Clownery is an art that many devote themselves to without a trace

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Clownery originated in the distant Middle Ages, when traveling circuses needed to fill the gap between numbers. For this purpose, clowns, funny jesters were used, who cheered up the audience with their jokes, as well as acrobatic, juggling and other tricks. Now clowning is a full-fledged offshoot in the circus genre. Often clowns perform on the stage with separate numbers.

What is clowning?

Basically, clowns enter the circus arena the same way between the main numbers and fill with their performance the time needed to remove the props from the previous number from the stage (arena) and prepare the props for the next one. But clowning in some circuses is of such magnitude and can boast of such masters of making people laugh that many, at times, go to the circus only to laugh at clowns and their tricks.

Clowns come in many varieties. Now in the circus you can see:

• Buffoon clowns playing on a sharp exaggeration of some character traits, individual features of appearance, feelings.
• Musical clowns who create reprises based on playing various musical instruments and singing.
• Magic clowns that can combine different genres of clowning.
• Clown trainers who build their numbers on the participation of trained animals and birds in them.
• Clowns of satirists who pretend to be clumsy and unsightly clumsy and foolish, making the audience laugh precisely due to the absurdity in their behavior.
• Meme clowns who are fluent in the art of working with inanimate objects, as if invisible to the public.

Where and how are clowns used outside of the circus and their main feature

Clownery is not only the art of filling and amusing the audience during circus reprises. Very often, clowns are invited to participate in other humorous shows. An example is the same Alexander Morozov (Itak clown) from the well-known Petrosyan Show (the current Crooked Mirror). Many clowns separately perform their numbers in some performances.

Their main difference from other satirists and humorists is the make-up applied to the face in such a way as to grotesquely emphasize either facial expressions or some facial features. The same can be said about their costumes. Each clown has his own outfit and his own, so to speak, “war paint”, but, regardless of the reprise, they always enter the arena in their unchanged role.

Exceptions

Many clowns don't use makeup at all. For example, the well-known Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) believes that he has such a face and facial expressions that even without “grotesque enhancement” he can turn his facial expressions so that the makeup will only interfere with him. And this is certainly true. Meanwhile, Atkinson is a real clown and a master of his craft, and he never worked in a circus. Yes, he is considered to be a comic actor, but for a simple layman, all his antics are real clowning, in which he became so adept that he became an unsurpassed master of his craft. Sometimes it seems that his whole life is nothing but an endless circus of clowning.

Masters of clowning

But if clowning, the meaning of which is recorded on Wikipedia as “a circus genre consisting of comic scenes performed by clowns, introducing buffoonery and eccentric techniques into them”, this is just an offshoot of theatrical or circus art, then for many masters this was more than just a "circus genre". Among them are such outstanding personalities as Marcel Marceau - the once world-famous clown Bip, Oleg Popov, better known in our country as the "Sunny Clown", Konstantin Bergman, who did not focus on any one role and was at the same time good in all, Charles Vettach, better known as the clown Grock, the famous actor Slava Polunin and, of course, one of the most famous masters in our country - Yuri Nikulin. Each of them could say that clowning is much more than just an art. For them, it was the very meaning of life.

The image of a clown in the modern horror genre

But it's no secret that a clown can also quickly scare a person, as well as make him laugh. For many people, it is very creepy to feel next to a person whose make-up makes it completely impossible to guess his facial expression and facial expressions.

In horror films, clowning is like a separate genre in an offshoot of the film industry. How many horror films with clowns are there in Hollywood already? Do not count. Especially increased the number of "afraid of clowns" (according to the scientific fear of clowns is called coulrophobia) after Stephen King wrote his two-volume blockbuster called "It", where some archaic and terrible creature disguised as a clown was stealing children in the town of Derry, Maine. Therefore, now clowns, alas, are perceived by the ordinary man in the street no longer with such optimism as before.

But why should we be afraid? Or, nevertheless, there is something?..