Clowning began in the distant Middle Ages, when traveling circuses needed to fill a free gap between numbers. For this purpose, clowns were used, funny jesters who cheered up the audience with their jokes, as well as acrobatic, juggling and other tricks. Now clowning is a full-fledged branch in the circus genre. Often clowns perform on stage with separate numbers.
What happens clowning?
Basically, clowns enter the arena of the circus all the same between the main numbers and fill in with their performance the time needed to remove from the stage (arena) props from the previous number and prepare the props for the next. But the clowning in some circuses has such a scope and can boast of such masters to make people laugh, that many, sometimes, go to the circus just to laugh at the clowns and their tricks.
Clowns come in many forms. Now in the circus you can see:
- Buffon clowns playing on a sharp exaggeration of some character traits, individual traits of appearance, feelings.
- Musical clowns creating reprises based on playing various kinds of musical instruments and singing.
- Naughty clowns that can combine different genres of clowning.
- Trainer clowns building their numbers on the participation of trained animals and birds.
- Clowns of satirists, who make themselves clumsy and ugly clumsy and absurd, making the audience laugh precisely because of the absurdity in their behavior.
- Mime clowns, who are well versed in the art of working with inanimate objects, however visible to the public.
Where and how are clowns used in addition to the circus and their main feature
Clowning is not only the art of filling and amusing the audience during a circus reprise. Very often, clowns are invited to participate in other comedy shows. An example can be the same Alexander Morozov (clown So) from the well-known "Petrosyan show" (the current "Curved Mirror"). Many clowns separately perform their numbers in some performances.
Their main difference from other satirists and humorists is the make-up applied to the face in such a way as to grotesquely emphasize either facial expressions or some facial features. The same can be said about their costumes. Each clown has his own outfit and his own, so to speak, “war paint”, but, regardless of the reprise, they always enter the arena in their unchanged role.
Exceptions
Many clowns do not use makeup at all. For example, the well-known Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) believes that he has such a face and facial expressions that even without "grotesque amplification" he can wrap his facial expressions in such a way that makeup will only interfere with him. And this is certainly true. Meanwhile, Atkinson is a real clown and a master of his craft, and he never worked in a circus. Yes, he is considered to be a comic actor, but for a simple layman, all his antics is a real clowning in which he has become so skilled that he has become an unsurpassed master of his craft. Sometimes it seems that his whole life is nothing more than an endless circus of clownery.
Clowning Masters
But if a clownery whose meaning is recorded on Wikipedia as “a circus genre consisting of comic scenes performed by clowns introducing buffoonery and clowning techniques into them”, this is just an offshoot of theatrical or circus art, then for many artists it was more than just "Circus genre." Among them are such outstanding personalities as Marcel Marceau - the once famous world beef clown Bip, Oleg Popov, better known in our country as the “Sun Clown”, Konstantin Bergman, who was not fixated on any one role and was at the same time good at all, Charles Wettah, better known as the clown Grock, the famous lyceum Slava Polunin and, of course, one of the most famous masters in our country - Yuri Nikulin. Each of them could say that clowning is much more than just art. For them it was the very meaning of life.
The image of a clown in the modern genre "Horror"
But it’s no secret that a clown can quickly scare a person as well as make him laugh. It’s very scary for many people to feel close to a person, under whose makeup it is absolutely impossible to guess his expression and facial expressions.
In horror movies, clowning is like a separate genre in the branch of the film industry. How many horror clowns do you have on Hollywood account? Do not count. The number of “fearing clowns” (according to the scientific fear of clowns is called coulrophobia) increased especially after Stephen King wrote his two-volume blockbuster entitled “It”, where some archaic and terrible creature, under the guise of a clown, stole children in the town of Derry, Maine. Therefore, now clowns, alas, are perceived by a simple layman no longer with such optimism as before.
But why should we be afraid? Or, nevertheless, is there anything? ..