In which Our Hero is too tired to pretend.
One nice part about clowning is that the audience is honest.
By some biological necessity, they can’t fake it.
If the player is light, open, with pleasure — they’ll laugh.
Even if they’d hate you in real life, they’ll like you on stage.
That’s a comfort for those of us who don’t easily make friends:
who click with one in every thousand people we meet,
one in a hundred even here at clown school.
My second goal here is to make friends.
My first — learning the craft — is easier.
It has less randomness.
A good clown should be able to open themselves
and bring pleasure regardless of who’s watching.
That’s what makes it challenging.
That’s what makes it a job.
At the start of sophomore year of high school, I realized I had no friends.
Uncoincidentally, around the same time, I began to find women attractive and desirable.
I reasoned that I could either change the world or change myself.
Changing the world to fit one’s taste is the path of a supervillain
(and takes far more energy),
so I decided to learn how to be a friend.
If you try to be funny, you’ll never be funny.
If you try to be a friend, you’ll never be a friend.
Instead, to clown, you simply have to open yourself:
be kind, generous, caring.
The same is perhaps true
for friendship itself.
But what if you open yourself and discover you’re… kind of a jerk?
“Open” seems to increase attention paid to you. Charisma, one could say.
The others are the ones that keep them coming back for more.
When I’m sick, I hate everything.
My body hurts, my brain shuts down,
and I want to crawl inside the dark and stay there.
And yet, something happens on stage.
The power of giving,
the act of offering pleasure to the audience,
somehow overcomes the weakness of the flesh.
Bam! Pow! Beauty.
So now, I feel lonely, surrounded by clowns.
I’ll probably feel better in a few days,
with zinc and tea.
And then…
who knows.
Who knows.
Who knows.
If you don’t like yourself,
how can you let others love you?
Julian Wise 