The harlequin character of the commedia dell’ arte, began life in the Middle Ages as a figure of the Devil. The sinister is an inherent element in clowning: even the most innocent of circus clowns makes his grease paint mouth a diabolical leer…
No clown can be exclusively one thing or another, butt or knave, oaf or acrobat, ninny or fox, innocent or evil, for then he would cease being a clown and become merely a character.Some sinister clowns are beautifully dressed; and thus, Chaplin, the greatest clown of the twentieth century, got kicked but kicked back,moved with wondrous grace yet shuffled in outsized shoes, stole hot dogs from street vendors and shy glances at fair maidens, and sported a dandy’s walking stick as well as baggy trousers.
The clown embodies the central truth that there is no such predictable being as “Man” but only a plurality of men, that every definition of man is false. It is because the possible combinations of oaf and dancer, dolt and fox, dupe and dupester, glutton and swain, are infinite that no two clowns- like no two men- are never exactly alike, although each and everyone plays the fool.
A clown, in the end, has only one fixed attribute, his indestructibility. He never learns, he never changes,he is irredeemably what he is, a fool. He wreaks havoc and brings down the roof, but he survives. How is it that one fool is so often able to escape common folly? Because- and this, too, is the lesson of the clown- there is no such thing as the common folly; there are only individual fools…