I AM A CLOWN! Literally, figuratively, and proudly.
What clowning taught me about honesty, humanity, and living without armor.
There’s a question I get more often than you’d think. It usually comes after a show, when people are still half-smiling, half-processing the fact that a grown adult just communicated a surprisingly complex idea using nothing but a raised eyebrow and an ill-timed stumble. Someone leans in, a little conspiratorial, and asks, “So, why clowning? What got you into this line of work?”
It’s a great questions, and one that doesn’t just have one answer. Clowning isn’t something people drift into by accident. If anything, it’s a path you walk, against the current of cultural pushback. It’s a career that draws you in because something in you recognizes its importance long before you do.
It’s taken me years to fully understand why I was drawn to it, but I think I can finally put it into words.
Reason #1: Collaboration Vs Competition
The first part of the answer is simple. I’ve never been competitive. I don’t mean that in the self-effacing, I-just-do-this-for-fun way that people say when they lose a board game. I mean it in the bone-deep sense that competition never made sense to me. The whole structure of winning and losing felt like a language I couldn’t speak. That’s the reason why I was never interested in sports. That’s also why I always prefered cooperative board games instead of competitive ones (Happy to give recommendations if that’s a type of board game you’d like to try).
Now, that’s not to say that don’t feel a motivation to push myself and get better. I am motivated by a sense of self competitiveness, not social competitiveness. I desire to be better than I was yesterday, not better than someone else is today.
Sports amplified that feeling. The rules were rigid, the stakes oddly personal, and the whole thing seemed designed to measure one person against another. Even as a kid, I didn’t understand why the point was to beat someone else instead of discovering something together. That’s why I was drawn to theater.
Theater offered its own template. An ensemble is a small, temporary tribe where everyone’s success is tied together. You rely on each other. One person’s breath supports another person’s line. One person’s timing determines another person’s cue. There’s a unity in that kind of work, a shared striving that never asks you to step on anyone else’s toes in order to shine. In theater, no one in the audience is rooting against you (they may root against your character, but that’s a whole different story). There is a shared communal understanding. A shared goal, and a collective creation. I started as a “theater kid”. Then… I discovered the circus!
Circus sharpened that idea into something even more elemental. In circus, the physical demands are undeniable. I have to keep my body in shape, train skills that challenge our assumptions about the limit of human ability, and maintain the discipline required to do the same motion again and again until it finally softens into muscle memory. But unlike the athletic environments I grew up around, circus culture is built from collaboration. You don’t compete with the person in the air next to you. You protect them. You support them. You celebrate when they succeed because their success lifts the entire tent.Photo by Linh Quach on Unsplash
Now, I’m not saying there’s no competition in the circus. Anyone in the performing arts industry can tell you that there is plenty of that. We need to audition to get into the show. We need to perform well in order to get hired. If we’re solo artists, we need to sell ourselves to clients to prove that we are worth their time and investment. However, once the contract is signed, once house opens, and the audience takes their seats. We are all united. A team creating a shared experience together. That is what I love. When someone falters, you catch them both literally and figuratively.
I remember when I was first training at a circus school in Maine, we had a showcase at the end of the school year. Leading up to the show, during training, I fell and got injured. A sprained ankle. Nothing terrible but certainly something that would affect my ability to be in the show. What blew my mind was that everyone’s (yes EVERYONE'S) first reaction was, “Ok how do we rechoregraph so that Andrew doesn’t need to put a lot of weight on that ankle?”
That was their first reaction!
There was no “Whelp, guess you can’t be in the show” or “Looks like we’ll have to get someone else to take your place”. No. None of that. To them, there was only one option from the beginning. How can we work together to make sure everyone shines?
So we did, we re-choreographed a few section, and proceeded to put on a kick-ass show. We had a blast, the audience loved it, and everyone walked away a winner.
That sense of shared risk and shared triumph is part of why I drifted toward circus. Eventually I would go on to create my own one-man show (which I am still touring today), but even though I’m not in a big ensemble, I still carry that sense of collaboration with my colleagues to this day. We regularly get together to train, workshop ideas, and share insights and tips from our experiences on the road. The circus community is my second family.
Reason #2: The historically important roles clowns play
Now I know what you’re probably asking. I’ve heard it many times. After I tell people I’m a clown, after the initial reaction of “haha, very funny, so what do you really do for work? … wait, you’re serious?” I usually get something along the lines of “Why a clown?”
First I want to make a distinction, because there a so many different kinds of clowns. From the white faced clown (known as Clown Blanc) and Auguste clown to the characters from Commedia Dell’arte, there are so many different kinds of clowns. Yes, even scary clowns, which unfortunately has turned a lot of people away from clowning. But I promise, for every single scary clown, there are 99 kind and caring ones. I consider myself a new vaudeville clown. To summarize, I am modern performer reviving the spirit of old-time variety shows, focusing on character-driven, often silent or minimal-dialogue acts that blend mime, physical comedy, juggling, and acting, moving away from traditional circus makeup for more depth and personal connection
But to the original question of “why clowning?” The deeper reason is older than any one performer, older than any one circus. It’s woven into the history of the clown itself.
If you trace back far enough, the clown appears again and again in cultures that never spoke to each other. In Ancient Greece, comedic performers in the marketplace and in early theatrical festivals played the fool for the sake of exposing truth. In medieval Europe, the court jester held a position no one else in the kingdom could replicate. They could tell the king the truth in plain sight, hidden under a layer of absurdity. They could interrupt ceremonies, mock decisions, exaggerate flaws, and make observations that would have been dangerous in any other mouth.
You find similar figures throughout Asia. I.e. the Japanese kyōgen comic servants, the Chinese chǒu characters with their stark white nose patches, the South Asian vidusaka from Sanskrit drama who could question authority with a mischievous innocence that made audiences lean in. In Indigenous traditions across the Americas, trickster figures blend humor, chaos, teaching, and spiritual insight into a single role. Despite being separated by geography and era, they share a common thread: the clown reveals what others conceal.
In every place and every era, the clown was a mirror. A slightly warped mirror, yes, but only so the truth would be visible. They spoke in ways that sidestepped defensiveness. They exposed contradictions not to shame but to illuminate. They held up society’s flaws gently enough that people could laugh at them first, understand them second, and maybe change them third. That lineage matters to me. It gives weight to the silliness. It turns nonsense into a language with its own grammar and purpose.
But there’s one more piece of the puzzle, and it’s the one I return to when the work feels heavy, when the world feels like it has forgotten how to look itself in the eye.
Reason #3: The Importance of Play
Clowns teach people how to play.
It sounds simple. It isn’t.
Play is something we quietly strip from adulthood. We reward seriousness, discipline, efficiency. We applaud busyness and productivity, but rarely curiosity. And then we wonder why creativity dries up. Why imagination gets stunted. Why people lose the ability to laugh at themselves or explore the unknown without fear of looking foolish.
Clowns reintroduce that permission. We remind people that play is not something you grow out of. It’s something you return to when you want to feel fully alive. The clown is the master of experimentation, of trying something simply to see what happens, of leaning into the moment instead of controlling it.
We are professional permission-givers. We let people breathe a little deeper. We show them that failure can be funny, that confusion can be fertile ground, that joy is a legitimate way of understanding the world.
Picture this, a room full of corporate elites sitting in a conference room. Each of them engaging in hushed conversations. I begin my show. 5 minutes later, this room of adults is playing a game of catch with each other using an invisible ball. laughing, playing, and having an absolute blast. Sometimes you just need one person to give them the permission to be silly. And before they know it, they feel like kids again. Engaging, creating, and playing. Simply wonderful.
So when people ask why I chose this path, I think of all of that. The collaboration. The lineage. The play. I think about the moments when someone in the audience suddenly forgets to be self-conscious, or when a child laughs in that unrestrained way that adults forget how to access, or when a room full of strangers suddenly feels like a single, breathing organism.
Clowning is not the path I chose because I wanted to stand out. It’s the path I chose because it aligned with the parts of me that never fit inside competition, hierarchy, or the rigid seriousness of adulthood. It’s a way to stay honest. A way to stay human. A way to help other people remember their own softness.
In a world that asks us to armor ourselves daily, helping people set that weight down, even briefly, feels like meaningful work.
