Tag: Clowns: A Panoramic History
Histories of ancient theatre tend to leave the impression that comedy began with Aristophanes, but Greece already had a rich tradition of commedia-style performance — the Dorian mimes (image, above). As I wrote in chapter two of Clowns…
These Dorian clowns— as well as the short plays they performed —came to be known as
mimes (mimos). Today mime is usually equated with pantomime, the art of silent acting, but originally the word meant “to imitate” and referred to the performer’s talent for caricature; the ancient mimes were in fact quite talkative. Much of the dialogue apparently was improvised, and since the actors saw little need to preserve in writing what was said on stage, these comic dramas never became dramatic literature.
Chapter two (previous post) covered a lot of ground — about twenty centuries and at least four continents — so there’s a ton of potential supplementary material. I’ll just throw a few at you here, and then follow up in my next posts with some free books.
When I started this blog more than two years ago, I thought one thing I would definitely do would be to get my book Clowns, long since out of print, up on the blog so all of you could access it for free. The problem is that doing so involves a lot of tedious work (scanning; optical character recognition; proofreading; layout; etc.), plus I wanted to provide supplementary material for each chapter. Ideally I would rewrite it to improve it (hey, I was 26 at the time!) and bring it up to date, but that possibility will have to wait until I retire, at which point I’ll probably prefer to do something that’s more fun.
As I said in my previous post, I have a bunch of additional material relevant to each of the twelve chapters of Clowns. This is especially true of Chapter 5, because it focuses on physical comedy. In fact, you could view this entire blog as Chapter 5 supplemental material! In addition, I’m still a huge fan of the Hanlon-Lees and I could overwhelm you with stuff on them, but I’m going to wait for the publication this fall of Mark Codson’s book (see below) to dive back into their work.
Finally I get to answer all those questions I’ve been getting for over 30 years!
Chapter 5 from my book, Clowns: A Panoramic History
One more background piece. This chapter from my 1976 history of clowns dealt in detail with the development of physical comedy in the nineteenth century and, ultimately, its influence on American silent film comedy. Good stuff!
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Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin