Over the years I have run many clown workshops. Generally they are a space in which participants come to explore clowning and/or sharpen their existing skillset. I love facilitating the joy, lunacy and embodiment of clown. These workshops offer a particular kind of freedom. You step into the space, play a game, follow an impulse, make a mistake—and suddenly something is funny. Maybe you don’t even know why until you get feedback from the teacher and the other students.
That moment matters.
A good clown workshop creates the conditions for discovery. We stop trying so hard to be clever or even ‘funny’. We become more responsive to the audience, to our bodies, to failure, to whatever is actually happening in the room. We are safe to be vulnerable, from which the richest comedy is to be found. Sometimes, in the middle of all that play, we stumble across something genuinely hilarious. Maybe it’s a small routine, or maybe it’s a revelation about what makes your clown funny.
But finding something funny is not the same as creating a clown act. I often warn my students that simply going onto stage and repeating something that was funny in the workshop will often not work.
The workshop is often where the raw material appears. Creating an act means beginning the slower—and sometimes more difficult—process of asking: What exactly worked? Why did it work? What can I keep? What needs to go?
Spontaneity is the seed. Craft gives it somewhere to grow.
A clown act needs to be tested. Beats need to be sharpened. Entrances, pauses, repetitions and escalations begin to matter. Material that felt wonderful in improvisation may disappear. A tiny accident that seemed insignificant might become the centre of the whole act. You have to learn to adapt and change as the act begins to speak back to you.
And then you put it in front of an audience.
They tell you what the act actually is.
The challenge is to create enough structure that the piece can work again, while leaving enough space for the clown to remain genuinely alive to the room. Too little structure and the act becomes sloppy. Too much and the clown can suffocate inside the choreography.
The craft lies somewhere between the two: creating something repeatable without making it dead.
The workshop helps us find the funny.
Making an act asks us to build something from it.