Apologies in advance for the negative tone.
> There are Zen monks who have used absurdity to teach their pupils existential principles.
I get a sense of how those pupils must have felt because I don't feel like I've learned anything about clowning from this post.
One of my pet peeves are tutorials that only make sense after you understood the topic being explained, and I feel that these guidelines fall in that category. "The clown enters the stage to accomplish a task, not to get laughs. If there are laughs it is an interruption" sounds very deep, but I'm not sure how to square that with "The clown offers energy and fun for the audience to enjoy".
All the clowns I remember aimed to get laughs from their audience. Does that make them bad clowns? Or is it a "no true clown comes from Scotland" situation?
Those two principles come from two different people with two different styles of clowning. So it’s not a contradiction.
I agree that it's not a contradiction for two different people to hold opposing views. My objection is more towards the author of the post who, when bringing clowning to the uneducated masses (aka me), writes "some people say clowns should make you laugh, but others say they shouldn't". That may be technically true, but what am I supposed to learn from that?
I always got the feeling that "high clowning" must be out there and be really interesting to watch. I would have liked the post to shed more light on that.