Misunderstanding and condescension are rife with regard to clowning, and a book entitled Clown is ‘bound … to go against the grain of what you think you know about clowns’ (p. 3), warns Jon Davison in his introduction. But going against the grain is precisely what clowns do, as this book illustrates, and Davison, who is a clown himself, is not afraid to challenge assumptions and counter prejudices. The result is a gratifyingly historicized and situated account of a staggering range of examples of clowning, grounded in personal artistic experience, which is invaluable for students and scholars alike.
Clown is impressively ambitious in scope, ranging from Shakespearean fools to hospital clowns, from Buster Keaton to the Koshari of New Mexico. Structurally it has two parts, the first on clown practice (the ‘what’) and the second on clown theory (the ‘how’). In the former, Davison seeks to correct oversimplified chronologies of clown evolution based on the existence of clowns ‘in all important moments of history’ (p. 19). While tracing assumed genealogical links, such as that between the Fratellinis and the American circus auguste, or between the pantomime antics of the Hanlon-Lees and silent film comedy, he debunks the ‘march of empires’ narrative and determines that ‘clown history is part of all other histories: cultural, social, political, economic, technological, ideological and so on’ (p. 19).
The second part establishes a utilitarian approach to the contentious notion of theorizing clowning: ‘theory is there to help the comedian’, argues Davison (p. 139). A theorized understanding of how clowning works on the ground can be ‘a powerful tool – not just for the analysis of clown but also for its production’ (p. 166). Davison teases out the relation of clowning to many cultural themes, in chapters on clown writing, training, television, clown plots and the notion of clown truth. A fascinating chapter focuses on politics, drawing on Russian clowns Popov and Lazarenko, the Ducrows of nineteenth-century English circus, indigenous clowns of North America and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) to argue for the political potency of the clown: ‘at once critic, police, hero, enemy, representative of the people and a threat to social order’ (p. 256).
Eclecticism aside, a coherent underlying argument materializes in stages. Davison advances an interpretation of clown comedy as involving various kinds of wrongness: ‘wrong size … place and … behaviour’ (p. 193). He then details the responses of such wrongness to historical and social conditions. Finally, he proposes a ‘genealogy of contemporary clowning’ in which the notion of the ‘personal’ or ‘inner’ clown has displaced gag-centred repertoire. Davison aims to undo this polarization by arguing that the truthful or natural is historically mediated and theatrically constructed, thus debunking the notion that performances of failure expose one's true inner self to the audience.
Wide-ranging and well executed, Clown is a provocation, and the questions it raises are as important as those it seeks to address. In Davison's theoretical structure, clowns and clowning must, ironically, be taken seriously. Davison not only provides copious research but also illustrates the need for continued enquiry.
