Comedy is based on pain and truth, and as a performer of comedy I
always remind myself of this. The further you go into the dilemma
of a character, the funnier it is for an audience. If you're aware
of your clowning or your comedy, then the audience starts to become
aware that you're aware, and it starts to become a bit
smart-arse. It's what stand-up comedians are very good at doing,
laughing at their own jokes, and presenting the idea that we live
in a comic world, whereas actors have to play characters from the
character's point of view, and those characters don't view
themselves as being caught in a comic situation. It's actually
often the opposite: the characters are in desperate situations and
take desperate measures that become funny in themselves.
One of the things that clowning requires, as opposed to perhaps
drama, is a very strong connection with the audience; you really
have to be in tune with the people who are watching you and you
have to listen to them very carefully to know how to gauge how far
to take things.
The tricky thing is when I'm in rehearsals with the director, and
say we decide that the first laugh will be generated when I back
away from the audience and trip over a rock. If this laugh is not
generated then the rest of the show can't go on, so there's a
certain amount of trust required as we try to get that first giggle
out of the audience. Once I have that giggle, then all I do is play
with that.
Clowning is really about generating a dialogue that your audience,
through their expression and response, shares with you. I always
think of it in terms of compression, and I try to compress the
laughter that the audience sends back at me, to squash it inside of
them so it starts to hurt, so they don't want to miss the next bit
and they shut it in, and that thing they feel inside them is a very
strong, almost playful kind of laugh that is later released.
One of the things I've always found most interesting about 'edgy'
clowning is the word edge, meaning the edge of the stage where you
have one foot in the audience and one foot in the story and you
ride dangerously close to living out of the story and giving the
audience what they want, but also being reigned in by the
discipline of what you have to do within the story. It is an edge
because if you give the audience too much, then you don't have
respect for the story, but if you give them too little then you're
not playing with them enough. There's a fine edge where a character
can be in the middle of something, but the audience's response can
draw him out to them.
There are two very distinct sorts of clowning: white clowning and
black clowning. The white clown is very good at clowning, very good
at mime and at generating laughter with an audience and playing
with them. The black clown is the anti-clown, and he mocks mime and
the idea of needing an audience, and questions how perverse he can
be but still get the audience's laughter. He might mime grabbing a
female from the audience, putting her on stage and undressing her
and then doing the job on her and smacking her on the bum, which
sounds ridiculous but the audience is in a state of laughter, so he
looks for how he can take it further, to find what they won't laugh
at. From this point he puts it back to the audience and basically
says that if you are going to laugh at me and find some value in
me, then don't try to change me. That's the great thing about the
villain is that, although you can't love him because a villain
doesn't love himself, you can feel massive adoration for him, and
find him sexy and devilishly charming. But the fact is that they
are hideous characters.
One of the things that I'm exploring with this piece is the
extremes of human nature and the fact that within us we have the
ability to be so loving and generous and kind, but we also have
this side that can be so twisted and dark in our thinking and our
behaviour. You get to choose what you want to be, the light or the
dark, because you have it all in you, and this story allowed me to
explore the extremes that I know I have in my personality.
Darren Gilshenan co-wrote and performs in Fools
Island.
This piece is a transcribed extract of a spoken interview.
Fools Island, Wharf 2 Theatre, 30 July - 17 August
Feature: The Art of Clowning
Date posted: 23 Jul 2012Author: STC