‘I hate clowns,” so many people still say, and it’s frustrating. If only they could see shows like Clownts, as distant from Big Top cliches – or from Stephen King’s Pennywise, who has a lot to answer for – as it’s possible to be. Clownts marks the last night of the London clown festival, and finds alt-comedy godfather John-Luke Roberts presiding over a clown contest between three maestros of the art form.
It’s a night of which you might say “it descended into chaos” had it not also started at chaos, making mincemeat of Roberts’ authority and the challenge format. It also generated a species of hilarity perhaps unique to this anarchic and childlike practice: delighted, disbelieving, and of quite a different order to the laughs that greet most standup.
The winner was boiler-suited buffoon Sami Abu Wardeh – which we might have predicted from his show-stopping opener, when he careened about the stage catching cherry tomatoes in his mouth to the booming accompaniment of the music from the Old Spice ad. Notwithstanding Wardeh’s obsequiousness to Roberts as the games-master, competition is, I suspect, incompatible with the true spirit of clowning. Suffice to say that the other two contestants, Viggo Venn and Julia Masli, would have been equally worthy champions. The former inflated a giant balloon with a leaf blower, then failed to insert himself into it. The latter sailed paper boats on audience members’ heads and anointed their faces with seawater.
Such were the three opening routines, after which I marvelled at what idiocies might still be to come. Such expectations were not really met: the rest of the show kept remixing those same set-pieces. Diminishing returns, then – but they remained considerable, as Norwegian goofball Venn swapped identities with a man in the front row, Masli staged a fake protest against sexism in comedy, and Wardeh applied his eccentric intensity to the challenge: “Convince me you’re watching a bird.” Compèrered with a permanently raised eyebrow by Roberts, this uproarious hour celebrated an art form that removes cynicism and self-consciousness from the comedy equation, and invites us all to reconnect with our inner fool.
