In which Our Hero remembers the audience and the performer are on the same team.
Today I didn’t buy a painting.
I could have.
There are worlds in which I walk out of that studio holding a canvas, or at least a print. I like his work. It’s good enough that I’d happily see it on my wall. I also, frankly, think this guy could be very successful. And while I don’t know anything about investing in art, I do know that he does good work.
Instead of buying, I did something arguably more valuable: I gave him one mental shift that might change the way he sells forever (hard-won after nine years of being a creative freelancer myself).
The shift was this:
- You and the buyer are on the same team, trying to get to the sale together.
Most artists don’t think that way. They imagine selling as hoodwinking, convincing, persuading. Commerce as a low-grade con.
But when I exchange $20 for a meal, two true things are happening at once:
- I am saying, “I’d rather have this meal than this $20.”
- The seller is saying, “I’d rather have this $20 than this meal.”
We both win. That’s the point.
If someone wanders into your studio already 50% likely to buy your painting, wouldn’t you both be better off if a sale happens?
That’s what my friend was missing. He felt like he was pushing against the customer, trying to “get them” to buy, and he hated it. Instead, he should walk next to them, shoulder to shoulder, helping the buyer cross the line they already half-want to cross.
Sales, at least for an honest artist, is a cooperative game.
Clowning is the same game
This is also the part that many performing artists (including clowns) forget: the audience wants you to succeed.
When we audience members sit down for standup, for a play, for a clown show, we’re not secretly hoping it’s terrible so we can be right about humanity’s decline. We might predict it will be bad, but given the choice between:
- “I knew it would suck,” and
“It blew my expectations out of the water,”
almost everyone would rather be wrong and delighted.
Even the pessimists would rather go home saying, “Honestly, it was great.”
So performance is also a cooperative game:
- As the clown, you are the leader.
- The audience is your team.
- The “sale” you’re closing together is shared pleasure.
You’re not dragging them, hostage-style, toward your weird art. You’re inviting them into something – pleasure – they already came to find.
This, unfortunately, is not my default setting.
Competitive games vs cooperative games
I am more experienced with competitive games than cooperative ones. Poker, for instance, is the opposite:
- There, the goal is to hide.
- To show nothing.
- To give away as little information as possible while extracting as much value as possible.
Clowning is about the inverse:
- Openness instead of secrecy.
- Generosity instead of extraction.
- “Let’s enjoy this together” instead of “Let me get the best of you.”
One of the purposes of clown school (for me) is to re-train this reflex. To make cooperation feel as natural as competition.
Right now, the questions I’m wrestling with include:
- How do I lead the team gently?
Guide the audience without shoving, nudge without bullying, care for each teammate without over-focusing on any one.
- How do I actually lead, instead of hiding behind stronger personalities?
Be the tip of the spear, not the person comfortably in the second row.
- When I’m with a partner on stage, how do I treat them as a collaborator instead of a combatant?
Remember that “winning” is making the scene sing, and that often occurs when you’re playing harmoniously.
- How do I remain open when uncomfortable?
Oftentimes, I’m shutting down. And that… is not… helpful. 😦
These are not just stage problems. They’re life problems. Which brings us to the cocktail party.
When I forgot we were on the same team
At a cocktail party today, I met a few people I genuinely liked. Smart, funny, curious. The kind of people I’d happily see again.
They asked about my relationship status. I told them a technically-true (and engaging), but far-more-boring version.
Here’s what I told them:
In college, I was interested in a girl who was dating a woman. A friend told me she only dated women, so I filed that away as “ah well, not for me.”
Ten years later, we reconnected. It turned out my friend had been wrong:
- She does not, in fact, only date women.
And here’s the part I didn’t share – not because it’s shameful, but because it’s intimate, and intimacy is precisely what I tend to withhold when I get scared:
- At the time of meeting her, I was taking exogenous estrogen. I had grown breasts. My emotional life was much closer to that of a woman than a man.
So even if she had only dated women, I still might have qualified.
That’s the good bit. The twist ending. The painting on the wall I could have offered.
Instead, I hid it. I offered the flat version. And therefore, the next bit that I added – when I later tried to connect – didn’t land. I’d already collapsed into myself, ending the cooperative game.
I protected information, staying “safe”.
But they weren’t my opponents. They were potential teammates. We were building something delightful together. And that collapse — the retreat instead of the play — is exactly the reflex I’m trying to rewire.
(To be clear, the issue wasn’t that I “should have” told strangers something deeply personal. It’s that I noticed myself collapsing inward even though both they and I wanted to play, to connect, to stay in the cooperative game.)
The update
So: today I didn’t buy a painting.
I also didn’t honestly sell myself.
In both cases, the correction is the same:
- Be in situations where we’re on the same side.
- Remember we’re on the same side.
- Act like the game is cooperative.
- Offer the real story, not the safe one.
When I become excellent at those in daily life, I’ll be a better clown.
And when I become a better clown, maybe I’ll finally remember, in the moment, that we all walked into the room wanting the same thing:To leave having created shared pleasure.
And in that pleasure, created Value.
Julian Wise 