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Bring on the Clowns
Down the ages clowns have captured the laughter of adult and child alike with their absurd dress, bizarre antics and a brand of humor whose universality has stood the test of centuries. In this extensive study of clowns and clowning, Beryl Hugill draws the parallels between ancient and modern clowns and traces the story of clowning from its origins in the ancient world of Egypt, China and India, through the padded buffoons of Greek drama and the dwarfed and deformed figures that populated royal households, to the era of court jesters, and describes their function and role in society and the form of their entertainment. Here in one major performance are all the world’s clowns – carpet and run-in clowns of the circuses, the splendidly dressed white-faced clowns, the hobo clowns; Beryl Hugill reveals the secrets of their techniques, tells why they use the dress, make-up and props they do, and describes the great individual acts of the international world of the clown.
224 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1980
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 30, 2024
“One characteristic of clowns is that they do not use a script. There are standard routines, some very ancient, which are passed on from clown to clown; dialogue for them is rarely, if ever, written down. When one reads the few routines which have been set down, it is impossible to appreciate their humor without the magic ability of the clown to give them life. The key element is improvisation, rather than the scenario on which it is based—a tradition hat goes back to the Renaissance” (10).
“The actual word ‘clown’ did not enter the language until the sixteenth century. It is of Low German origin and means a countryman or peasant. Its original meaning is allied in sense to the word for a Dutch or German farmer, ‘boor,’ from which we get the adjective ‘boorish.’ So ‘clown’ meant someone who was doltish or ill-bred” (14).
“The white face is said to have originated in early seventeenth-century Paris, where a baker named Gros-Guillaume (Fat William) was applauded for his low comic acting in farces. He performed at fairs and, later, with renowned theatre companies at the Hotel de Bourgogne, his face still covered in flour after a strenuous day’s work. Audiences were amused by his habit of blowing the flour off his face and nicknamed him le farine. The practice of wearing a white face was popularized by later clowns at French fairs and was adopted by Debuface at the Funambules Thater in Paris” (15).
“The auguste is never complete without his bulbous rubber nose. This practice stemmed from the nineteenth-century augustes who would paint their noses red if they wished to portray a drunk” (15).
Mystery plays: “The Devil wore a costume of leather, hair, or black cloth and a grotesque mask” (70).
“Later, in the 1800s, came the development of the love-lorn, pathetic Pierrot by Jean=-Gaspard Deburau, who dominated Paris’s Theatre des Funambules” (111).
“Deburau had been born in Bohemia—then under Austrian rule, now part of Czechoslovakia. He was the youngest member of a family of touring acrobats and spent a rootless childhood in a Europe battered by the Napoleonic wars. Deburau’s mother died young and he grew into a tall, dreamy, taciturn fellow---a clumsy acrobat, ridiculed by his more agile brothers and sisters.
The family settled in Paris in1814, and eight years later Deburau began to appear with his father at the Funambules as a buffoon with a talent for elegant and savage mimicry, in 1826, when he was 30 years old, his father died, leaving him free to sign his own contract with the theatre to play Pierrot, the white-faced clown” (111).
“Pierrot was one of the characters in the harlequinade, a type of play featuring the ever-popular Harlequin, brought to France by the Italian commedia dell’arte. The tale was a simple one of virtuous young love between Harlequin and Columbine, thwarted by parents and rivals, Pantaloon and Pierrot, Scaramouch and Clown. The rival was comically and heartlessly pursued, assaulted and betrayed throughout the pantomime until the final scene of reconciliation
Before Deburau’s time, the Pierrot was a loosely-defined clown figure in the Italian comedy—a figure of fun identified with Gros-Gullaume, the French fool who played in front of Cardinal Richelieu with a face covered with baker’s flour” (111).
“Deburau’s performances of Pierrot gained a cult following among the French. In his skillful hands, the character changed from one of country-bumpkin innocence to one endowed with a measure of cunning. Yet at the same time his Pierrot could convey the pathos of the human condition” (112).
“Without words, he depended on startling visual methods of communication. These included cascades, or balletic fights, sauts, startling and often dangerous leaps up and down counter-weighted trap doors, and truck, bizarre, instant changes of scenery or props so that a cooling ice cream, say, might be transformed into a flickering Roman candle in Pierrot’s hand” (112).
“Grimaldi’s success can be summed up in that elusive concept ‘style.’ To the eighteenth-century man or woman, style was all important; it did not matter what you did so much as how you did it” (123).
“the auguste’s traditions of red wig and grotesque make-up” (154).
“The actual word ‘clown’ did not enter the language until the sixteenth century. It is of Low German origin and means a countryman or peasant. Its original meaning is allied in sense to the word for a Dutch or German farmer, ‘boor,’ from which we get the adjective ‘boorish.’ So ‘clown’ meant someone who was doltish or ill-bred” (14).
“The white face is said to have originated in early seventeenth-century Paris, where a baker named Gros-Guillaume (Fat William) was applauded for his low comic acting in farces. He performed at fairs and, later, with renowned theatre companies at the Hotel de Bourgogne, his face still covered in flour after a strenuous day’s work. Audiences were amused by his habit of blowing the flour off his face and nicknamed him le farine. The practice of wearing a white face was popularized by later clowns at French fairs and was adopted by Debuface at the Funambules Thater in Paris” (15).
“The auguste is never complete without his bulbous rubber nose. This practice stemmed from the nineteenth-century augustes who would paint their noses red if they wished to portray a drunk” (15).
Mystery plays: “The Devil wore a costume of leather, hair, or black cloth and a grotesque mask” (70).
“Later, in the 1800s, came the development of the love-lorn, pathetic Pierrot by Jean=-Gaspard Deburau, who dominated Paris’s Theatre des Funambules” (111).
“Deburau had been born in Bohemia—then under Austrian rule, now part of Czechoslovakia. He was the youngest member of a family of touring acrobats and spent a rootless childhood in a Europe battered by the Napoleonic wars. Deburau’s mother died young and he grew into a tall, dreamy, taciturn fellow---a clumsy acrobat, ridiculed by his more agile brothers and sisters.
The family settled in Paris in1814, and eight years later Deburau began to appear with his father at the Funambules as a buffoon with a talent for elegant and savage mimicry, in 1826, when he was 30 years old, his father died, leaving him free to sign his own contract with the theatre to play Pierrot, the white-faced clown” (111).
“Pierrot was one of the characters in the harlequinade, a type of play featuring the ever-popular Harlequin, brought to France by the Italian commedia dell’arte. The tale was a simple one of virtuous young love between Harlequin and Columbine, thwarted by parents and rivals, Pantaloon and Pierrot, Scaramouch and Clown. The rival was comically and heartlessly pursued, assaulted and betrayed throughout the pantomime until the final scene of reconciliation
Before Deburau’s time, the Pierrot was a loosely-defined clown figure in the Italian comedy—a figure of fun identified with Gros-Gullaume, the French fool who played in front of Cardinal Richelieu with a face covered with baker’s flour” (111).
“Deburau’s performances of Pierrot gained a cult following among the French. In his skillful hands, the character changed from one of country-bumpkin innocence to one endowed with a measure of cunning. Yet at the same time his Pierrot could convey the pathos of the human condition” (112).
“Without words, he depended on startling visual methods of communication. These included cascades, or balletic fights, sauts, startling and often dangerous leaps up and down counter-weighted trap doors, and truck, bizarre, instant changes of scenery or props so that a cooling ice cream, say, might be transformed into a flickering Roman candle in Pierrot’s hand” (112).
“Grimaldi’s success can be summed up in that elusive concept ‘style.’ To the eighteenth-century man or woman, style was all important; it did not matter what you did so much as how you did it” (123).
“the auguste’s traditions of red wig and grotesque make-up” (154).
Displaying 1 of 1 review