Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Editor’s Note

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.2.0135

2326-067X

Stanley Orr,

Linguistic Variation and Morphology

Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to see a news clip for the annual America’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in Detroit, Michigan, one of the nation’s oldest Thanksgiving Day parades. At one point in their coverage of the parade, commentators Rhonda Walker and Evrod Cassimy announce the arrival of the “Distinguished Clown Corps,” a group of Detroit community leaders who don the motley for charitable causes. As the clowns pass by, tossing out Mardi Gras style bead “throws,” Rhonda and Evrod share very different responses:* * ** * *While Rhonda sticks to her script, extolling the virtues of the Corps, Evrod howls in pain as the clowns pelt him with throws. As the segment proceeds, one can sense Evrod’s growing frustration and annoyance—“I am not responsible for any other words that come out of my mouth! . . . Ow! They’re still throwing them!” With its humorous point/counterpoint motif, this bit of video ephemera brings home different faces of clowns and clowning. At first blush, clowns impress one as fun and joyful entertainers who place their gifts at the service of the community. As we see in Evrod’s lines, however, clowns might also trouble, unsettle, or even menace—hence the interesting term “coulrophobia,” fear of clowns, which was recently included in the Oxford English Dictionary. As Donald McManus suggests, following Dario Fo, the clown is a near universal character that pervades various cultures and yet one whose diversity complicates attempts at definition (11).While this special issue of Pacific Coast Philology cannot fully define or contain the protean energy of the clown, its engaging contributions illuminate new dimensions of this ubiquitous figure. Emerging from the 2019 Conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, the pieces collected in this issue traverse several genres to address “Send in the Clowns”—a theme inspired not only by Steven Sondheim’s classic number but also Norman Manea’s celebrated essay “On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist” (1991). Manea discusses the clown in terms of a dichotomy between “Auguste the Fool,” the subversive poet, and the fascist dictator, the “White Clown” or “Clown of Power.” With respect to the former role, this special issue devotes a good deal of attention to clowning’s redemptive “contrariness” (Manea 19). In “‘A Clown’s Nightmare of a Masquerade Ball’: John Kneubuhl’s The Moon and I,” the 2019 President’s Address, I elaborate the conference theme before turning to an early play by Samoan-American dramatist John Kneubuhl. With recourse to contexts developed through Kneubuhl’s other stage and screen dramas, I treat the playwright’s experiments with the fale aitu, a Samoan clowning tradition that deploys irreverent humor against authority figures. Likewise, Paul Alonso’s Plenary talk, “Satiric TV as Critical Metatainment in Latin America,” illuminates the ways in which comics Brozo (el payaso tenebroso, “the shady clown”), Jaime Bayly, and Peter Capusotto, respectively, adapt and transform various TV journalism conventions to satirize those in power. Alonso traces the lineage of these journalistic clowns within the time-honored tradition of court jesters.“The court fool could get away with a lot,” writes Rae Armantrout in her insightful reflection “The Poetry of Folly”: “Folly is not punished immediately. Folly is a mistake not caught at once, a funeral disguised as a birthday party (or a birth defect disguised as a dream).” And yet such tomfoolery is not without its perils; as Judith Yaross Lee suggests in her conversation with Martin Kevorkian, “We know about the court jester whose head is removed . . . there always was a certain risk to being the clown.” Their interview touches on a range of issues, from the history of humor studies to scholarship on Mad Magazine and, following James Caron, the “Citizen Clown” persona of Mark Twain. We are also fortunate to include another important dialogue, that between poet Juan Delgado and Cahuilla/Cupeño writer Gordon Lee Johnson. They discuss the importance of jokes, laughter, and tricksterish “rez dogs” on the Pala Indian Reservation near San Diego. Thanks to Gordon Lee Johnson for allowing us to reprint three of his essays: “As Spirits of the Old Ones Dance, We Sing,” “Rez Dogs Eat Beans,” and “Closing a Portal to Past; Opening One to Promise.” In Delgado’s words, Johnson debunks “the myth of the stone-faced Indian and other stereotypes grounded in prejudices and ignorance.”All of these contributions resonate with Amanda’s Lagji’s analysis of the 1959 short-story collection Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul. For Lagji, Naipaul’s tragicomic stories turn upon thematics such as colonial clowning, mimicry, humor, laughter, and exaggeration found throughout the Trinidad of the author’s childhood. Generally speaking, the foregoing authors approach the clown with a critical eye, expertly teasing out its complexities and variations. Michael Heyman and Joseph Thomas begin their meditation on nonsense poetry with this kind of interpretive stance; as they proceed, however, Heyman and Thomas set down “layers of dialogic deviltry” that violate the academic writing conventions of voice and documentation. Special thanks to PAMLA Executive Director Craig Svonkin for curating this piece, which both interprets and enacts the conventions of clowning!As this overview makes clear, our special issue enjoys a great deal of affinity with Auguste the Fool, Manea’s subversive artist-clown. That said, many of our contributors engage with the other side of Manea’s equation, the “Clown of Power,” a trope for the political dictator:The stuff of nightmares, this buffoonish oppressor is elsewhere associated with vampirism and the Grand Guignol (Manea 19)—perhaps suggesting that the horror-clown frightens because it represents the exercise of power rather than, or in addition to, transgression; hence the sadism of clown serial killer John Wayne Gacy (Durwin 13) and the confluence of everyday bigotry and primordial evil in Stephen King’s 1986 novel It (McKenna 182). According to Judith Saunders, this tradition of “bad clowns” also includes the “serial killer” Mr. Punch, derived from the Italian Pulcinella of the commedia dell’arte. Saunders compares the outrages of Punch to the clowns in Harold Pinter’s political plays One for the Road, The New World Order, Mountain Language, and his recently discovered sketch The Pres and an Officer. For Saunders, Pinter exploits the energy of the Punch and Judy Show in order to represent “state-sanctioned brutality.”In revisiting Manea’s highly visual gloss on the White Clown, I am also reminded of Frank Quitely’s The Kelvin Hall Clown, an original portrait drawn for our 2019 PAMLA conference. We are honored to publish this drawing together with the artist’s remarks on its inspiration. As Laurence Grove makes clear in “The History of Clowns in Comics,” The Kelvin Hall Clown turns upon a series of disturbing incongruities: “From afar we see a smiling figure of playful happiness, but close-up the weary eyes, the wrinkled brow and the straight-line mouth bear the woes of the world. As befits the fragility and transience of human existence, the clown’s head, like life itself, is but a balloon for the popping, a theme that goes back at least to Erasmus’s homo bulla adage.” Frank Quitely’s artwork is also illuminated in “Glasgow Smiles Better: A Response to Frank Quitely’s Portraiture and The Kelvin Hall Clown (2019).” Julie Briand-Boyd and David John Boyd here discuss the ways in which the piece reads as a “palimpsest of both the carnivalesque and of Glasgow’s history.”This last formulation anticipates our conclusive article. In keeping with the issue’s atmospheric cover photo by Russ Gartz, Andrew Howe leads us on a road trip through the history of American motor tourism, a journey that culminates in a stop at what is considered America’s “creepiest” hostelry—the storied Clown Motel of Tonopah, Nevada. On one hand, Howe argues, the property exemplifies the tradition of themed motels by incorporating untold hundreds of clown effigies, figurines, and paintings. But the Clown Motel abuts an historic cemetery and “promotes a mythological massacre with remnant ghosts, details for which are neither well-developed nor consistent. The result is very much a carnivalesque pastiche rooted in horror.” In this respect, the Clown Motel operates as a self-reflexive site that partakes of Auguste the Fool’s ludic spirit while working in the ominous coulrophobic tradition associated with the White Clown. In his travels, Howe brings our “Send in the Clowns” special issue full circle, almost from cover to cover. Exploring the Clown Motel proper, Howe notes that clown noses are available in the gift shop for twenty-five cents. This reminds me of the red noses handed out gratis at our 2019 PAMLA Conference (some of which are still rolling around my study). In reading the excellent contributions of this special issue, I invite us all to at least symbolically don one of these prosthetics to experience the fun and the weirdness that come with “sending in the clowns.”