non-viable shows, propped up financially by regional government in the belief that they are culturally necessary. In 2004, I saw a show by a big burly man, who looked like Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh, playing a bagpipe made out of the untreated carcass of a pig from the pulpit of a church in an isolated mountainside village, while his female partner clowned around in the aisles, Noel Fielding style, in a red hat, which was by turns hilarious and moving. In 2003, despite my initial reservations, we followed a troupe of state-subsidised drama-student types pretending to be the mentally and physically handicapped outcasts of medieval French society, as they loped through the labyrinthine alleyways and squares of a tiny mountaintop citadel, causing licensed mischief in the twilight. The event was called Bouffinades en Circulades and was staged every night for two weeks in September in different little rural villages, and appeared to recreate a medieval tradition where the village’s social rejects were allowed, for one night only, to run free and mock the core values of their superiors. The French clowning master and revered theatrical theorist Jacques Lecoq, whose shadow hangs heavily over loads of polo-necked types who studied physical theatre in the eighties anywhere in Europe, repopularised the forgotten term ‘bouffon’ to describe the physical embodiment of ‘mockery’ in clowning and theatre in the early sixties.
In the village we followed the bouffons from house to house, from square to square, from business to business, and outside each one they would stage a semi-improvisedsketch, an especially beautiful one being something to do with animals in the stable of a farm building, where they were all lit by flickering candles. Outside the butcher’s the bouffons mocked the butcher, outside the baker’s they mocked the baker, and outside the town hall they mocked the mayor, all in a variety of costumes, declaiming comic verse in French which we were unfortunately too ignorant to understand. But outside the church, even the licentious bouffons were cautious. A circle was drawn in the dirt before the church and the performers huddled inside it, dressed as bishops and priests, waving crucifixes, and an audible frisson rippled through the audience.
I was thrilled, not in some adolescent way, about to enjoy a gratuitous mockery of religion, but because something essential about what stand-up was had suddenly, by association, become clear. The bouffons were in a charmed circle, perhaps under the protection of serpents, in a sacred and clearly delineated space where they were free to work their magic without interference. The director of The Aristocrats , Paul Provenza, once told me he saw the stage of a stand-up club as a giant pair of inverted commas, framing the performer, saying ‘what is being said here is only being said, not actually done, so judge it accordingly’. Could there be any clearer image for the special privileges of the comedian than this moment, where the clowns marked out their own unassailable territory in the very shadow of the church, the great forbidder that binds with briars our joys and desires?
I’m eternally grateful for the combination of chance, coincidence, French regional-arts funding and my then girlfriend’s instinctive theatrical good taste that allowed me to witness that moment. It made me certain of something , convinced me that I was on the right track, and I’mnot sure what I’d be doing now had I not encountered it. Like seeing Ted Chippington open for The Fall in 1984, this was, twenty years later, an absolutely key moment for me as a comedian. I could do anything I wanted. I was in a charmed circle.
But as well as the supposed intellectual theory behind the bouffons’ show, the spatial relations of the performance also excited me. Like the Native American Pueblo clowns of the Hopi, the Zuni and the Tewa, of whom I had read much but never been fortunate enough to
In the village we followed the bouffons from house to house, from square to square, from business to business, and outside each one they would stage a semi-improvisedsketch, an especially beautiful one being something to do with animals in the stable of a farm building, where they were all lit by flickering candles. Outside the butcher’s the bouffons mocked the butcher, outside the baker’s they mocked the baker, and outside the town hall they mocked the mayor, all in a variety of costumes, declaiming comic verse in French which we were unfortunately too ignorant to understand. But outside the church, even the licentious bouffons were cautious. A circle was drawn in the dirt before the church and the performers huddled inside it, dressed as bishops and priests, waving crucifixes, and an audible frisson rippled through the audience.
I was thrilled, not in some adolescent way, about to enjoy a gratuitous mockery of religion, but because something essential about what stand-up was had suddenly, by association, become clear. The bouffons were in a charmed circle, perhaps under the protection of serpents, in a sacred and clearly delineated space where they were free to work their magic without interference. The director of The Aristocrats , Paul Provenza, once told me he saw the stage of a stand-up club as a giant pair of inverted commas, framing the performer, saying ‘what is being said here is only being said, not actually done, so judge it accordingly’. Could there be any clearer image for the special privileges of the comedian than this moment, where the clowns marked out their own unassailable territory in the very shadow of the church, the great forbidder that binds with briars our joys and desires?
I’m eternally grateful for the combination of chance, coincidence, French regional-arts funding and my then girlfriend’s instinctive theatrical good taste that allowed me to witness that moment. It made me certain of something , convinced me that I was on the right track, and I’mnot sure what I’d be doing now had I not encountered it. Like seeing Ted Chippington open for The Fall in 1984, this was, twenty years later, an absolutely key moment for me as a comedian. I could do anything I wanted. I was in a charmed circle.
But as well as the supposed intellectual theory behind the bouffons’ show, the spatial relations of the performance also excited me. Like the Native American Pueblo clowns of the Hopi, the Zuni and the Tewa, of whom I had read much but never been fortunate enough to
Similar Books
