SOLO EPISODE: Am I clowning?

[Music] Welcome to Stand Up and Clown the Podcast. I'm your host Chad Demiani. Thanks for listening today, especially since I've been on an unplanned break for about a month. I apologize for that. The short story is I had an intern named Gabe from Emerson College. He was doing a great job helping me edit. The semester ended and I had a bunch of shows that I was working on, including the last of the Rory and Chadwin comedy tonight shows. The last one featuring Will Ferrell, by the way, which is a story I definitely want to talk about this summer. So I had started falling behind and to make matters worse, which is one of the things I am best at. I'd also bought a bunch of new expensive equipment because I had done this podcast with my friend Latif called It's Show Business and he has a live setup. So we were right across the table from each other and it was such a lively, fun conversation. I was like, I want to do more of that. I have access to all these great clowns in LA. So besides talking to other wonderful performers via Zoom, I want to have that experience again. And before I knew it a month had passed. And I am actually working on an interview with Christina Catherine Martinez, which is great, but we are all over the shop and I'm just trying to make a little more sense of it. So I thought I'd come back with a solo episode. I've been getting a lot of feedback the last year about the few episodes I did about rules and thought maybe this summer I can do some more topics, especially for people out of town or just starting clown that are looking for a little more clarity on what we're doing. Which is kind of the whole joke of this podcast is that there is so little clarity. One question I get a lot is am I clowning? It's usually not clown students either. It's other artists. I'll have a musician come up and say, oh, we do this. Call a response thing in a show and is that clowning or recently I had a student who does a lot of improv talk about how he and his improv teammates really roast each other through the show or will call out moves in a meta way and be like, what a terrible idea and a lot of standups. I do a lot of standup shows and often we'll get into a discussion about when is it standup, when is it clowning? Before I go into some tenets of clown or principles that I think kind of define when you've crossed over the line to what we're doing, I want to say don't worry about it. If whatever you're doing is fun, brings you joy. If the audience likes it, if those two things exist simultaneously, keep doing it. Clown is cool right now, but guess what? That means very soon clown will not be cool and you will not hope you are doing clown on stage. So if you are someone for instance who likes to do traditional improv, that's my dog drinking water. If you like to do standup and you love joke construction and just hitting three laughs a minute or whatever other metric that you have, great. As long as it works for you, as long as you feel seen as an artist you're doing it right. But it is a fun question to explore. I'd say its greatest value is giving artists who are doing clowning an opportunity to review the work they're creating currently. Are there ways that I can enhance the work that I'm presenting to people by digging into any one of these things? I think a lot of times we get lost in ideas. I talk about that quite a bit in class. We think about concepts. None of the principles of clowning really have to do with specificity of ideas. They have to do with the spirit of the work that you are presenting. Number one, as a performer, are you experiencing joy on stage? Ideally the most joy you can have. The reason we play so dumb as clowns is that we are trying to exist in a pure state of play. This can apply to everything again. Sometimes people love the math of comedy and they love putting patterns together. They love flexing their intellect. All of those things can be an expression of joy. Are you making the work that best reflects how you like to exist as a performer? Number two, your primary goal is to connect and bring joy to the audience. So here we see clown separating itself from other art forms a little bit. Personally, I don't think that should be true, but you can definitely talk to stand-up comics or theatrical performers or musicians. Improvisors especially who very much talk about not factoring in the audience in the choices they make. And for a clown, we want it to very much feel like all the choices we make are in the pursuit of the audience having the best time possible. Honestly, this could be its own solo podcast and maybe it will be. I have a lot of artists that I respect that I'll hear talk about, fuck the audience. Don't worry about the audience. And I feel the opposite. Care deeply about the audience. Don't forget the number one in this list of things that make something clown is that you are expressing your individuality that you're out there being as creative as possible on your terms. But you have to live in the paradox. These choices that you make that absolutely reflect who you are are also the choices that you feel give you the best opportunity to give that audience the best show possible. Both can exist navigating that contradiction. Well, that's what art is. Art is brushing up against situations that in normal life would seem impossible. Number three, are you in communion with the audience? So we've established that our goal is to please them. You can please people artistically by being presentational. A movie can please an audience. They are simply taking it in and it's a transactional relationship. They're cheering or laughing or crying because they like the product as it is presented. You might hear people just say, is there a fourth wall or not? So that's the normal parlance, right? Like, is there a fourth wall? Do you see the audience? I think at this stage of the game that can feel a little reductive because it's not just about seeing them. Stand up does that. And good stand up are in communion with the audience. My friend Mike Falzone runs a show out in LA called Surrounded. It's a show in the round. No material allowed. You go out and you interview the audience. You play with the audience. You try to catch fire with an idea. There's a sense of collaboration as much as you want to give the audience something they love. You also want them to co-sign the show that they jump on completely and they feel like they're part of it. Now we're getting further and further away from some other art forms. And when I say transactional, but it's not bad. There's a lot of transactional entertainment. People love to watch and judge and decide when to give their love and when not to give their love. What we want is that action reaction. We are in communion with the audience. We are making choices. We are gauging their responses to those choices. I think this can be confusing to some people too because most of clown as we know it is devised. When you're improvising shows, you see the audience and you make choices and they react. It's simple to correct your course or go a different direction. One of the great illusions of clown when it's done right is that you have built an act where the audience very much feels seen and heard and their reactions are moving the show in different directions. But in fact, what you are doing is you are making them feel a part of something that already has a shape that has a determined ending that we've written. But they feel like their voice is very important. Sports is a good example of this. You have two teams out there. People are booing, cheering. There's an idea that if you're at the home stadium, it matters. It's affecting the contest and in a way it is. But ultimately, you have this thing playing out and the audience doesn't necessarily have any control over the outcomes. But it's undeniable that they are integral to the product and the experience. The noise they make, their investment in it is as much a part of the game as the place. It's all connected. And that's what a clown show is. So even if we have written every line and we have shaped the show where we're hitting marks to attract, the audience feels that their contribution is crucial that the show can exist without it. Number four is there a game part of clown is the existence of some type of game structure. If you are playing, then there has to be a game. That's not true in every form of entertainment. That's not true about music. Stand up can be about patterns and observation. Improv, I would say, is a close cousin because often you are exploring forms. And so the game is your existing within a set of limitations to do a herald or a lorand. And this kind of takes us back to what we just talked about in terms of sports. There is very much a competitive element to clown, even if it's fake, even if it's something we manufacture, no different than pro wrestling. We want an audience to connect with the idea that there is a set of rules that we're trying to accomplish something that we can succeed or fail or win or lose. Those games can be completely naked, like it can just be something like we're going to throw a ball back and forth or the task can be simple. You see this a lot in traditional clown like a clown comes out and they're just going to make a grilled cheese sandwich or they're going to tie their tie, take a shower, put their pants on, and then they find all these ways to make it more difficult. They create restriction limitations. That's what games do games hone in on a certain way you can move forward. And then of course those rules are ripe to be broken. We follow these rules until they no longer serve us and the audience is in on the rules and breaking the rules as part of the fun, but also figuring out ways around the system, ultimately collapsing at all. Clown work lives and dies by this concept. It's a playable game that in a perfect world the audience can play along, but at the very least they are cognizant of the rules that we have created. I think one of the things that separates modern clown or at least the clown we're doing in LA is we are trying to build more sophisticated pieces, hour long shows that are a series of game after game after game after game. We don't necessarily need the audience to identify it as a series of games. It's more nuanced. They can get lost in the play and just transition from one new idea to the next all while being transported into a world or we are seemingly trying to tackle a bigger issue or theme. I'm currently working on my first ever actual solo show. I've done so many solo bits. I am putting together a full hour for the first time in my 50s. The way I start looking at that process is just collecting different games that I can play. And then I'll find the context later. I want to find that context because ultimately I want to take the audience on a ride where they stop even thinking about the concept of game and are simply on an adventure with this character. But at its core, those sets of rules, that's what keeps the show alive. Number five, the show must be foolish. This is also something that's often misconstrued. Clown shows can absolutely have sophisticated themes, sophisticated games in the sense that they're very creative. But the spirit of play is rooted in being able to completely commit to the moment. You could certainly make an argument that chess is play and that there are games of strategy that are well thought through. But we're not talking about those kind of games. We're talking about hide and go seek, peekaboo, red light, green light. Things where in the moment of play you just have to act and react. And the way we do that is we make sure our play is rooted in childlike stupidity. There's a lot of reasons for this. It helps break the composure of an audience when you ask especially an audience of adults to really let go and allow themselves to enjoy something that's very dumb. You get a different kind of laugh. You get a different state of being from those audience members. Never forget that audience members are as trained as performers. They've been taught they have a specific role in the show, especially live comedy. You do something funny and they laugh. That is the transaction. We want to break away from that. We want them to be physically committed to the show emotionally committed to the show. We want them focused on us and paying attention. But we don't want them ever making calculations or withdrawing from us. And if you think of something like chess, which is a game for sure, you have a moment where you can completely leave the state of play. You can go inward. You can think about the next move. You can think about the next 12 moves that might happen. But in doing so, you're completely disconnected. So foolishness is a way of connecting with people that really requires none of that intellectual real estate. There's a book I really love called Thinking Fast and Slow. I love the first half. The second half is not so great to be honest. But in that first half, they talk about level one and level two thinking. Level one thinking is when you see a stop sign, you know just to stop. And pulsively, you don't have to think about it or you come home and your partner is frowning and you know something's wrong or you're in trouble. You feel it in your bones. Level two thinking is 17 times 24. So when I say 17 times 24, if you were really to engage with that statement, most of you have to stop and start to really work this equation. They have to go inward and we never want that to happen in a clown show because the whole point is to be connected. We want them on the surface playing with us. I actually do entertain a lot of high-minded ideas, especially in my live direct shows. Even in the solo show, I was just talking about a little bit earlier. I'm talking about elements of redemption and cancel culture and what does it mean for people to change and can people in power ever truly be sympathetic to the people that they lowered over. These are things I hope an audience will ruminate on after they leave. I hope to put those thoughts in their head and inspire discussion later. But in the moment of the show, I just want them with me. I play dumb, foolish, abstract, I'm silly, I'm childlike. I know that's going to bring them a lot of joy, but also it's going to keep them present. Number six, and this is the final one, the role of failure in the show. And to talk about the moment of failure, I actually want to pull back further. What is the purpose of a clown show? I believe in clown that our main objective is not laughter. It is love. There should absolutely be laughter. But I feel like laughter is one of the results of getting an audience to love you. That's our job. We connect with them. We're joyful. We create games for their benefit. We make it simple. We play dumb and foolish so they can laugh at us and with us. This is all in the pursuit of them becoming enamored with us. Because when you love something or someone, then you're willing to give up more than just laughs. You're willing to give a piece of yourself. And how do we do this? We do this by making failure an integral part of the equation. And that's not to say that clown shows should be just one mistake and flop after another, but something in the DNA of a clown show, it has to court failure. We want to see those clowns take risks. Unlike other forms of comedy, we truly live in our failures and we celebrate them. You see it in every form of comedy. You see someone flubble line, an improv scene goes down in flames. A mistake happens and we all laugh. But in most shows, we move on. This thing happened. It was a delightful surprise. We move forward. And in clown, that failure becomes part of the narrative. It's part of the story of how badly we want to please you and what we're willing to do to get there. Because we are willing to try things out of our scope, because we're willing to let you see us at our most vulnerable, you become endeared to us, you have an empathetic response where you want to root for us. We continue just to deepen and deepen and deepen the relationship through the show. When you're making work as a clown, you're not trying to figure out the easiest way to get from A to B. You're trying to show the audience that you're willing to take the most difficult path. A dumb path, a foolish one, you can look like an idiot, but we also can see that your hearts in the right place, your effort is earnest. And this is something that a lot of new clowns don't always grasp, because what they see is their teachers and the people that they admire and the people doing the work well, living in the flop. And they think, well, the faster I can fail, the quicker I can really affect this audience and get their love and adoration. But what an audience really wants to see is the genuine effort. They want to think it matters to you to put on a show that matters to them. And then when the result is we've bitten off more than we can chew and we stay present with them and we stay optimistic and we dust ourselves off and try again, that is the work. And that's what makes failure a success for us. We look at failure exactly the same way as we look at success. Success is the intended result. Failure is the unintended result. They both provide a path forward. The only thing we really want to avoid in a clown show is apathy, safety, comfort. We don't want to create space where they think we've stacked the deck for ourselves. I want an audience to have extremely high expectations when I'm on stage. And I hope to meet those expectations, but I also know if I go plummeting the earth because I flew too close to the sun, that they are going to be just as thrilled and they're going to have a different adventure with me. I'm always trying to win when I'm in a show. I create rules and restrictions that make it super difficult. My goal is to seem capable and interesting and skilled. I just also know that when I fall short, that's a chance for me to show my humanity to the audience for them to see that I am imperfect. That's what we have in common. We do not have success in common. Some of us as performers don't know success and some audience members for sure don't know success, we all know how to get it wrong. And that concludes the first solo episode of 2024. Thank you all for listening and most of all thank you for your patience. I do love doing this podcast. I am looking forward to putting out more work. I want to revisit a bunch of the original clowns that I spoke to when I first started in this new live format that I talked about in the beginning where we're face to face. I definitely want to do more of these solo episodes. If you want, you can reach out to me on Instagram @thechaddemionny. If you have thoughts or questions, maybe they'll inspire a future episode. Also check out my link tree in the episode notes. Clowns I'm doing way too many shows out here. I'll be honest and teaching way too many classes. I'm having the time in my life. I have two weekend intensives every month at UCB and then my original intensive with a class show at the Elysian, mid month. All the information is there. And I mentioned it throughout this podcast, but I'm very excited. I am putting out my first ever work in progress solo show. Something I do plan to talk about on a future solo episode. It's called reckless Chad Rubin XX. It's a character I've been doing all around town for a little over a year. I just felt like I'm turning 52 years old on May 15th. What a great night to take a chance and potentially fail or find something new. This is Chad Demionny signing off and as always, keep on clowning. [Music]