Sevrin Willinder spent about ten weeks failing at clown school. The method at Philippe Gaulier’s school in France involves a teacher with a drum and a supply of insults. Willinder was not even being insulted, which was worse. The drum would sound and the next student would get up. He felt invisible.
Then he was handed four dense pages of Chekhov with two days to learn them. He decided that was impossible. So he planned to know roughly what he was saying, paraphrase, and commit so hard that everyone would be impressed.
“I failed spectacularly, but I kept trying.”
Sevrin Willinder
The room came apart laughing. He remembers feeling wonderful and having no idea what he had done. Read our interview with Sevrin Willinder.
Clown school has very little to do with red noses and circuses. It is a kind of training in being watched, and a surprising number of the stand-ups and solo performers we interview have been through it. This piece collects what they say it taught them.
Jump to: What clown school is · Do not try to be funny · The flop · Nowhere to hide · The body · The audience is the genius · Against looking cool · Six rules · Common questions
What clown school actually is
The best-known school is Philippe Gaulier’s, in France. Students perform in front of the class and are told, bluntly, when they are boring. Lauren LoGiudice trained there, and so did Brendon Lemon and Willinder. LoGiudice describes it as improv on steroids, built around welcoming failure. Her memory of the teaching is a furious Frenchman with a drum, making it very clear that he did not want to hear another word from her. Read our interview with LoGiudice and her two co-stars.
You do not have to go to France. Rebecca Wolf took one clown class during a theatre degree and was told she had a knack for it. In New York she went every week to a drop-in class called Clown Gym, which cost about forty dollars and had a different teacher each time. “It broke me wide open.” Read our interview with Rebecca Wolf.
Lemon began with a class in New York in 2022 and went to Paris two years later. Paul Elia took a class, fell for it, and hired a clown coach to work on his stand-up. “I respect clown,” he told us. “People are sleeping on clowns.” Read our interview with Paul Elia.
Britt Anderson of Whisper Theatre moved to Chicago to study improv, hoping for Saturday Night Live, and found clown there. She took a master’s degree in physical theatre. Chloe Matonis is studying a satirical branch of clown, and says watching a clown cabaret changed her idea of what a stage could be. Read our interview with Whisper Theatre and Chloe Matonis.
Lesson one: do not try to be funny
The line every Gaulier student seems to carry home is an insult. Willinder quotes it like this.
“Don’t try to be funny. You’ve never been funny in your life.”
Philippe Gaulier, as Sevrin Willinder recalls it
He disliked it at first. Then he worked out what it meant. It is a warning against performing cheekiness at an audience. What works is being truly vulnerable inside a ridiculous situation.
A second teacher at the school gave him the other half. “At any given moment, I can’t change if I’m a good actor or not, but I can change if I’m having fun.” You cannot take a six-month acting course in the middle of a show. You can decide to enjoy yourself. He now puts both lessons in one line: do not try to be funny, have fun.
It matches how he found out he was a clown in the first place. At drama school he was playing a piano repairman in a serious scene. His teacher told him to play something well and then act as though it sounded terrible. He did. The room laughed and he did not understand why.
Lesson two: the flop
Clown has a word for the moment an act collapses in front of people. It is called the flop, and the training is in what you do next.
Brendon Lemon says the flop is frightening because you cannot hide it. The discipline is to stay inside the feeling until the next idea arrives. What loses an audience is not the failure. “It’s only when you start to hide, or run away, or try to get out of the moment — that’s when they feel abandoned, because you’ve abandoned them.” Read our interview with Brendon Lemon.
LoGiudice says the same about stand-up. “There’s no bomb unless you bomb yourself. If you connect with the audience, you can’t bomb.”
Willinder’s Chekhov scene is the flop working as intended. He failed in full view, did not stop, and that was the funny part. He also thinks the attitude might have saved the worst gig of his life, a children’s show at a juvenile detention centre where not one joke landed. We have more on that in how 21 comedians survived bombing on stage.
Lesson three: there is nowhere to hide
Lemon had been a stand-up for twenty years before he took a clown class. What he noticed was how much a stand-up can hide behind. You have the act to fall back on and a microphone stand to hold. You can look over everybody’s heads. Clown takes all of that away. “In clown you have to connect.”
He says it shook him out of a kind of laziness on stage, and it changed how he stands at a microphone. One of his Edinburgh shows is now nothing but crowd work, different every day, with no stock of prepared comebacks. The plan is to build the parachute on the way down, and he says clown is what makes that possible.
LoGiudice credits the training with removing the barrier between her and the audience. She needed it. She had spent three years doing stand-up in character as Melania Trump, which left her, in her own view, with a lot of bad habits. Clown was how she got rid of them. Her co-star Wayne Charles II points to the result. “We all use the whole stage.”
Lesson four: the body tells the truth
Wolf is a talker, and clown made her stop relying on it.
“You can say the words however you want, but your body shows the audience — and shows yourself — if you really mean it. I recommend clown to everyone, performer or not.”
Rebecca Wolf
She also learned something about herself. Clown exercises play with high and low status, and hers turned out to be very comfortable in charge. That is what lets her run a show in which audience members play the characters and she has to keep the story on track.
Elia’s coach, Chad Damiani, helped him find more moments of physical comedy in a stand-up act that had been mostly words. Richie Schiraldi of Whisper Theatre came to performing from sport, and describes the day he met juggling, tumbling and clowning at college. “Oh, this is theatrical sport. This is speaking a language that is somewhere inside of me.”
Lesson five: the audience is the genius
There is no fourth wall in clown. Wolf says that forces a question most performers never ask. “Clown urges you to think about what the audience is feeling.” So she asked why her show was interesting for them, and decided it would be more interesting if they were in it.
Liz Coin brings a volunteer on stage every night and says it never fails, because of one rule.
“The secret to audience participation is: the audience needs to look like a genius.”
Liz Coin
People dread being picked because they dread being humiliated. So the volunteer has to be the clever one and she has to be the idiot. “You want to make them brilliant.” Read our interview with Liz Coin.
Willinder’s whole show is built on that. He pulls people out of the audience for an hour, and what he hopes for is small and specific: that two strangers in the room make friends. For the same idea in another form, see how improv makes stand-ups better.
Lesson six: stop trying to look cool
Coin sees a problem in New York comedy, which is that everyone wants to look cool. Her clown training pushes her the other way.
“I strive to be the thing on stage that you are here in the audience to laugh at.”
Liz Coin
It gets her labelled an alternative comic, and purists who want joke after joke do not always enjoy it. She says the two forms use different parts of her brain. On a stand-up stage she wants to seem witty and prepared. As a clown she wants to seem like an accident.
Tom Johnson, a British actor and sketch performer, has the same taste without the training. People who are afraid of looking foolish, he says, are letting their ego get in the way. “I like people to look like the idiot.” Read our interview with Tom Johnson.
CeeKay Brown does stand-up as herself and a clown act in a beard. She knows which is easier. “When I wore a costume I felt less scared.” Of stand-up she says, “The character of yourself is so much harder to play.” Read our interview with CeeKay Brown.
Six rules stand-ups can take from clown
- Have fun first. Willinder’s line. You cannot become a better performer during a set, but you can choose to enjoy it, and audiences can tell.
- Stay in the flop. When a joke dies, do not rush past it. Lemon and LoGiudice both say the room only leaves when you do.
- Let go of the stand. Look at people. Use the stage. Charles’s note about his own show applies to anyone.
- Check what your body is saying. Wolf’s lesson. If your words say one thing and your shoulders say another, the audience believes the shoulders.
- Make the volunteer the clever one. Coin’s rule for any crowd work or audience participation.
- Be the idiot. Looking cool gets respect. Looking foolish gets laughs.
For more on the forms these performers move between, see solo show or stand-up set and comedy duos, couples and ensembles.
Common questions about clown school
What is clown school?
It is training in physical comedy and in being present with an audience. Students perform exercises in front of a class and get direct, often harsh, feedback. It has little to do with circus clowns.
Who is Philippe Gaulier?
He is a French clown teacher whose school in France has trained many well-known comic performers. Three of the comedians we interviewed studied there.
Does clown training help stand-up comedians?
The stand-ups we spoke to say it does. They credit it with better connection to the audience, less fear of a joke failing, and more use of the body and the stage.
Do you have to go to France to study clown?
No. Several performers told us they started with a single class or a cheap weekly drop-in session in their own city, and one hired a clown coach to work on his stand-up.
For more conversations like these, see all our comedian interviews.