of the class. (In the drama of my memory, I fantasize that decorations were ripped from the walls and feral fifth graders roamed the halls of Eden Christian Academy in total anarchy.) After this goes on for several minutes, the teacher brings me out to the hallway and has me lift my shirt up from my back so she can examine the rash. I’m exposed. Found out. She realizes that I have lied and chastises me. Memory blurs out her actual words. I try to dodge her gaze so I can avoid explaining or even thinking about the reasons for my disruptiveness. I am unsure if my guilt and shame at having lied supersedes the sweet payoff of having caused a spectacle.

One might read this scene and dub me a class clown. At my private evangelical Christian school, it seems I am the only girl in my class who gets in trouble. I once managed to receive three detentions in a row in the same afternoon for talking out of turn. (The teacher wanted the classroom to be “silent as a tomb,” and my brilliant retort to this was “I like tombs.”)  One downside of a Christian education is that one can begin to associate the negative aspects of their schooling with the actual word of God. My teacher and Jesus merge in my mind as if he is the one bearing down my desk, handing out detention. A year after this fifth-grade scene, I struggle with the dissolution of my family through a second and very abrupt divorce. My grieving adolescent self latches on to memories of these clown antics as something to be disciplined, punished, and cured. If I can purify myself, then maybe I will be orderly and pleasing before God. Maybe my life will be orderly and pleasing, too. I begin to sit still in church. I take notes during sermons. I feel more anxious about getting things right. I distance myself from the loud and provocative impulses of the child. This new self gets positive feedback from others. The clown gets tucked further and farther away.

Photograph taken by Corrie Aune.

Over time, I have come to understand that trauma estranges us from ourselves and one another. However, in the strange grace of the universe, old storylines and buried selves have a way of reemerging when we least expect it.

During an acting class in college, a beloved teacher prompted us to do a clown exercise. I sat up in my seat. I thought clowns only lived at the circus. One way to clown, as my teacher explained it, is to exaggerate a personal trait you are self-conscious about. For example, one woman created a clown piece centered on exaggerating facial hair she didn’t like by taping a massive mustache to her face. She stood in front of the audience, pointing and daring people to laugh at her comically large facial hair. Clowns offer us an interesting proposal. What happens when you move towards your fear, insecurity, or shame in front of others instead of hiding it? Drawn to this challenge, I proceeded to do the exercise by poorly performing a series of gymnastics moves, exaggerating my desperate desire for positive feedback. My clown self ran around in delight when she got applause; she slowed and felt dismayed when there was silence. My teacher spoke some words gently to me after this exercise, and I found myself bursting into tears. Something important had transpired, but I didn’t know what.

***

The word “clown” can conjure up images of frightening circus creatures or Stephen King creations. Christopher Bayes, the head of physical theater at Yale Drama School, declares in his book Discovering the Clown that all these images must be “banished” from our mind so we can make room for another idea of clowns: beautiful and strange creatures who delight, heal, and mirror us back to ourselves.[1] De-shaming the fool within, we hear her brave invitation to vulnerability, to face the risk of rejection. Or, in clown-speak, “the flop.” For performers, a certain kind of death can occur onstage when you are met with silence. But there’s a twist: in the world of clowning, failure is a playground — it is fodder for new jokes and ideas. Rather than fearing catastrophe, your clown must learn to run joyfully and stupidly into failure’s awaiting arms.

***

After the college clown exercise, I followed the question behind my tears all the way to a graduate program in counseling psychology. A connection emerged for me between clowning and shame. There, a professor taught that shame often strikes when we are moving in the direction of creative exploration and the innocent, unsuspecting state of play. When shame attacks, the body experiences a strong neurophysiological sense of impending abandonment or critique, and we turn away to hide. While this reduces exposure, it reinforces the notion that we are shameful. Clowning and shame often felt intermingled to me as a child. I remember vivid moments of embarrassment where I meant to do something funny but was caught off guard by disapproval, suddenly and unpleasantly aware of the big fat red nose on my face. Meeting my inner clown forced me to revisit the feelings I preferred to hide.

You don’t need a red nose to access your inner fool, but it can help. In theater, actors utilize the red nose, or “the smallest mask in the world,” to unmask the impulsive persona that is their inner fool, particular and unique to each person.[2] There are many schools of thought within modern clowning; the one I learned sees the clown as the unsocialized self, a childlike creature in pursuit of joy and relationship. The clown is, as Bayes says, “who you are if you had never been told no” (5). All id, no brakes. Through the process of socialization in our families and cultures, we all learn which parts of ourselves are acceptable to others and which parts are not. Clowning is the radical reclamation of those unsocialized, rejected younger parts so you may become more fully yourself. Donning a red nose is a way to face shame again and rehearse a different story.

I became insatiable in my quest for knowledge about clowning. I was surprised to learn that there are historic ties between clowns and the sacred. Indigenous tribes across America had sacred clowns, whom they saw as serving a crucial role within the community. The Sioux tribe called their fools “Heyoka,” which means “crazy.”[3] The Heyoka would do things in a purposefully backward or contrary way. (Apparently, this could look like a clown running around with a hammer and flattening everything that was round.) To the Heyoka, hot was cold, up was down, sacred was profane, and profane was sacred. They could mimic and mock people in one moment and comfort and tickle them in the next. Their antics would provoke the community into self-reflection and examination of their values by breaking social customs. Clowning was a sacred shock to the system, a disruption of the status quo.

But how were Indigenous people chosen for this role? “A clown becomes sacred by opening herself,” writes Peggy Andreas in her essay “Path of the Sacred Clown.”[4] The initiation of the clown came in embracing the absurd joy and pain of life and finding freedom therein. Peggy quotes a Heyoka remembering her initiation into clowning after experiencing a trauma: “I didn’t care about my life … I didn’t realize it then, but there is big medicine in that abandon.”[5] This path of the sacred clown seems to echo Matthew 10:39: “Whoever loses his life will find it.” Still, reading about these sacred fools felt like a far cry from my fifth-grade classroom antics. What place did clowning have in the house of God?

An answer to this question lay in the words of Maya Angelou, as shared in Frederick Buechner’s book The Remarkable Ordinary. Angelou recalled seeing an Episcopal high church service, with all their incense and robes and vestments, and remarked, “What you should have right off the vestry is a laughter room. You parade around with all these wonderful things, and every once in a while you go in there and ha ha ha! and then you come out of the laughter room and you pick up the cross and keep going.”[6] Perhaps Angelou saw the invisible red noses on the faces of priests who believed they were “getting it right.” Angelou points out how church rituals and customs sometimes flatten the spontaneity of life until we lose sight of the very God we are trying to know. Jesus, too, was cheekily critical of religious leaders who performed their holiness with great shows of sacrifice. Take a break in the laughing room, put on your red nose, and discard the performance, the desperate anxiety to be good. Guffaw at the absurdity that we are all just making this up as we go. Clowns suggest that God is laughing, too.

I recently spoke with Danielle Levsky, a Jewish clown who conducts workshops like “Clowning for Social Healing” and helps connect people with their sacred inner fool. She told me the story of a group that gathered for a religious ritual around some sacred vessels. A clown gets up and, in Danielle’s words, “shits in the bowl.” The clown then goes and plucks a flower and loudly delights in its beauty. People have always needed clowns to exist in the tension between the sacred and the profane, to poke at complacency and invite us back into wonder. Blessed be the disruptors, the provocateurs, the children with ADHD.

***

Sixteen years following the Great Mollusk Incident of 2006, I am at an arts residency at Mt. Saviour, an active Benedictine monastery and farm in Elmira, New York. I find myself there, weary from graduate school and unsure of how I feel about organized religion. The book Discovering the Clown by Christopher Bayes lies in my suitcase. I tell the group of artists there, without thinking too hard, that I am interested in exploring clowning and shame. They nod approvingly, which surprises me. I read Bayes’ book and feel agog at sentences like “The clown does not live in the clever or desperate muscles. It lives in your simple, soft, little hopeful lemon-headed vulnerability” (50). Somehow, the work of my life feels distilled into this short tome.

On a walk to my dormitory, I pass Brother Bruno, a monk who is working on the monastery farm. I tell him I am nervous about my artist presentation. His face crinkles in bemusement, and he remarks to me, “A clown is not afraid. They are a clown!” His gentle laughter at my anxiety over clowning helps me relax a bit into the simplicity of what I am trying to do. This is fun! This is stupid!

I present an exercise that Christopher Bayes calls “The Greatest Trick in the World,” wherein your clown demonstrates a trick that is actually quite hard for them to do, and that they will likely fail at. Publicly failing at a simple task sounds both mortifying and wonderfully compelling. I have recently learned that at the ripe old age of 28, I am not able to blow bubbles. I either forgot or never really learned. Either way, I decide this is a suitable challenge for my inner clown. I present the pink bottle of bubbles to the artists. My clown delights in surprising them with this bottle they had seen earlier in the week. I fish around for the bubble wand, which eludes my grasp. First try: no bubbles. There is laughter, a small chorus of “Awww.” My clown is pleased by laughter but sad to have failed at her task. I try again: no bubbles, just spews of liquid.

This time, very real feelings of shame unfurl in my body, and I let them heat up. I let this be seen a little bit. On my third try, I decide to problem-solve. I bring the bottle over to a fan on the floor. Success! A stream of bubbles flows past, and I am aware of cheers and peals of laughter. Suddenly, my clown is invincible; she can do anything. I take a victory lap with my bubbles and instinctively bring the wand to Brother Bruno in the audience. I hold it up to him so he can try. I notice bubble solution dripping onto his robes. He blows with no success, and I laugh.

I think back on this moment with Brother Bruno, and the story of the bleeding woman comes to my mind: the one who grasps onto Jesus’ robes, hardly daring to hope he would turn around. If I could only touch God, I would be healed. I spilled my humanity onto Christ, and not only did he turn, but he wanted to join me in my game.

[1] Christopher Bayes. “A Key to Clown Logic: Follow the Red Nose.” American Theatre. June 27, 2019.

[2] Christopher Bayes with Virginia Scott. Discovering the Clown, (NY: Theatre Communications Group, 2016), 5.

[3] Peggy Andreas. “The Path of the Sacred Clown.” Dreamflesh. 1995.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary. (Michigan: Zondervan Press, 2017), 50.