Clowns and the Theater of the Absurd

The Court Jester of Tabbyland, Harry Whittier Frees, 1922

"You’d make me laugh if it wasn’t prohibited.” -Waiting for Godot

In one ancient bit of clownery, a fool tries to teach his donkey to go without food, and he bemoans his fate that as soon as his donkey learns the trick, he dies. The clown is naïve and doesn't see the link between cause and effect, and maybe we laugh because we know how he feels.

This example comes from The Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin, where he explores the ways that the spirit of the theater of the absurd can be traced through the history of clowns. Esslin was the one who coined the phrase “theatre of the absurd” to describe the illogical and often comical plays of Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, and so forth. Esslin quotes another scholar, Hermann Reich, who proposed that the clown (from antiquity to the present day) is someone whose "absurd behavior arises from his inability to understand the simplest logical relations." (Esslin 330)

Clown plays and performances aren’t “bound by any of the strict rules of the regular tragedy or comedy." (331) You could include as many characters as you wanted, forgo plot, start juggling for no reason. The history of clowns includes jesters, harlequins, mimes. Esslin finds their descendants in the crosstalk of vaudeville routines, and later in the deadpan performances of silent film stars like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. In fact, Esslin thinks silent film comedy was vital to the theater of the absurd, because of its "dreamlike strangeness of a world seen from the outside with the uncomprehending eyes of one cut off from reality. It has the quality of nightmare." (335)

This nightmare-reality that swept away Beckett and friends continues to influence some genres of horror. It appears in David Lynch's work, and maybe the theater of the absurd and silent film influence is most clear in Eraserhead. When Henry visits his girlfriend's family, their household of squirming roast chickens and unmoving kitchen grandmothers and startling birth announcements makes perfect sense to them, but to Henry and the viewer, it's unearthly and horrific.

I also think that a strain of weird and cosmic horror has roots in the theater of the absurd and the ancient fool of comedy. With its tropes of marionettes and evil clowns and tentacled terrors whose presence seems so obvious in retrospect, weird horror unsettles us with the menace of a painted grimace. I think ideally, weird and cosmic horror keeps revising itself, because the beauty is in the surprise. And yet, what remains is the sense of the absurd...the humor of being creatures whose expectations and understanding are constantly thwarted.

Esslin also draws our attention to Shakespeare's clowns, notably the Fool in King Lear who is the only one who can knock any sense into Lear. And yet, he's a Fool...he can't prevent the tragedy that's coming. He can only make jokes and hope someone is listening.

With its absurdist humor and self-deprecating hopelessness, Eliot's Prufrock tells us:

"No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool."

Rather than Hamlet, Prufrock sees himself as Polonius, a fool trying to offer his frivolous advice as the tragic figures around him confront heroic torments. The fool is the comic relief, and we can relax when we’re in his presence as he pokes fun at the illogic of existence.

There’s so much to talk about here, and I’m not writing a dissertation, but I’ll keep returning to this idea of the absurd and its relationship to the stories I love. Esslin found clowning in the spirited banter of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in the illogical reactions of robbers who find themselves tasked to cook meals in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, and in the non sequiturs of Ionesco’s The Band Soprano.

I love it when comedy and tragedy are combined, forgoing genre rules in absurdist speculative stories by the likes of Shirley Jackson, Ralph Ellison, Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, Barbara Comyns, Kurt Vonnegut, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Kafka, to name a handful. Similarly, in addition to Lynch, you find unsettling, funny, existential humor in films by Luis Buñuel and Stanley Kubrick and Jean Cocteau and Ingmar Bergman, among others. Feel free to recommend more.

For those depressed by the absurd, Ionesco offers some comfort:

“To attack the absurdity is a way of stating the possibility of non-absurdity…Nothing makes me feel more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic. I feel that every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.” (Esslin 198)

Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359954.The_Theatre_of_the_Absurd