An Undelivered Speech to the Clowns on Opening Night of the Coney Island Clown Skool

I was honored to give the opening speech on opening night of Glen Heroy’s Coney Island Clown Skool at CIUSA last night. Congratulations to him and to all concerned for getting this wonderful new institution off the ground in such a bleak time!

As it happens, the talk I originally planned to give dealt with the repercussions of last Tuesday’s election, but at the last second I opted not to give it. I’d realized that in my zeal to respond in an immediate way to what’s going on I’d completely forgotten the original brief I’d been given: to introduce Glen’s students and whoever else was at the ceremony to Coney Island! And anyway — it was self-indulgent. I’m sure most of the assembled had been thinking similar thoughts anyway. For this week-long session it would be far better for the students to have their retreat, focus on their art, enjoy their surroundings, and fortify themselves for the fight ahead. So I tossed my original speech aside and gave them a thumbnail history of Coney Island as an amusement resort. And let me tell you it was cathartic to do so!

But I still want to share the thoughts I had initally worked up, for I thought them important enough to pen in the first place. So here it is, the speech I didn’t give:

Photo by that other Holy Fool, Norman Blake

Thank you, Glen! And welcome, Clowns! 

I feel very much honored to be here. I’ve always been struck by something Springsteen said when he accepted his Oscar for writing the theme song to “Philadelphia”. It was a little surprising. He said something like “Thanks a lot for having me at your party”. It had never occurred to me that a major rock star hadn’t always been socializing with all the movie stars all along. Weren’t they all in show business? But they were in different branches, I guess.

Anyway I feel honored in that way. I revere clowning as a calling, but at most I am a clown ally. I am close friends with many clowns, I was in a serious relationship with a clown, I have presented many clowns, I have reviewed and chronicled many clowns, and I have even given vaguely clown-like performances. but that existential, alchemical plunge that you have made, where you have to come out to your parents as a clown, that has not been part of my own story. I worry a little that I’ll be speaking to you from outside your close fraternity, but maybe it’s a good thing. Today it might be a very good thing.

Glen told me that he has signed up 12 pupils! Just like Jesus! And I decided that I’m going to make that the touchstone of my talk (Ha! I said “Touchstone”!) Touchstone was a Shakespearean Fool, and Shakespeare was very plugged into the literary idea of the Holy Fool. The Christ-like Clown. Don’t worry! I am not religious in that way, and we all know those kinds of clowns, the proselytizing Augustes who mean well in their simple way, but make art grit its teeth. But as someone who writes about the history of show business, and theatre, and the roots of western history and culture and art and myth and so forth it’s impossible not to come to grips with the legend of the original Holy Fool if nothing else as a symbol, an archetype, and yes, again without getting religious, a role model.

For those of you who are not among the student body, you will essentially be overhearing a private clownversation and that’s okay, because I’m going to be addressing the clowns as human beings as much as artists, so hopefully there will be something to take away from my appeal for you too.

Oh by the way, I must warn you this was never going to be a light, fluffy, facile, easy to digest speech. As another clown once said, “Homey don’t play that!” But that, least of all, at this historical moment. I’m here to try to assure you (you clowns), I hope, that you are not on the sidelines. In fact you never were, or never should have been, and shouldn’t be, and that was always going to be the theme of today’s talk, it’s just that going forward the importance of every choice you make is going to be dialed WAY up. I think being a clown is as important a job in human society as there is. I’m pretty sure it’s even older than prostitution. And some even prefer it! And in some very kinky cases, combine the two!  

I am not going to make any assumptions about anybody’s politics. Mine I’m sure will be readily apparent very quickly but I won’t embarrass anyone by asking about yours. Theoretically, I think, clowning at its highest apogee of purpose is metaphysical. It is a quasi-religious ritual, summoning uncanny forces, lifting audiences right out of this pathetic, benighted mortal plane. All things remaining the same. In a closed and peaceful social system.

But there are times when you don’t have that luxury, of just being an entertainer. After all, how do you carry on with your precious magical slapstick trifle, when the doors at the back of the house burst open, police storm in, and the clown is dragged down the aisle of the theatre and thrown into a van? For one random, hypothetical example. That’s an extreme and alarming portrait. Some of you may think it is hyperbolic and paranoid, but I think others of you know that the world is full of countries where that happens all the time, even to clowns. And the last guard rails that would keep that from happening in America have just been removed. Trump has announced that he’s coming after “enemies from within”, and that includes the press, and artists and authors. If you’re queer, or female, or a person of color, your prospects are even worse. This is not a King who will tolerate the wisdom of a Wise Fool. And now there are nearly no checks on him:  the congress and the courts and the justice department and his cabinet picks and countless state and local governments have pledged allegiance to HIM. He has also vowed to fire anyone in the military or civil service who won’t do the same. So all checks on his power will be gone, and this is what’s happening in two months.

And you won’t have to have done anything “wrong” to get scooped up. This is what many people seem not to understand about authoritarianism, that you can remain diligently aloof from politics, keep your head down, pay your taxes, mind the speed limit, praise Jesus, and pledge allegiance to the flag — and work birthday parties with little squeaky toys from the joke shop — and if somebody doesn’t like you for whatever reason NOW you can be in deep, dark, serious, fatal shit.

This means, that to a large extent, in a certain way, your decisions don’t matter, your future is no longer under your control. Until we’re on the other side of this, all you can do is pray or wish or hope (if you prefer) for good luck. The whole country is now a very scary version of Las Vegas. So it’s just down to what kind of artist and what kind of human being are you going to be?

Like I said, I make no assumptions about what your own convictions are, or even what a clown is or should be. Are clowns necessarily humane and giving and wise? There are other perspectives, other images all born of the dark, nihilistic heart of the angry anarchist. This weird modern sympathy for Batman’s Joker character. Those chilling, impassive Guy Fawkes masks. Juggaloes. Pennywise, John Wayne Gacy. And clowns are always like “Why do people fear us?” But you do have to acknowledge that P.R. problem. Several years ago, I collaborated with a filmmaker named Allan Piper whom a lot of Coney Island regulars know, and we made a short film about how Donald Trump fit into the tradition of the scary clown, which goes all the way back to prehistoric ritual. And of course Trump’s followers proved what gentle and loving souls they are in the comments section to that video.”“How dare you say I’m in a cult and my leader is a maniac!”, they say, while in the same breath vowing to kill you. My old girlfriend, who was a commedia person, used to talk about how the proper conception of Arlecchino included a mischievous glint in his eye that could well be malevolent.

The point is we don’t know. Agents of chaos. Some people think that’s cool, and others are polyannas about it and deny the legitimacy of it, which is fine, but frankly ineffective, because it exists. That destructive potential is as sexy as fuck to some people. And it begins as performance – the kind of performance we do, the kind of performance I am giving from this podium right now – and ends up with mountains of skulls. It has happened throughout human history in more times and places than can be counted. What did liberals call Hitler prior to 1933?  A CLOWN! The potential for anyone to be THAT kind of artist has never been greater than right now. And I have sobering news for you: the pay on the dark side is much much better.

What’s the alternative then? There is more than one positive path. I hope you won’t scorn this illustration for being drawn from such a cheesy pop culture source. But the first movie I ever saw in a cinema was the 1972 disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure. Because of the nature of that film as a primary formative experience in my life, I confess that I have come to credit it with a disproportionate amount of meaning and profundity. But hear me out! Just about all of the characters in the film are archetypes of one kind or another: there’s a whore, a virgin, a cop, a servant, a sea captain and so forth. It’s practically “The Balcony”.

Two of the characters are men of the cloth and they are polar opposites. One of them, the hero, is a loud-mouthed renegade. He disregards rules that don’t make any sense, he dismisses authorities who are working off an irrelevant play book, and his only goal is to save everybody, even when they don’t want to save themselves. That’s Gene Hackman. Less remembered is Arthur O’Connell as a Catholic priest, who decides that his role is to comfort the afflicted and stay with the dying. When I was young I had a lot of scorn for that, but now that I’m older I see the value for that type of compassion. Do you know the name of Father Michael Judge? He was a chaplain with the New York City fire department. He gave his life at the Twin Towers on 9/11, and he was just there to bless people. Some people live to be cynical about the value of that, but I think that in this world of fallible, still-primitive human beings that has value. It comforts us, it helps us feel strong, even if it’s something on the order of a ritual placebo.

My reverence for your chosen calling has to do with just that. It is a calling, it is in fact a literal priesthood. You don’t have to believe in a literal god, though your predecessors as practitioners most assuredly did, stretching back surely for many thousands of years. If you have chosen not to be an agent of chaos in what’s about to happen then you’ll likely be doing what you do out of motivations of compassion. And here is where we get to specific applications.

I am afraid I am going to editorialize a little. I believe that art that merely gladdens the heart in times like these runs the risk of inadvertently aiding and abetting the criminals and murderers in power by making audiences feel that all is right in the world so they can and should just accept the status quo. I understand that that is all that some people have got to give, and so be it, though as I mentioned, in the end, that will be no guarantee of safety, your own or anyone else’s. I have less sympathy for that approach to art in times like this, but there will, sadly, be a call for the clown equivalent of the Father Judge kind of thing. When I worked at Big Apple Circus and went on rounds with hospital clowns I saw with my own eyes the value of that kind of work, when the bodies and souls of the afflicted need cheering. Not the safe and the comfortable. That’s mercenary. But the people who need it. God forbid we should all see real life reenactments of “The Day the Clown Cried” prior to the Jerry Lewis version coming out. Nothing I’ve seen or heard convinces me that’s off the table.

Which leaves us with subversion. That word sounds scarier than what I intend. There are many kinds of subversion. If this election had gone differently, for example, my talk today was mostly going to be about what is essentially industrial subversion. Having the courage to assert your own artistic vision in a climate where the entire apparatus is embracing another aesthetic and another system of values.  

My thing is vaudeville. To an extent that most contemporary people don’t know or remember any more, up until about 1940 all of the comedians in mainstream entertainment (by that I mean things like vaudeville, and burlesque and musical comedy and silent movies and very early talkie) all of the popular comedians were much closer in spirit to what we now think of as the separate subcategory of clown. Quite literally: America’s favorite comedians were clowns. Not circus clowns, per se, but clowns. They wore outlandish makeup and crazy costumes, and they engaged in slapstick and punning humor and so forth, and that was the prevailing aesthetic until around the Second World War, when everything became much more realistic and less archetypal and imaginative in most screen comedy. To be specific that was when guys like Chaplin and Keaton and Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers and hundreds of others gave way to guys like Bob Hope and comedians from every generation after that. Average Joes rather than clowns. I defiantly believe in the older way, that it has validity and ultimately potential to be much more universally effective on audiences and there are even relatively modern examples of that, like Pee Wee Herman, even though he’s ancient history now too. My original idea for today was to present a pep talk, about not settling for being on the fringes of popular culture, to fight to demonstrate your legitimacy with mainstream audiences.

But a project like that would be a luxury in the coming world I’m afraid. (I’m not averse to filling out what I mean if anyone is interested, but I feel like we have bigger fish to fry today). And anyway, it’s kind of moot. I honestly believe that sooner than any of will be ready for, any original content on screens or online will be AI. Not just because you don’t have to pay artists, but because artists are a political inconvenience. All of the top Hollywood stars, all of the pop stars, and authors etc etc etc or most of them are on the side of humanism and outspoken critics of what’s happening in this country and the world. But apparently at least half of their own audiences wants them to shut the fuck up and just sing and dance or whatever. Pretty shortly, in what will amount to Putin’s America, most will be chilled into silence. But I honestly think that it’s going to be moot very soon. The artists will all be let go. It’s much easier, much less troublesome. And I think we’ve learned that audiences will settle for just about anything that caters to their basest emotions. It doesn’t have to be good.

I know it sounds implausible, but you must remember that I write about vaudeville. This has happened before! In the early 1930s an entire widespread, strong American entertainment infrastructure was instantly dissolved and replaced with machines! The machines that replaced vaudeville were radios and movie projectors. For a time, networks and movie studios did continue to employ a much reduced pool of human talent because at that time it was necessary. Now even that is not necessary!

What does that leave? The elephant in the room. Live performance. It’s the only thing that technology can’t touch. And so you guys become uniquely valuable. In fact, no matter how bad things get — name your dystopia: war, natural disasters, the failure of the power grid, plagues, zombies — your profession is one of the few that can just keep fulfilling its ancient mission. If you can get people to look up from their phones. On the positive side, in the dystopia there may be no phones.

So that was industrial subversion. Quaint now, really, in the scheme of things.

As for, ahem, political subversion, I am not suggesting everybody be Dario Fo or Reverend Billy or Borat, although that would be cool! I’m not suggesting everyone turn into literal Marxist, Brechtian clowns, not everyone is Jennifer Miller nor should they be. But as artists like Charlie Chaplin knew, there is a way for the (apparently) purely aesthetic performance to be subtly political just by awakening empathy and making audiences feel and care about their fellow creatures. The poor, and the dispossessed, and the ostracized, and the marginalized and the pissed-on of every sex, gender, color, ethnicity, and creed are going to badly need the sympathy of their fellow citizens and THAT to my mind is a really valuable thing all of us can be doing right now, outside of literally, physically protecting people and keeping them safe. After all, this has happened because the culture we live in is so selfish and so cruel. You guys are uniquely trained, and disposed, and endowed and blessed to be an antidote to that.

I know you know all this, but sometimes it’s useful to organize your thoughts and clarify. The exercise had been useful to me, at any rate.

The good news is, we still have a few weeks, he takes office on January 20 and he is not a young or a well man. Sometimes the fate of the world can depend on a single French fry. And even better news, short term? Speaking of French Fries? you’re in Coney Island! And there is a really awesome genuine Coney Island variety show coming up right after me. Maybe my talk wasn’t as inspirational as might be hoped, but the performers on tonight’s bill really will be.

Thanks for your time and attention. And now on: with the show.