Cultures

Born in Europe in the 16th century, this is a global figure to be found all over the world. Alternating between refined and rustic – the clown and the Auguste – or cinematographic, several mutations have led to a more stable development. A clown can be any artist or person whose behaviour, voluntarily or unknowingly, triggers laughter. The term has even become part of everyday language: "what a clown!"
The Western clown is the expression of a culture, a state of being in the world interacting with an era, a thought, a political history. Contemporary to the emergence of private property and capitalism, the unique figure of the clown is the aesthetic result of a historical process that aligns him with the commercial and urban culture. The various expressions used today meet the needs of the cultural and entertainment industries, advertising and consumption, educational, therapeutic or social mediation. Western culture has retained the initial bipolarity of the figure, between those of the joker and the tramp.
Designable and identifiable by all, the character has a name, a behavioural pattern, a silhouette. Elegant, pale and worrying in the tradition of Joseph Grimaldi, it is most often reduced today to a red nose inherited from the congested face of the alcoholic or the peasant, the mask of the Auguste, but also from the comic strip and the cartoon. It swings between the playful or manipulative intelligence of a white clown or a fool (Francesco Caroli, Raymond Devos, the joker) and one who is made fun of for his candid ignorance. The clown then returns to childhood and its most tender, dreamlike and even metaphysical part (Buster Keaton, Charlie Rivel, Dimitri, Slava Polounine) but can also be reassuring (the Clowns Doctors, Clowns Without Borders) or attractive (Ronald MacDonald).
And last but not least, tragic or frightening, is the dominant figure of the excluded. Misfit, unsettled outsider, poor but dignified (Charlot, Yuri Nikulin, Otto Griebling) we mock him; deformed, eccentric, monstrous, he bothers us (Coluche); malevolent, we fear him (It). Antonymous with wealth, beauty and success, it is then a representation of the difference where codified stage productions provide an opportunity for integration and conjure up the anguish of an entire society: failure.

The Heyokas, North American Indians, are men of contrasts: they do everything backwards to heal the illnesses of their community through laughter, in dances and rituals using a logic of inversion: "A Heyoka has a strange behaviour. He says yes when he means no. He rides his horse backwards. He puts on his moccasins or boots the wrong way. In winter when the temperature drops below minus forty, he puts on a bathing suit and announces that he is going for a swim to cool down a little..."  
John Fire Lame Deer (Tahca Uhste), a Lakota Indian, who translates Heyoka into English by the word clown, explains in his book: "For us, a clown (Heyoka) is a sacred, funny, powerful, ridiculous, holy, shameful, visionary being. He is all this and much more. By acting like an idiot, he is actually performing a ceremony." [John Fire Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes, De mémoire indienne : en quête d’une vision, Bénaix, Éditions Présence Image & Son, translation Jean-Jacques Roudière, 2009. p. 340].
The Hotxuás, Indians of the Krahô tribe in northern Brazil, have the task of bringing the community together with joy. They are "laughter priests" who entertain the community. They also use a behavioural inversion code. The face and sometimes the body are symbolically made up in red, black and white make-up, considered sacred, the Hotxuás represent an element of balance for the Krahô. In search of laughter in everyday life, offering the possibility of seeing life from other angles, they contribute to the social structure of the tribe, as shown in the film Hotxuá. [Cardia, Gringo and Sabatella, Letícia, Hotxuá, Brazil, 2009]

The extreme media coverage of the Western model sometimes leads to the naming of singular expressions of the comedian as clowns, although they are very different in their forms or functions, because they are not intended for the production of shows. The term "sacred clowns" then refers to a phenomenon outside Europe in a way that may appear ethnocentric and that could be prevented with a more precise terminology. The connection between the clown and the Trickster is just one such example.
Paul Radin, anthropologist¹, Carl Gustav Jung, psychologist and Charles Kérény, mythologist², studied the cycle of the hero Wakdjunkaga whose function is to "play tricks" in the mythology of the Winnebago tribe in North America³. It is an expression of the archetype of the Trickster or "divine rascal", "deceiver, cheat, perfect scoundrel or congenial rogue⁴", which exists in many cultures and conveys representations of good and evil, of order and disorder. He is a "violator of values both creator and destroyer⁵" at the same time "hero and buffoon⁶", a "situation invertor⁷".
These researchers use the word "clown" to refer to this social disruptor, but without referring to the entertainment world. A certain confusion has thus crept into the search for the origins, an archetype or a mythical figure linked to the clown, who then appears as an avatar of the trickster. But this thesis is still being argued over. Paul Bouissac[2015] notes that if there are obviously some similarities between the properties and functions of the clown and those of the trickster, the "white" who plays tricks and the transgressive Auguste for example, the contemporary figure of the clown, which combines the two properties, and that of the trickster, would be avatars of the same social identity. For him, the cultural link between the trickster and the clown is pending further research, still at the speculative stage, and a stimulating hypothesis.