In which Our Hero discovers a new kind of intelligence.
Yesterday I saw a clown show. The second-year students performed scenes they had been rehearsing, and one moment in particular brought the house down.
Two clowns were locked in a strange duel of one-upmanship using nothing but bananas. The first clown sat down for dinner. The second pulled out a banana. The first summoned a waiter to bring him two bananas on a silver platter. The second peeled his banana with quiet superiority. The first snapped his fingers again and had the waiter grind fresh pepper over his bananas like they were a Michelin dessert.
And then came the pièce de résistance.
The second clown peeled a banana, attached a vacuum hose, and sucked the fruit straight into the machine. He then opened the vacuum’s little plastic compartment—the one where attachments live—and inside was a perfect, ready-to-eat banana. The crowd exploded. It was ridiculous. It was ingenious.
And I sat there thinking:
How can something be this dumb and this smart at the same time?
A friend of mine likes to say, “Clowning logic is toddler logic.”
I’ve mused on this for weeks. Yesterday, it finally clicked. It’s a theory. A remarkably precise one.
It explains why the banana gag was both silly and clever. It wasn’t adult intelligence at work. It was toddler intelligence.
1. Logic That Doesn’t Work (But Feels True)
In clown logic—just like toddler logic—objects don’t always behave according to physics or reason. But they do always have a logic.
A banana is shaped like a gun → so it can be a gun.
A banana is shaped like a phone → so it can ring.
An unpeeled banana enters a vacuum hose → the vacuum outputs peeled bananas.
The logic doesn’t hold, and yet it feels inevitable.
The clown isn’t being stupid. He’s using a different rule set.
2. Infinite Positivity and Grit
Toddlers fail to do the same task twenty times with unwavering optimism. They pick the block up wrong, drop it, pick it up again, grin, try again. They don’t even know someone might be embarrassed or self-conscious.
Clowns do this too. Failure is not a setback; it’s an ingredient. The clown delights in trying again and again. It’s part of the charm. The audience roots for them because they never sour, never collapse, never scold themselves.
A clown can fail joyfully, a kind of emotional intelligence most adults have misplaced. (Is this why we love to watch someone embrace the flop? Perhaps it’s just failing joyfully.)
3. Lack of Control; all is Fate and Luck
A clown sits at home. Someone rings his doorbell. The clown opens the door. He gets pied in the face. The door closes. The clown returns to his chair.
Three seconds later: ding-dong!
The clown opens the doorbell again, just as excited as before.
Clowns operate in this same looping causality. No matter their behavior, they’re going to get pied in the face.
A friend’s baby hates bath time. He will wail and scream, sometimes strategize and connive. But whatever happens, he always ends up in the bath.
4. Repetition With Heightening
Toddlers adore repetition. Say “boo” ten times, and the tenth might get the biggest laugh. Their neurons seem to knit new connections in real time.
Clowns use this too. A repeated joke—with slight heightening each time—lets the audience see the clown’s mind working. Each repetition says: “Look, I’ve learned something!” At some point it might stop being funny. Why knows why? But bring it back up later in an unexpected way? Hilarious.
The game grows because the player grows.
5. Invented Rules That Aren’t True
Toddlers create miniature physics for their world:
“Only mommy can open drawers” (perhaps because mommy said this one time)
“If I hop, you must clap.”
“Dogs are male, and cats are female.”
Clowns do the same. Everything cone-shaped is an ice cream cone. A microphone, a traffic cone, a wizard’s wand: all delicious. Entire scenes arise from treating objects according to invented, toddler-esque rules.
These rules create friction, miscommunication, and comedy because the audience watches the clown operate inside a world only the clown understands.
The Banana Returns
So why did the vacuumed banana land so hard?
Because the clown applied toddler logic with adult-level precision.
He located an absurd rule—”in the vacuum” means “in the vacuum”—and committed to it fully. The magic wasn’t the trick; it was the conviction. The childlike law was obeyed so faithfully that the result felt surprisingly “smart.”
And then, later, the same clown tried to feed cake ingredients into the vacuum and produce a cake from offstage.
This time, the audience didn’t bite.
Why?
Two reasons:
- We’re doing bananas, not cakes.
The world of the scene had already established a rule: we’re playing with bananas. Switching to cake is like arriving to the toddler’s wizarding world as a sci-fi character. You tried, but it’s the wrong game. - The cake came from offstage, not from the vacuum.
The previous joke worked because in the vacuum means in the vacuum. Pulling a cake from offstage wasn’t “the logic continuing”—it was creating new logic that doesn’t even make sense. (If they had put bananas and a strawberry into a blender, then pulled out a strawberry-banana yogurt from that same blender, that would have worked.)
The banana moment worked because it honored the rules.
The cake moment didn’t because it ignored them.
The Closing Thought
Maybe clowning can appear stupid because adults forget how to use toddler intelligence.
Toddlers aren’t dumb. They’re just operating a different operating system—one built on delight, mischief, repetition, and possibility. And one where the rules of the world aren’t yet solidified.
A clown steps onstage and reactivates that OS.
And for a few minutes, the audience gets a fresh start too.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, my banana is ringing.
Julian Wise 