Quotes About Clowning

“There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes. And the more nervous they are-the quicker to take fright-the more violent they pray that every storm will be ... Painters who have had this mentality, after repeated wounds and intimidations at the hands of the apparitions called human beings, have often come to believe in phantasms-they plainly saw monsters in broad daylight, in the midst of nature. And they did not fob people off with clowning; they did their best to depict these monsters just as they had appeared. Takeichi was right: they had dared to paint pictures of devils.”

— Osamu Dazai

“He sleeps a long, unquiet sleep disturbed by quick dreams of woodland places. These come as no great surprise. He meets elves and sprites and clowning devils. Anxiety? He wakes at last to a new world and to a morning lost in heavy mist. Sorely his bones ache - he traces the length of the soreness with a long, dull, luxurious sighing. Which is very pleasant, as it happens. Though also he feels about ninety fucking six.”

— Kevin Barry

“Christmas is the marriage of chaos and design. The real sound of life, for once, can burst out because a formal place has been set for it. At the moment when things have gotten sufficiently loose, the secret selves that these familiar persons hold inside them shake the room ... An undercurrent of clowning and jostling is part of the process by which we succeed finally in making our necessary noise: despite the difficulty of getting the words right, of getting the singers on the same page, of keeping the ritual from falling apart into the anarchy of separate impulses. From such clatter
extended and punctuated by whatever instrument is handy, a triangle a tambourine, a Chinese gone
beauty is born.”

— Geoffrey O'Brien

“To cover his tracks and mask his erotic withdrawal, he took pleasure in good-naturedly dirty stories and mildly ambiguous allusions, all delivered loudly and with laughter. The mother was his best ally, ever quick to support him with smutty remarks that she would pronounce in some exaggerated, parodic manner, and in her puerile English. Listening to the two of them, Irena got the sense that eroticism had once and for all turned into childish clowning.”

— Milan Kundera

“As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.”

— Stephen Fry

“It can come a bit hard sometimes to see one's own unique, heroic life pinned so pitilessly to a wall. At other times it can endorse, affirm and save, but as I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters at all but me.”

— Stephen Fry

“I am always joking and always clowning, giving and helping.”

— Red Buttons

“The tour bus is always fun, and there's plenty of time to watch movies. Actually, Kanye introduced me to the movie 'Step Brothers.' We were sitting there, watching it and clowning around - it was so funny, man.”

— Kid Cudi

“And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Because it is illegal to talk to a stranger on a train, it can sometimes be confusing when someone stands on your foot or hits you with their briefcase and then fails to say sorry. Which is why I have decided to carry an air horn with me at all times, and when someone stands on my foot I will set it off in their face and then go back to reading my paper. I imagine this will make people want to avoid standing on my feet, but if I've paid good money for the air horn, I'll want to use it, so I'll wear massive clown-shoes while travelling. I'll also wear a red nose and a wig.
Essentially, I really want to get into clowning.”

— Danny Wallace

“Of course, they're not clowning around trying to make me laugh. They're doing their best to live very serious lives, and they just happen to fall down sometimes. I think that's cool.”

— Haruki Murakami

“I was a class clown. At 12, I was definitely clowning. I was making all the jokes. But I was smart, so the teachers didn't know what to do with me.”

— J. Cole

“He explained how ridiculous the clowning was, and there and then I decided to settle down and play seriously.”

— Mary Lou Williams

“I was always one who was clowning around in school and getting in trouble.”

— David Boreanaz

“I went to Paris for a year in 1986 to study theatre; there was a lot of clowning around, buffoonery and fencing. It was then that my own style kind of blossomed.”

— Orla Brady

“When you do a good comedy show, you have to understand that if you don't have drama or sad moments, then the comedy turns into a clowning kind of situation.”

— Jaime Camil

“Clowning is a trick to get love close. I can hug 99 percent of people in the first second of contact if I'm in my clown character. The clown assumes your humanity. It assumes that, whatever trauma you've had, you can still love yourself.”

— Patch Adams

“I've taken clowns into the war in Bosnia, the refugee camps of Kosovo, and none of those are any more important than clowning in a subway or an elevator or just walking down the street.”

— Patch Adams

“I took a couple of classes in clowning, but that was more like Lucille Ball kind of slapstick, not Ringling Brothers. But we had to do things silently, and the teacher would do this running commentary. 'Does this make Clown sad? Oh, Clown doesn't like that, does Clown?' Always 'Clown.' Never a name.”

— June Diane Raphael

“Plus, you know, when I was young, there was a lot of respect for clowning in rock music - look at Little Richard. It was a part of the whole thing, and I always also believed that it released the audience.”

— Bruce Springsteen

“I started getting on my feet and clowning around, and they ended up putting me in a play when I was 12. And I was hooked.”

— Tim Robbins

“Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“I once knew this cellist, Miss Browning,
A swan with whom I enjoyed clowning.
But at night when she bloomed
I felt blissfully doomed.
Far from shore, in danger of drowning.”

— Julia Glass

“There is a gesture he has, a motion, that always reminds me of a great batter leaning into a hit. He has a way of throwing one foot forward, putting his head down a bit as he silently runs the valves, and then the cheeks bloom out in the way that has mystified his dentist for years, and he hits into the solo. When that foot goes forward like that, you know that John Birks Gillespie is no longer clowning. Stand back.”

— Gene Lees

“Children have a remarkable talent for not taking the adult world with the kind of respect we are so confident it ought to be given. To the irritation of authority figures of all sorts, children expend considerable energy in "clowning around." They refuse to appreciate the gravity of our monumental concerns, while we forget that if we were to become more like children our concerns might not be so monumental.”

— Conrad Hyers

“In all honesty, I never actually did anything wrong (in my eyes, at least) at school or misbehaved in any big way. If it was anything, it was probably just a lot of clowning around.”

— Rory McIlroy

“Casey wanted us to stay loose. That didn't mean clowning around. He just meant we should be confident and relaxed. We shouldn't feel that one strikeout was going to end the season for us.”

— Mickey Mantle