In which Our Hero ends on an unusual question.
Clowning is an odd emotional experience.
Clown school is an odd emotional context.
Where else is one assigned the task: be emotionally open, vulnerable, generous, light, and kind?
Where else is one given an explicit assignment to manipulate their own emotional state in service of others?
One place that comes to mind is politics.
I recently happened upon a (¿state?) senator. I was coming from a friend’s birthday, and the senator commented on the hat I’d given my friend. The senator exhibited genuine-seeming curiosity about what it meant, then delight in the silly inside joke it represented.
And,
like,
he wasn’t being inauthentic.
But,
like,
that is his job.
I don’t believe he was deeply interested in the game itself. I doubt he’d want to watch it or play it unless it came packaged with votes or fundraising. And yet: the delight was real.
I suppose clowns are the same way.
It isn’t inauthentic to change your emotional state and then share that state with others.
But it is contrived.
It’s not inauthentic to manipulate someone at a poker table either.
But it is manipulative.
So what’s the point?
Is this the core function of most people-leadership roles? From CEO to politician to parent to clown: are they all versions of the same act?
If behavior flows from emotion, is a leader’s primary job internal emotional manipulation, followed by broadcasting the result?
I’m reminded of LBJ amping himself up – working himself into a righteous frenzy – before speeches and political events, especially if it felt like he was behaving in ways antithetical to his values. He told himself he was doing it for people he cared about. That the moral sacrifices were worth it.
And then he sent those people to die in Vietnam.
I’ve known a CEO who practiced a similar kind of self-amping. His former employees now, at a remarkable rate, despise him.
So what’s my point? The connection to clowning?
Is it bad to manipulate your own emotional state? Obviously not. But when does it become bad? Under what conditions? In service of what ends?
What’s my point?
I don’t know. I’m musing.
That’s what this blog is. Thinking out loud. Marking where my thinking currently sits and letting it evolve. I don’t endorse everything I’ve ever written. That’s part of being a writer.
But today I’m reminded of how strange an emotional experience clowning is.
And how much people hate politicians.
And I find myself wondering whether – or more precisely, to what degree and in what ways – they should also hate clowns.
🤡
Julian Wise 