Discovering the Clown or The Funny Book of Good Acting by Christopher Bayes (review)

Christopher Bayes’s new book communicates his unique philosophy and pedagogy of the contemporary clown. Bayes is a prominent teacher who is perhaps best known as head of Physical Acting at Yale, but he also has his own, smaller New York–based school and a long list of professional credits. His status within the world of physical actor training warrants understanding his training methods. Having taken a class with Bayes, and multiple ones with Virginia Scott (who helped Bayes with the book), I can state that Discovering the Clown captures the essence of his clown teaching. It is important to note that the book is less a manual and more a philosophy of clowning as demonstrated through exercises and coaching techniques. At its root, Bayes’s clowning centers on approaching experiences in life and then onstage with openness, innocence, and joy. Clown training then is de-socializing or de-conditioning in order to rediscover one’s “fun.” He makes this clear through the four sections of the book.

The first two sections set the ground work for the later clown-specific exercises. Part 1 focuses on the body and rediscovering a sense of impulse. As Bayes states, “before you can discover the clown you must embark on the process of undoing, un-growing up, and de-socializing” (6). Exercises in this section range from his passing energy game “Buh,” to games of tag, to improvising group songs, to a group exercise that involves participants sharing laughter that builds to the whole room laughing. All of these aim to loosen what inhibits the body, particularly the shame of expressing big emotions and vulnerability. In the second part, Bayes offers strategies for creating comic material. He uses playful terms and exercises to help the reader understand his theories. For example, “Smell the Barn” and “Mr. Shotgun” describe two related challenges of performing. The former is Bayes’s term for actors who are eager to leave the stage, and the latter for actors that seem like they are forced to be onstage. With these terms, Bayes playfully stresses that the comic emerges when performers find joy and pleasure onstage, instead of sharing anxiety and fear. In his exercise “The Most Beautiful Thing in the World,” students must describe an imaginary “something” that is just offstage. The exercise is not about being clever or even revealing the “thing,” but finding “the poetic body,” or “the body’s ability to express wonder and bliss” (72). Once the body is open to spontaneous and unruly fun, the clown work can begin. As Bayes states, “[t]he clown comes from a poetic world and is the unsocialized idiot in all of its innocence and beauty” (71). These first two sections pave the way for this idiot to emerge.

Parts 3 and 4 are where Bayes lays out how actors “find” their clowns and how to deploy them. This word choice is important, because for him, the clown is not something that is created in a conscious way as is a character, but is already within a person and they can use his strategies to find it. More than anything, Bayes feels that the intellect often gets in the way. He writes that “[t]he clown does not live in the clever or desperate muscles. It lives in your simple, little hopeful lemon-headed vulnerability” (50). Bayes engages with what he sees as the technical details of clowning, such as how the iconic small red nose functions as a mask that reveals instead of conceals vulnerability, but argues that it is the feedback from and relationship with an audience that is most essential to both the creation and performance of a clown. He argues that “[e]verything is for the audience. Everything” (101). For Bayes, a person cannot create a clown in isolation or through reading. Part 3 then offers less in the way of group exercises and more of his experiences with and strategies...