Between Laughter and Nostalgia Lives the Life of a Clown. His Home is in Front of the Audience. In Search of Emotion, of Empathy, Without Grand Speeches, Without Grand Gestures, Here and Now.
The Life of a Clown
I hate clowns. As a child, the circus made me feel more pity than laughter, and I’ve always thought the best way to talk about it is from a place of tragedy. As Leandre Ribera said, we humans are a bit absurd, and the clown comes to tell us that often emotions have little to do with reason and logic. In real life, we think things over at least twice before doing them, but the clown does not: he reacts immediately to his emotions. Which ones? I don’t know; I would have to be a clown, and I’m not.
It’s understandable to feel that hatred towards clowns when we are young because adults always filled us with fears about characters like the bogeyman or the garbage man. Even though they don’t directly scare us with clowns, their colorful faces and red noses, along with their shrill voices, make it almost impossible not to be afraid of them. That’s why they say:
The Brave Live Until the Coward Wants Additionally, if we’ve had the misfortune of watching those types of movies that give us nightmares, it will only strengthen our fear. We’re screwed because the madness, sadism, vulgarity, and double standards give us a reason to distrust anyone who paints their face with a smile, has a red nose, and wears big shoes. But it’s not out of fear of losing the ring if we drop the soap like in prison; it’s because, literally, “we see faces, but we don’t know hearts.”
Even as we grow up, we always have those memories that, though we laugh about them now, were traumatic in our childhood. Watching clown movies or going to a circus full of clowns echoes in our minds, and even though we’ve grown up, the life of a circus is tragic but also comedic and, when we’re not looking, can even be violent—extremely violent.
Between heaven and hell, between laughter and tears, between a happy face and a sad face, if you cross a death and a destructive love, the result is that the life of any person, even that of clowns, turns out to be a complete movie. Although a confrontation between clowns seems sad to me, the elements of death and a destructive love can turn tragic clowning into a paradigm.
