Do all clowns need the nose to be a clown? What qualifies as a clown?
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No, the nose is not needed. All they need to do is just clownery.
I think @ChaoticDeluge qualifies as a clown.
Usually just a weird*ss idiot in make up and bright clothing
You stole the joke I was gonna make
I did a little bit of clowning when I was going to go into acting full-time. It was very basic stuff because I was being taught by someone who was doing a degree at RADA, rather than actually going to the drama school myself. Plus, we only had about 3 hours a week to cover everything! We did masks and stage combat and Brecht and Chekhov and everything!
But the essential element of learning the art of clowning properly (for an actual circus performance, not just dressing up in a wig and a weird nose for a birthday party) is pretty simple:
A normal clown experiences everything in the world for the first time. The revel in discovery. They’re excited by everything. They’re innocent. They explore the things that we take for granted! That means a lot of experimenting. Plus, they don’t show or feel pain, so you don’t need to feel bad when they mess up.
There are also dark clowns that are a lot weirder. My drama teacher put it this way: A dark clown (I can’t remember if that’s the proper term) experiences pain. They feel all the emotions that a normal human being does instead of being curiosity in human form like a normal clown. However, someone’s got their family tied up with a gun to their heads back stage and they need to make you laugh to keep them alive. That means they get really desperate when you don’t laugh and are ok with hurting themselves if you get a kick out of it. Hearing you laugh encourages them. That makes the audienece feel obligated to laugh and feel kinda invested in the clown’s story.
Personally, I prefer performing the second one because I’m an edge lord.
But that doesn’t matter anymore because I wasn’t really any good at acting and I ended up quitting.
D A R K C L O W N
Sounds like a rad fantasy story, ngl >.<
Bump because we all are clowns
What qualifies as a clown?
Yep, that’s pretty much it…
Bump!
I’m in an intensive drama program at my high school. In grade 10, we do clown during the first semester. We explored different aspects of ourselves before hand and did a bunch of wacky exercises, but then we began to develop a physicality and once our teacher thought we were ready, we were given our noses (that day is now our clown birthday). The nose then acted as a way for us to transfer ourselves into the physicality of our clown. For me, the best parts of clown was that the clowns like to break the fourth wall (for those of you who aren’t familiar with theatrical terms, the fourth wall is the invisible wall that separates the actors on stage and the audience). Long story short, in my opinion, party clowns and actual clowns are different. There’s a lot more work in actual clowning.