Are Clowns Hot?

Let us consider the clown

Clowns are not your typical candidate for analyses of Hotness. The thick coats of paint on their faces, ballooned garbs, and offensively colourful suits are not, on the surface, seductive. Last week, I was paying for a charmingly luscious croissant and coffee when a group of “laughter medicine” doctors stumbled into the coffee shop in which I stood. The party of five immediately secured gazes from every half-awake soul who was just looking for some bread to break their fast. I was no exception. I couldn’t rip my eyes away—the worn doctor’s coats decorated with butterfly appliqués, greying face masks with noses painted on with marker, and the shy, stringy wigs sitting atop their heads were all too lurid a spectacle to behold so early in the morning. One of the clowns caught my eye and wobbled over nearer to the register. I can’t remember if it was a whisper or an exclamation, but the words, “Do you like my nose?” suddenly appeared before my own pink, human nose and cemented the encounter’s sinister veil. This kind of clown, my dear reader, was unheimlich and unwelcome—more akin to a poisonous, black, bubbling ointment than light-hearted medicine of ha-has. Yuuuck.

But while the clown of birthday parties and nightmares of yore isn’t on the positive end of the spectrum of our analysis, there is another clown that I’d like us to confront today. This clown may be just as unheimlich as the clowns that rudely interrupted my early-morning affair with a beautiful golden croissant, but they might not be. This clown is hidden away, tucked beneath all of our layers of being. Today, we’ll venture to see what happens when we draw them out. Off we go.

The Issue Arises

Last summer, I picked up a copy of a book called Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir. I was intrigued by this unassuming white tome. Published by Fitzcarraldo, whose list I broadly respect, the premise of this work of non-fiction is that a psychoanalyst-(feel free to take a second to sigh)-poet decides to take a clown class to “recover the sensation of feeling alive and embodied.” Alsadir is drawn to Clown after attending a stand-up comedy show, where she begins to see similarities between humour and psychoanalysis.

The theatrical art of clowning, Clown, is very different from the red-nosed, polka-dot-suited clown rejected above. There are different traditions of theatrical clown, but they’re all centered on the premise that, by stripping away your social masks, you may find your “inner clown” and learn to access a state of play that will better support your creative processes. For Alsadir, there was an link between this process of self-revelation through play and the process of uncovering the unconscious through analysis. Alsadir pursued a strand of Clown developed by Christopher Bayes, who was, in turn, trained by Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaullier (the French! They strike again!). This method of acting believes deeply, purely, in the power of the body: Lecoq once explained the reason behind his craft by saying that “the body knows things about which the mind is ignorant.” In Clown training, actors (and psychoanalyst-poets) learn to listen to the body, giving in to spontaneous expression and turning away from pretension to reach a pure state of play.

You’ll note that I have not named a target emotion for the work of Clown. While ideally play leads to laughter—a cathartic, unmediated connection with a True Self and therefore an audience—what Clown ultimately seeks is unmediated expression, period. Clown asks us to explore who we might be if we hadn’t been asked to “behave less” while growing up and mediate our actions, words, and feelings to better fit in with the world around us—behaving to please. Clown asks us to believe that we are at our most beautiful when we are most ourselves, even if that means we’re messy, enraged, deep in despair, or a knot of nerves. (Hot)

While Alsadir’s book inflated my wonder about Clown, a dear colleague (who is just as into psychoanalysis as I am) stumbled into the book at around the same time (I am not certain how, but anyway, this occurrence was a happy happenstance of life). As we read, we exchanged WhatsApps commenting on this part of the book or that, tentatively asking each other how far into the book we each were, warning each other when Alsadir’s free associations became too free, or gushing when a particularly inspiring section was around the corner from where the other stood. Between screens and pages, we each silently expressed our desire to take a clown class, maybe together, one day. A couple of weeks ago, my colleague texted me, there’s a “Clown Warm Up” next weekend at Chris Bayes’ studio, and promptly signed us up. We were going to take a clown class. We were about to be rattled.

The Experiment

I arrived at a large, empty rehearsal space on a grim Saturday morning not sure what to expect. It had been months since I last picked up Animal Joy, and Alsadir’s careful renditions of her first class were lost to the warm, dancing blades of grass of the summer. I sat toward the side of the room and tapped my emergency contact information into the teacher’s phone as the classroom began to fill with eager theater kids and a handful of adults who were also affiliated with the arts. My colleague and I were the only consultants. As people trickled in, we arranged ourselves in a loose circle in the center—some of us stretched, some of us twiddled our thumbs on phones. And when the clock struck 10, we were off.

We were first asked to introduce ourselves and share something that made us happy. We stood up. We were asked to start shaking our bodies. After training as a ballerina for the better part of my pre-adult life, warming up for movement is second nature to me. I feel at home turning my ankles, swinging my arms, rolling my neck. But though we did a good amount of that, there was an intruder in our midst: warm-up for Clown class, I noticed, was rooted in feelings. While we shook our limbs, we were asked to… laugh. Then, when our bodies were rehearsing stillness, we were asked to pass laughs across the room. We were asked to reach—and hold on to—wonder. What? Where are my pliés? I should be stretching my calves and abductors to prevent injury, not my soul.

Walk around the class, exclaimed the teacher, and feel angry!! Rage out!! Around me, the theàter kids started screaming and pounding their bare feet into the soft wood below us. They threw their fists in the air, their faces convulsed into sheer rage. I AM SO ANGRY BECAUSE I WANT TO BE AN ACTOR, one roared, IT IS A TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE PROFESSION!!! I DON’T WANT YOU TO SPEAK RIGHT NOW! I AM THE TEACHER! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME, barked the other. In this sea of anger, I tried to play along, but it was impossible to find sound inside of myself. I stomped around a little bit. I jumped fiercely at the ground, which resulted in something like trying to squish a bug, perhaps, or emptying the imaginarily inflated wood as if it were an air mattress. I clenched my fists and foolishly tried to inflict some pain on the air around me by flailing my arms around. I ventured, once again, to make a sound. I couldn’t.

The teacher reigned us back into a circle, and re-named what was first a Laugh Circle and then a Wonder Circle to the “Rage Circle.” She invited anyone who needed it to step into the middle of the circle to let any remaining anger go. Two or three earnest theater kids stepped inside and raged out, their faces contorting with the pain they released from their bodies. Inside my head, I couldn’t stop the wheel: why can’t I speak? I’m mad I can’t say anything? I’d love to rage out like that? Why can’t I? Eventually, my body forced my mind to take a step. I stood quietly in front of all my clown friends and whispered, I am mad that I can’t be any louder than this. The teacher smiled, That’s fine. Stomp your feet, at least. Bring your body into it. So I hopped around a little bit, and said, just a tiny bit louder, I am mad! That! I can’t! Be any louder! Instinct kicked in: Why! Did ballet! Teach me! The language! Of the body! And keep me! Mute!! And then I quickly retreated to the edges of the circle, as folks around me laughed with me and my grumbles. I felt so well-behaved.

Class went on, and feelings continued to evade me until it's end. We were asked to walk nervously: everyone around me zipped and zapped anxiously mumbling, exclaiming, while I stood in a corner, looking scared. We were asked to walk fearfully: everyone around me cowered loudly, shrieking when they encountered one another, while I stood in a corner, looking nervous. And we were asked to walk drenched in despair: my classmates’ eyes welled with tears, the hot flames of sadness pouring out of their eyes and mouth and ears and noses as they wailed and wailed and wailed. I didn’t stay in a corner that time; I walked. But my walk was determined, my breath was quick; steady signs of anger more than sadness.

After two hours, we all put our social masks back on and bid farewell to our new Clown friends. I ate a luxurious plate of waffles with fried chicken and walked sixteen kilometers before finally landing back home.

✻

For the few weeks surrounding my clown class, I had been feeling uncharacteristically Sad. I couldn’t pin down why. Initially, I blamed it on my recent affair with COVID. Immediately after the illness, I felt my attention falter and my anxiety quicken—perhaps COVID accentuated my underlying psychological vulnerabilities. I let the days go by, hoping that as the brain fog cleared, so would the Sads, but they were still with me two weeks later, when I picked up another light cold. After COVID, the return of runny phlegm marked the third respiratory infection I’ve had since January. I remembered that Freud said that symptoms often have underlying psychological causes, so, along with booking an appointment with my medical doctor to ensure there wasn’t something glaringly wrong with my immune system, I decided to bring all this to analysis.

On Thursday, March 14th 2023, I said to my therapist, I’m sick again. And I’m still sad. We began to poke around my memories—was there anything that this season represented? Did I feel this way last year? The year before? I couldn’t think of anything. We reflected on my experience in Clown class; amid the Sads, I sought a more convincing explanation for my emotional muteness. Yes, much of the communication of dance happens with your body, the tips of your fingers, the gentle turn of your neck, but that was still communication. I’m not sure whether ballet imprinted silence on my body, or not exclusively. My mind jumped to gender dynamics—yes, I am a cis-woman, raised in a patriarchal society and in a family in which we firmly believed that should a tear ever roll onto your cheek, you must retreat and hide away until you’ve once again found composure. A relevant sentimental education to elucidate this experience, we agreed. But, the more I reflected, I noticed the silence that held me captive felt more totalizing; it had whiffs of something more individual than what either of those social structures afforded. I felt the silence in my throat, in my chest, like a stopper that begged to be pulled out.

My therapist noted that all the emotions against which I found muteness were “negative” emotions. I don’t have trouble expressing joy, happiness, or excitement, she remarked. I agreed. Positivity is my modus operandi. I exude optimism. What is it that keeps the sadness in, yet allows the happiness to roam free? And is that a problem?

Halfway through the session, which felt like wading through a thick fog, I found something. Oh, I exhaled, I think that Diego died around this time. And I guess, I said, that at about this time in the year, when that happened, I was flying back to Mexico to attend a memorial. Flung back to the present, I remembered I was scheduled to fly to Mexico in three days for a wedding. Am I flying on the same day that I flew back almost a decade ago? The body knows things about which the mind is ignorant.

✻

Nine years ago, on March 14th 2014, I woke up to the bright Abu Dhabi sun and a dozen or so missed calls from high school friends with whom I hadn’t spoken since arriving at college. I was tired, and not entirely alert. Before calling back, I habitually hopped on to Facebook (yes, I know, please remember that this was almost ten years ago and Facebook was still somewhat A Thing).

Something was wrong. My feed was full of an unfamiliar kind of post: obituaries. They were for a close friend, someone I sat next to on the bus for years starting when we were both 11. Someone in whom I confided through my adolescent years. Someone I once, maybe twice, kissed. I thought I was dreaming. I returned one of the missed calls to no answer. I clicked on his profile and scrolled and scrolled through countless comments of a similar genre until finally I was interrupted by a call. Diego’s body was found last night. There’s an investigation. We know he was out partying. He dropped off a friend of his at her house before heading home. Yes, the bridge by that Church. We’re not sure. Mexico City is dangerous.

Diego’s death changed my life. I mean, of course, it would. I was very young, as was he; only 19. As we finished high school, he and I were caught in some unresolved conflict, which also embroiled a larger friend group with whom I hadn’t been able to make peace. His death accentuated the conflict, and, in a way, cemented my position as an exile, no longer a part of the group. (Though let’s also remember I was literally on the other side of the world.) His death stained my acclimatization into university. Finally feeling at home in my new reality as a college student, I was slapped with the opposite of the future that I was supposed to be imagining. I found it hard to explain to my new college friends what I was feeling. Diego’s death plunged me into an inwardness from which, perhaps, I am only now recovering.

It’s been many years, and many of the feelings have receded into the background. I’ve worked through a lot of the superficial pain—the guilt, the disbelief, some of the anger. However, something I hadn’t thought about before this remembering of Diego was how well I did in school, despite the pain I felt in that freshman Spring. I excelled, not only in that semester but in all the subsequent ones. I was so young to be dealing with something so catastrophic, and yet I travelled, learned, wondered, laughed, grew, danced, loved, played, and explored. I wonder if my way of dealing with the Sads was to build on the best of the lessons I learned in Ballet and Family and not to allow myself to hold on to the negativity.

So what does this all have to do with Hotness?

As ever, good question. In the last newsletter, I wrote about Byung-Chul Han’s The Agony of Eros and his argument that in our narcissistic haze, we’ve lost sight of the Other, which in turn has made it impossible for us to truly love. In this book, Han also speaks to the dangers of the purely positivist society that capitalism has built, “Today, the future is shedding the negativity of the Other and positivizing itself into an optimized present that excludes all disaster.” When Han writes of “positive” and “negative”, he’s not only creating a value judgment but also crafting a distinction between things that can be consumed and those that rob, invade, and take from us (among which, he believes, love lies). Without the negative, like without the Other, we’re stuck in a toxic sea of satiety, of sameness; “when one is stripped of the Other, one cannot love—one can only consume.” Robbed of many things as I was after Diego’s death, I sought refuge and comfort in the positive. Don’t get me wrong: I am thankful, even, for the defense mechanism that has carried me through to writing this piece today. I don’t think that shutting out the bad was a “bad” response, nor am I suggesting that I became a capitalist consuming monster. I was still able to feel sad and angry and scared. But did I allow myself to feel deeply? I don’t know. Did I ever embody that feeling? Maybe, at times, but Clown class seems to suggest not. More importantly, as time has gone by and the years have piled on, I have lost sight of feeling the hard. Until recently, I thought that there was nothing left to feel about Diego’s death. Like with so many things, I was wrong.

This long, refracted dispatch is an example of my trying to live life in a Hot way. I am learning to recognize that there is beauty—power—in the messy, sticky, icky hard feelings of life and that we need not hide them. I’ve sometimes heard people respond to the question “how to be Hot” with a defense of control and restraint. I’m not sure that’s right—I suspect I might be (or feel) a little Hotter if I showed a little less control... and a little more trust in my inner, feeling, Clown.

✻

To close, let me not mince words: Han has fucked me up. I spent a five-hour flight ten days ago reading Han, writing, crying, then reading again, crying again, writing again, and reading again. There was more to it, of course, but holy Hot tamales, he created a new framework for me to see the world, and I can’t go back. It’s wonderful: I have a new language to make sense of the dense and damp situation that is being alive. But it’s also really decomposed me. I’m writing all these newsletters, I think, to put myself back together again. Who knew that a search for Hotness would be so profound. I promise to bring more silly soon, but in the meantime, here I am, pulling my head up out of the tepid sea of sameness that surrounds us in our daily lives, trying to feel things. The hard is hard, but it need not be scary. And, based on my experience these past two weeks, on the other side, there promises to be peace. And maybe some Hotness.

‘Til next time.

Enjoyed this? Did it tingle some tingles deep in your core? Write back! I love reading your reflections. And while you’re at it, share this with a friend! Or two! Or four! Warn them, though, that I’m usually less existential than this, and that while we take the exploration of Hotness Very Seriously here, we also have some fun.