Clowns: a Monday morning exercise in aimless thought

[Sethomas]

I had nothing to really do this morning, so as an exercise in stupidity I thought I'd write as much about clowns as possible before time to get ready for class, without researching the matter. I don't know why I had clowns on the brain, except that I've never seen them treated as victims of social consciousness, which I've long felt they are. So, it begins:

Growing up, I was pretty indifferent to clowns. I didn't really understand their purpose. I tried to employ convenient adjectives to them, but none of them really stuck. Even today, my mental lexicon comes short for real descriptions that are both concise and accurate. When I was in elementary school, I mainly thought that clowns were funny people. Their appearances were funny, at least, but it's not like they actively told jokes or elicited laughter. Their primary purpose was to "spread joy". Not that I thought this much about it as a wee lad, but their main objective seems to have been to distract people from life's monotony with pleasantly erratic behavior.

I guess I should clarify that I did have something of an aversion to clowns. I wasn't afraid of them, I didn't dislike them, but I never felt comfortable around them. I believe that this was because I always wanted to be left alone. My classmates didn't treat me like "one of their own", in general, and I knew that a clown wouldn't differentiate me from any other child, so I'd be in an uncomfortible position wherein I had to act as the normal child I never thought myself to be. Considering my youth, I was extremely depressed in those years, so I most likely had a subconscious fear that when efforts to "spread joy" proved ineffectual, I would be in a very uncomfortable position wherein I would have to pretend to be happy or else insult the well-intended clown, providing for a very awkward situation in any circumstance.

My earlier memorable childhood was marked by exposure to the movie Problem Child, an inspiration that irrational fear of clowns was the norm, and Stephen King's IT, an incontrovertible source of fear of clowns. Neither one really phased me, nor I would guess, most children my age. I don't know whether programs such as Bozo the Clown would have had any sway on me, but I had no access to cable television in those years so it's a counterfactual issue.

Aside from the initial years of extreme mental plasticity, children seem most impressionable during their early memory, say, years six to nine. However, I remember from age nine to eleven was when my peers and I were most influenced by the show Animaniacs. The target demographic was likely younger than that, but it was a new program at that time in my life. A repetitive theme of that show was that Wacko Warner would reiterate his fear of clowns, then proceed to abuse one in particular that now strikes me as a Yiddish stereotype in recollection. Suddenly, there was an interesting sociological cycle among my peers involving the fear of clowns. Kids would be ironic in taking after a show oriented towards youths half their age, by being ironic in holding a deliberately irrational fear of clowns, itself ironic because clowns just want to spread joy. Just like the sociological experiment detailed in "The Wave", it's totally ambiguous where irony becomes earnest and where personally preferential attitudes become collective consciousness. There are a number of instances wherein something that is conceptually hilarious is in practice painfully prosaic. That Andy Kaufman would sing on occasion "100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" in its entirety as a comedic routine is something that anyone can appreciate, so long as they're not actually there when it happens. In Huck Finn, an acting troupe presented a farcical play three nights in a row: one night duping a limited audience, a second night for those the first audience had duped into watching, and a third night for all victims to exact revenge with rotten vegetables. Stupidity loves company, apparently. It is a great tragedy to humor scholars that Napoleon Dynamite quickly achieved wide-spread attention, as it presented unlimited potential as a guage of comedic relativism before being contaminated with both acclaim and infamy.

The stages of coping, namely after a death, include the initial disbelief, numbness, and shock, followed in turn by bargaining, depression, anger, and acceptance. Having viewed Napoleon Dynamite evokes in many these very stages. Disbelief: "I can't believe I just sat through that", "or I can't believe everyone thinks this is funny". Numbness: the viewer is emotionally void after an assault on one's sensibilities in contrast with popular consensus. Shock can come in two primary forms, being either "what is WRONG with people who think this is funny," or the more inverted "what is wrong with ME for not understanding the popularity behind this?" One bargains, after having seen Napoleon Dynamite, by compromising his/her standards to effectually normalize themselves with consensus reality. Anger tends to permeate all prior stages, but is distinguishable in itself during the long period before acceptance when the wounds are salted by recurring confrontation with friends referencing movie quotes, message board posters including animated gifs in their signatures, and the unrelenting ubiquity of the Napoleon Dynamite experience at large. Acceptance comes when one realizes that public hysteria will always have its ebbs and tides, and that just because consensus reality may dictate that the emperor wears the finest garb does not mean anyone personally believes the sovereign is not naked.

The public idea of reality, then, is highly subjective to an individual's understanding of irony. The same perception can be funny to different people for varying reasons dependent upon what I would call their humor-ply. In chess, "ply" is preceded by a number indicating the horizon of move sequence permutations a player can hold in mind. A beginning chess player moves only as the immediate situation demands, and with experience often gains 2-ply to perhaps 4-ply. The ply of great chess geniuses is typically five to seven, from my understanding. Relating this to the clown phenomena, one individual might have a genuine fear of clowns. A 1-ply humorist would feign the fear of clowns based on the idea "clowns are ideally good-natured, so it's ironic to be afraid of them". A 2-ply humorist would feign fear of clowns as a mockery of those amused by the 1-ply clown irony. A 3-ply humorist might feign fear of clowns as an ironic condemnation of the entire phenomenon, much as a cynical young adult might have worn a Britney Spears shirt in 2000 as a derisive means of being fifteen years ahead of the game in the retro scene. However, it's possible that with each increasing ply there be an alternation of feigning fear of clowns versus feigning abounding love of them. I personally believe that several levels of humor ply were present in the fifth grade social construct during the Animaniacs release, though the insuperable nature of conformity among ten-year-olds should sufficiently explain the homogeneity of its manifestations.

When the smoke had cleared and all the levels of irony had been mutually cancelled out with the entrance into adolescence, clowns resumed their status as a non-issue in my life. I later became familiar with historic (though recent) examples of pedophiles and murderers with some identity as clowns. I never confused the fact that these identities were intwined, but I felt that there was something to be said for the fact that the perversity of mind to beget a pedophile or murderer had the self-awareness to be consciously manifested into being a clown. I once argued with an atheist on a question of demographics. My contention was that for a state marked by antitheist Marxist ideology and a period of internecine military operations, a common almanac can attest to the fact that Vietnam of the 1960s was of sizable majority Buddhist, a religion synonymous with compassion and pacifism. My interlocutor argued that someone who engages in guerrila warfare was de facto not a Buddhist, while brutality and ruthlessness is a quality of a gin of the mill Christian. In the case of deranged individuals wearing giant shoes and facepaint, I would argue that one is not a clown as the ideal of "spreading joy" can be somewhat compromised by acts of pederasty or homicide.

Approaching the present day, I came to see clowns as something of an exercise in human empathy. To think about the outright dejection by the public eye, especially among little kids, of someone devoted to the cause of spreading joy evokes far more emotions in me than I generally realized I had, let alone want to have. Without citing scholarly authority, I think it's reasonable to suppose that clowning is not an economically viable option for the vast majority of self-described clowns. I would love to say that clowning is a lost art, but I can't really imagine balloon animals and Volkswagons with trap-door bottoms to be anything but 20th Century innovation.

Pantomime, however, is an expression that seems to have been unscathed by time for centuries, perhaps millennia. (I would know more about this if I had been on the Arts team of Academic Superbowl when the theme was Ancient Rome, but alas, I was on the Science and Mathematics teams.) Many people perceive mimes as just pretentious clowns. The mental image of Poirot is one that cannot be avoided, a word whose spelling is so incompatible with pronunciation in English phonology that it summons in American minds an unbridled hatred of all things French nearly as old as Poirot and America themselves. In Abre los Ojos, Penelope Cruz plays a mime. Appreciating the fact that El Prado, the apple of the Spanish eye, contains more art than most Americans realize actually exists, having a mime in that movie as a main character likely impresses into its home audience an artistic association lost on me. When the story was appropriated by Hollywood as Vanilla Sky, including Miss Cruz herself in a reprise role, her character was by some fluke of editing transformed into a dancer. I don't recall the exact working, but her style seemed to be ballet. Alright, maybe it wasn't a fluke. Maybe the brains who decided that Tom Cruise belongs in the Americanization realized that if someone can't appreciate the Castillian masterpiece in itself because subtitles are unpatriotic, they probably won't want to watch a mime. The artistic vacancy thereof was filled, of course, by pop music spanning way back to the Beatles (whenever they were around). Americans, while they hate clowns, nevertheless reserve a respect for clowns that will forever be denied to mimes. Clowns are colorful. Clowns make noise. Clowns don't prey off of human dignity with mockery. Clowns, while something of an American tragedy, can be easily ignored. If you ignore a mime, he will often utilize your disinterest for the sake of mockery for others. While clowns can be seen as misguided, as having taken a wrong path on the road to making the world a better place, nobody posits such aspirations into mimes. People want to avoid clowns, but to beat up mimes. The American classic, "SHUT UP!", is impotent against a mime.

Violence may thus ensue.

My sister has long held aspiration of participating in MSF, known in America as "Doctors without Borders", after having completed the medical studies for which she is now in residency. A recent flatmate of hers had a female friend over for dinner. Not only was my sister informed that this friend was a clown, but that she had participated in a program called Clowns without Borders. Now, my imagination is limited artistically in that I'm not too adept at formulating new ideas that are particularly creative or original. In more mechanistic terms, however, I feel that my imagination is very gifted in regards of hypothesizing multiple outcomes given the input conditions. That being said, my imagination totally inadequate to formulate a picture wherein Clowns without Borders to be anything but (some word beyond my knowledge or existence, expressing the salience of human futility and tragedy). I am not going to investigate the nature, objectives, and accomplishments of Clowns without Borders, because it can honestly result in greater embarrassment for the human race than I am prepared to contain.

Words fail, the mind boggles.

It's impossible to be mad at someone who wishes to spread joy "without borders". After all, Christ said "whatsoever you do to the least of my people, so you do unto me." I'm sure that, despite the arguments of the pedantic monk in The Name of the Rose, the historical Jesus had a sense of humor and in a modern context would hold nothing but love for clowns. I can imagine some harmful cases of altruism gone awry, but this is not one of them. What I find remarkable, however, is the realization that there must be a vast sustaining beauracracy behind this... this. I'm reminded of the German word "Schwachsinn", which is usually translated as "imbecility", but more literally would be "weakness of mind". I doubt these people are imbeciles by any measure, but in terms of mental fortitude they haven't been bringing their A-Game to the board meetings. Years ago, I spent some time at the United Nations building in New York studying UNICEF. Few things put life into perspective quite like relating mortality rates with dollar amounts. A leading cause of death is post-partum tetinus. Immunization: $15. A serving of beans and rice to postpone death, if just for a day? Three cents.

If I were to encounter a clown now, months away from my 22nd birthday, I think it'd be little different than when I was five. Awkward under any pretense. I'm imagining clowns being sent to sub-Saharan Africa with $1700 plane tickets. My mental wiring is absolutely forcing me to assume that they take with them a considerable amount of food and rudimentary medical supplies. My cynicism worries people aware of my history, and so the possibility of negating this assumption of mine presents too great a risk for me to research the matter. In like manner, I do not know if Clowns without Borders encourages the wearing of facepaint, giant shoes, et cetera during these comically inefficient exercises in "spreading joy". I use the term "comically" in suspended cognizance of the fact that somewhere between twenty and forty-five thousand children died of disease and starvation since yesterday.

God bless the clowns, though. I can think of no other profession that lives up to the commandment, "Love those that hate you", with such stalwart joviality.