>>5729803>>5729833Clowns are a manifestation of the Carnivalesque, what in art and literature may sometimes be called Grotesque Realism. The theme that is being explored is the balance between language and behaviour that is permitted and language that is not. Many festivities, performances and occasions are really constricted rituals enacted to furnish, enforce and maintain a legacy for authority, whilst others are authentic celebrations of joy and life. The Carnivalesque, and the focus upon the grotesque, is actually a means of restoring reality to occasions as opposed to the artificial hierarchies and deferential strictures and contrivances that characterise everyday interaction, eg the upending of formality from slapstick mishap. Crude anatomical humour, focusing open elements of the body, or what protrudes from the body, what enters or leaves its orifices, is actually a sublimated expression of the belief in the purity, naivety and innocence of the self (ie the body) versus the outside world, which is often perceived to be threatening or corrupt. I believe in literature Falstaff is an exemplar of the clown, perhaps also Rabelais (I have not read him though). The bawdy, indelicate, uninhibited and coarse humour of the Carnivalesque is paradoxically an expression of honesty and innocence, for it is humour based upon an appeal to the body and bodily functions possessed by all, unlike the self-conscious thoughts of the purportedly sophisticated intellectual, who has to maintain a fatiguing facade of inoffensive humourlessness, ingratiating dissemblances, in order to appear presentable to a wider swathe of respectable society.
>Clown womenThis one is quite difficult, the only one that springs immediately to mind might be that jester girl from Soul Calibur, the one with the spinning hoop blade? I was never really into her moveset she was difficult / unintuitive to use (I admit, button-mash) Perhaps there is some more obvious archetype??