In the last decade, LA has become a hotbed of avant-garde clowning. Yup! I hate to break the news, but if you want to see live comedy that is truly original, you gotta check out a clown show. I can feel you cringing through the screen, but stay with me.
All over town, particularly on the East Side, young comedy fans are lining up at theaters late at night to watch weird, wild clown shows that are practically performance art.
Why has this ancient art form suddenly become trendy? And how did LA become the center of it?
At 9:30 p.m. on a Monday at the Elysian Theater in Echo Park, 51-year-old clown Chad Damiani takes the stage.
With huge arm muscles, a robust belly, and a gray beard, he’s giving sexy Santa. The show is called Stand Up and Clown and in it, Damiani directs a live, improvised clown show featuring stand-up comedians. He invites them up, two at a time, and gives them a prompt that they use to create a scene. The comics aren’t allowed to speak; they can only use body language and facial expressions.
But first, Damiani makes a request to the audience.
“I’m gonna ask you to do something tonight that you’re not asked to do at any other show that tries to browbeat you into being comedy day care providers,” he says to laughs. “I don’t want you to give it up too easy tonight. Make them earn their first genuine laugh of their lives.”
Then he calls out the prompt: “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!”
Two 40-something men lumber onto the stage. Matt McCarthy, a burly, bearded redhead, scowls as he pulls Ithamar Enriquez, tall and lean, by an imaginary rope around his neck. Enriquez pretends to be a horse, his eyes bulging, his mouth hanging open cartoonishly wide, showing off his teeth.
While this might sound like the kind of nightmare you have after eating spicy food, it’s actually a pretty funny scene. The audience goes from nervous giggles to full-throated cackles.
So what exactly is “clowning” today anyway?
“One of the main tent poles, if you will, of clowning, is to solve a very simple problem in the most idiotic way possible,” explains Natalie Palamides, an LA actor and clown. “I think a good touchstone … is the bit where Lucy and Ethel are in the chocolate factory. They're essentially trying to solve this problem of the chocolates going past them too quickly to pack, and they're like, how do we resolve this? [They] end up shoving a bunch of chocolate in their mouth, which obviously is a very idiotic way to solve this problem.”
Palamides acts in many different kinds of projects – voice-over for cartoons, commercials and TV, and I’ve cast her in my own sketch videos. She’s best known in Hollywood for her visceral, outrageous, and insanely funny one-woman clown shows. She’s taken her act on the road, performing all over the U.S. and Europe and earned rave reviews in The New York Times.
Natalie Palamides’ award-winning clown show “Nate” became a Netflix comedy special produced by Amy Poehler. Photo by Elisabeth Caren.
In her latest show Nate, streaming on Netflix, Palamides plays the archetype of a super macho dude on a journey to learn respect for women.
To embody Nate, she dons full male drag, wearing a fake mustache, wig, no shirt, boobs fully out, with fake chest hair painted on in black marker.
At one point in the show, she invites a male audience member onto the stage, asks him to take his shirt off, and wrestles him.
Her parents don’t exactly “get” her comedy.
“My dad can't watch it,” she says. “I think he tried watching my Netflix special and threw his arms in the air and walked out of the room and literally said, ‘I can't watch this.’”
Alternative comedy isn’t for everyone. But for the people who do connect with it, it can be really profound.
Max Baumgarten, 38, a clown and actor I know personally, shares some wisdom from his clown teacher, John Gilke.
Gilke compares clowning to being an acrobat, Baumgarten says: “They could fall in second, they're risking their life in front of you.”
He continues, “As a clown, how do you do that? How do you achieve that same risk? You're trying to risk as much as [acrobats] emotionally, by just showing yourself and being naked, by literally trying something so stupid and doubling down on it.”
Why LA?
Gilke is a big reason clowning has exploded here in LA. He started a clown school called The Idiot Workshop in 2013 and it instantly became a hit. Damiani, Baumgarten, and Palamides all trained there.
Gilke recalls, “I did this one-month workshop and people wanted to do more, people just kept coming. Eventually, it grew into this huge thing, which I never could have created if I'd set out to do it. It just kind of happened.”
Rail-thin with a bushy salt-and-pepper beard and glasses, Gilke looks like a friendly but odd cartoon character. His path to clowning started at 13 when he got into juggling. He quickly became obsessed, and soon joined The Pickle Family Circus.
“When I was 20, I dropped out of college after my first year of university, and my parents were pretty upset,” he says. “Just the idea of running away from university and to the circus was enough to really, really scare the living crap out of them.”
But following his passion paid off. Gilke made it to the highest level of clowning in 1996, when he joined the world-famous Cirque du Soleil, where he performed for almost 20 years.
In 2012, Cirque brought Gilke to LA. He settled here, started teaching, and a comedy scene was born.
Damiani believes that Angelenos were craving clowns because of how commercial and regimented the local comedy scene had become. Compared with clowning, stand-up and improv have a lot of rules. There’s a formula to it.
By contrast, “almost always, clowning is an act of counterculture,” he explains. When there are rules, “there's always going to be people who tire of it or people who are looking for something different. I think what clown offered was unpredictability.”
So many actors in Los Angeles live in a constant state of anxiety and rejection, striving, and climbing. But in clowning, they get something different. As Gilke describes his school, “We don't have levels. We believe, rather than trying to create something where people are climbing a ladder to achieve something, it's really you come here to succeed at nothing.”