Philippe Gaulier and the paradox of clowning

The Great Clown, who has died, taught us to find failure funny

Photo by Hannes Magerstaedt/Getty Images

To talk about the Great Clowns, when you have never actually clowned, is to be a five year-old talking about the solar system, but as far as I understand it, you either trained with Jacques Lecoq, or with Philippe Gaulier, who has just passed away at 82. Like Jung with Freud, Gaulier was once Lecoq’s student, but branched out in the pursuit of something more. He called this “the game”: spontaneity, play – and the idea that it only really starts working when it’s going wrong.

The Gaulier school is outside Paris, in a little town, and you pay thousands of euros to do the full training, which is two years long. Most of the funniest clowns working today – Natalie Palamides, John Norris, Garry Starr and Viggo Venn (from Britain’s Got Talent) trained with Gaulier, as did Sacha Baron Cohen, to name one of the many celebrity alumni. Gaulier taught through “negation” – of the ego, among other things. He banged a drum to bring you on, and he banged a drum to send you off. If you were unwilling to be “small” in front of him, you might never get on at all. It was normal to hear him say stuff like, “What are you doing? No one is laughing.” A friend worked with him 30 years ago, when he was in middle age, and he already looked like an old man. “He was withdrawn and droll, and the sadism was in the game itself,” he told me.

People talk about Gaulier’s eery intuition, his ability to see an Achilles heel. He would often “choose” your clown for you, based on what he could see in you, furnishing a trainee with, say, a pair of flippers and a snorkel – this must have been quite annoying if you turned up with your own ideas. When the British clown Marny Godden, one of the funniest I have seen on stage, attended a Gaulier course in Manchester, she was first a “monster” in the great man’s eyes, and then a “bitch” (“I am not scarred.”) The week wore on, and Godden hadn’t been funny once. Then she did an impression of her Dutch grandmother saying “help me”, and Gaulier laughed. She was voted Best Clown by the other trainees in the final show, but he denied her the accolade, because she had laughed at her own joke too.

“Every day in clowning is a fresh nightmare,” Godden tells me. “But every day is also a chance to strike gold. It is an extreme sport. It is addictive. When you fall you really fall hard, but when you fly, you really fly high.”

The process of breaking down and building back up still sounds somewhat alien to me, like the primal scream. But every one of us, in adulthood, is on constant guard against the silent panic, whether we are conscious of it or not – it haunts our offices, our interactions and our homes. When Philippe Gaulier said you could access your innermost child by putting on a red nose, he wasn’t just talking about being funny. One of the biggest lessons a child learns in early life is shame – and clowns work with shame all the time. “You are not just trying to make people laugh,” one clown, who wishes to remain anonymous, told me. “You are learning to be okay when people don’t laugh”.

I would like to live more like this. Clowns are taught to relish ”the flop”, as they call it: the silence that follows a joke that falls flat. They learn to trust that they have a host of other things – in their back pocket, in their psyche – that they can pull out and try instead. If something fails, they don’t close up and move away with dignity intact, as most of us try to. They remain connected, hold eye contact with everyone in the room, while being even more stupid, and expressing themselves even more freely, than they were before.

[Further reading: How “Wuthering Heights” seduced its readers]