Tag: Human error
In case you haven’t noticed, I think clowns and physical comedy are like totally RELEVANT and SIGNIFICANT in our modern world because we’re all still pretty dumb at least part of the time, though we’re less likely to admit it, and human error is still titanically inevitable. Which is what clowns have been telling us for several millennia, and the only good news is that we’re still able to laugh about it. So if you need to justify your clown existence to an annoying “friend” or to that condescending uncle, read and steal these quasi-intellectual arguments I wrote about here and here.
Two compilations of “doing it all wrong” moments taken from tv commercials that promise to fix all that.
And other oddly related stuff. A funny piece from 2007 by the novelist and Prairie Home Companion humorist. Just saw this reprinted in Funny Times, which I highly recommend you subscribe to.
Greetings from COP 15, the U.N. climate “Conference Of Parties” in Copenhagen, Denmark. In case you don’t get out much, COP 15 is considered a big deal not only because it was designed to forge an environmental treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, but because global warming trends have proven to be even worse than what the “alarmist” scientists were predicting just a few years ago. Thus not only do all the nations of the world have delegates at the conference, like it or not they have us “unofficial delegates” in town in the form of environmental activists staging their own Klimaforum, and taking to the streets with a variety of theatrics and actions intended to pressure the politicians and hopefully grab some international media attention.
Why We Make Mistakes
by Joseph T. Hallinan
(NY: Broadway Books, 2009); hardcover, 283 pp.
This article with the overly-cute title, which I wrote for Yale Theater magazine some 22 years ago at the behest of editor Joel Schechter, is still the best intro to where I’m coming from on the subject of physical comedy. This was about 11 years after I wrote Clowns, but this time around I had more fun with the writing and tried to make a wider range of connections between performance and the so-called real world. I still like the article, and I welcome your feedback on it.
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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