What is a Clown ?
It's International Clown Week, and that has us thinking about this ancient
figure, who is the primal source of laughter. Our word for "clown" comes from
the old Icelandic, klunni, which meant a clumsy person, and is related to other
archaic words for clod, or clump, or, in old Middle High German, klutz. We still
use that word today to describe someone who always seems to be tripping over his
two left feet.
No one really knows who the first clown was, though Mel Brooks has an answer
for that question in his hysterically funny movie, "History of the World Part
One," in which the earliest belly laugh is caused when a cavorting, stand-up
caveman comedian gets eaten by a dinosaur in the middle of his monologue -- to
his tribe's great amusement.
A more likely choice for original clown honors may go to the ice-age drawing
of a dancing man wearing a deer's head, which was discovered in a cave in the
south of France by three spelunking boys in the early 1900s. This mysterious
figure, who is frequently called the magician or shaman, whose spells could
relieve you of illness, is just a few steps away from the "show-man," whose
incantations can relieve you of the pressures of everyday life.
The Zunis of the American South West had a name for this creature: he was
called the Contrary. He appeared, dressed in a striped costume, wearing a
cone-shaped hat, at all the most sacred festivals. His job was to make fun of
serious things, to call attention to the absurd, impossible side of our
experience and thus to complete a kind of cosmic circle. He reminds us of that
other shadowy, tricky, wobbly side to our nature. He was supposed to do what you
aren't supposed to do -- fall down, eat the wrong things, say the wrong things,
behave the wrong way -- everything we were expected to out-grow when we joined
the serious adult world.
As kids we somehow felt a kind of kinship with this character -- after all,
to some degree we'd been there ourselves, not too long before. And perhaps that
is why so many clowns are child-like, from Baby Hermes to Chaplin, to Robin
Williams to Adam Sander.
When you think about it, the job hasn't changed much in, oh, twenty or thirty
thousand years.
Copyright 2003 ©John Cech