I've found clowns creeping into more and more of my creative work. My thesis novel, which was once about graveyards, is (like a clown car) squeezing in the circus hordes. I constructed an entire clown language on a whim. I'm not sure why, but I thought the best place to share my love of clowns with absolutely everyone would be my website. Thanks to Carl Stevens And His Circus Band for scoring.
What could be more clownish than the internet: where every interaction is observed performance, maximalism and mental overload lie behind each keystroke, and a new generation of clowns are peddling their fairs through memes and short-form video content?
Today, clowns are associated with children because of their role as entertainers. This is funny, because in reality, children tend to be repulsed by clowns. By playing at hurting themselves and bungling simple tasks, the clown compels children to laugh at the suffering of a monster.
When I was very young, I would beg my mother to drive the twenty minutes home if we encountered a clown twisting balloons in downtown Santa Cruz. The first time I didn't insist on crossing the street, she asked me why. I told her:
And I suppose I wasn't anymore. By the age of eight, I was begging my parents to cash in a free child's ticket coupon and take me to the traveling circu.
Above is a local newspaper article about when the American Crown Circus, or Circus Osorio, performed near my hometown. I must have been about 8 years old the first time my parents brought me, but we have no photos. Neither of my parents could remember the name of the circus.
I imagine that what helped me overcome that old fear was my childhood reverence for performance. As a little girl, I loved to sing off-key, to perform onstage (in school talent shows, baile folklorico troupes, youth theatre), and to share my writing with anyone who would listen. I was eleven when they finally let me read on National Public Radio, so at eight, I must have already been bursting with a need for showmanship.
Here's a photo of two girls inside the Circus Osorio tent. Neither of them is me, I think, though my hair was this color and I remember owning a pair of wings just like theirs. I also own a set of plastic keys from Children's Fairyland in Oakland. As a child, I saw the circus as a kind of Fairyland: a magical place that, like the books I relied on for friendship and entertainment, existed outside of reality.
My own reality, of course, had nothing so wrong with it. I was not a well-liked child, but I did quite well with my imagination games and my books and my friendship with the elementary school librarian. That was the problem. Living in my imagination and reading fantasy novels gave me an unrealistic image of my own life. There should be magic, adventure, whimsy, performance, spectacle, wonder!
I'm still fascinated by clowns today, for similar reasons. I love graveyards and abandoned buildings, curiosity cabinets and oddity shops, museums and chapels, clowns and circuses. The places in our lived reality that feel touched by a certain kind of whimsical magic. I've even started to think I might like to be a clown myself.
I have no way to prove it, but I believe I first learned about the idea of 'running away with the circus' from Circus Osorio.
There's one more thing that draws me to clowns, though I'm struggling to put the idea together neatly. Clowns have existed across time and space to subvert social norms. They expose social inequity, they critique the establishment. But they do it all in a way that is designed to provoke laughter rather than outrage or horror. I think what clowns do is something I couldn't do as a child: mask a complex internal experience with joy. To clown is to hide yourself behind a smile or a frown. To turn existence into a performance. In some ways, clowns taught me how to be a person, In other ways, clowns keep me from being my own person. There are gaps in these memories. Laughter in my dreams. I don't understand what it means, Monarque. I don't even know how to code. Am I wearing a costume? Who are we performing for? because to be a person is to pretend.
Judith Butler theorizes that social reality is not a real, tangible or natural thing, but instead a co-constructed illusion. Life is a farce. Through speech and bodily actions, we make up reality together, continuously strengthening it through repetition. But social reality is also a reality. Though there is no objective truth to it, by enacting it, we make it "real" and we let it affect us. I have always felt the effort of that farce, like a clown sweating between circus acts. There are so many rules I don't understand, so many lines I flub, and so many performances I flounder through to no applause. When a friend tells me how their day has been and I string together a response they like, I feel as if I have hit someone square in the face with a pie or crammed a tenth coworker into my car. This is performance. This is clowning.
I should specify that Judith Butler's controbutions to theory on performativity are mostly in the realm of gender performance. And I do see gender as a performance. Choosing the costume, makeup, phrasing, vocal pitch, body language, and facial expression to be perceived as feminine is no different from assembling a performance to be seen as funny. Tired. Masculine. Happy. Authoritative. Listening. Appreciative. To me, all of this is clowning, and just because I prefer some performances (intelligent, happy, feminine, friendly, supportive) does not mean that they are immutable aspects of my self. That's one of the things that drew me to using it/its pronouns. I have been called "Sir" by nervous older women and cashiers, I have been called "Ma'am" by students and cashiers, I have been called a little guy and a babygirl and a bitch (never by cashiers) and a dude, I have been called a girlfriend and a boyfriend and a partner, I have changed. It is not a girl or a man or a cashier. It is a Clown.
?: Huh Boo Hee⌄" Ho• Ho?
!: {} ⌄^ " Hoo ⌄^ Boo •⌄ ()• Ho!