Why clowns are taking over LA

I talked to Chad Damiani, Alex Tatarsky, and Edib Farhan about the rise of clowning and LA's clown scene.

While we’re on the subject of clowns, I cannot stop laughing at this video of CD11 councilmember Traci Park ineffectually spray painting to cover up graffiti (which reads “eat the rich” and “Free Palestine) left on the remaining exterior walls of a burned down house. It’s an apt image for her whole campaign. Vote for Faizah.

Send your tips, feedback, and pitches to nobaddaysinla@proton.me.

A new immersive art experience is popping up at … the St. Vincent Behavioral Health Campus. The hospital has been shuttered for six years and will soon be turned into an 800-bed housing facility for the homeless. In the meantime, it’s hosting the Hospital of Emotions, a temporary art exhibit which will take over 80 rooms in the hospital, designed by 70 artists. Seems like a trend.

However much you hate landlords, you don’t hate them enough. From Say Cheese, the 53-year-old Black-owned Silverlake cheese shop which closed after a 300% increase in rent, to READ Books in Eagle Rock, the used book store getting forced out after a 130% increase in rent, landlords are rapidly degrading LA’s cultural institutions and our quality of life. They are casually destroying our neighborhoods. The so-called “mom-and-pop” landlords need to be taken to task for selling to greedy private equity joints, corporations, and out-of-state buyers. The heart breaks every day.

So it’s really, really lovely to hear that two precious LA businesses have been able to buy their own buildings this year. The beloved Bob Baker Marionette Theatre is making Highland Park its permanent home after being forced out its old Westlake location. And the sisters who own Chao Krung, the Thai restaurant that has made Hollywood its home for more than 50 years, recently secured ownership of their own building.

“The Well of the Scribes was a beloved fountain at the L.A. Central Library from 1926 until it was removed in 1969/1970 to make way for a parking lot,” writes Alta Journal. They’re offering $10,000 to anyone with a good lead on where it is now.

John Waters shouts out Echo Park’s Stories Bookstore in his interview with LAist. “There's a guy named John Tottenham who wrote a hilarious book about working there that you should really read, he told LAist. “So I like to always go there. They have a really good selection of books.”

Frozen yogurt pop-up Lillie finds a brick-and-mortar location in Beverly Hills. Is this another No Bad Days prediction coming true? If you remember, Musidora founder Isabelle Fields declared back in January: “Froyo is coming back, and it’s going to be huge. Welcome back, pinkberry. We missed you.” Not quite Pinkberry, but close enough.

Local LA tabloid On the Rag has been invited to speak to the students of UC Merced’s comp lit program. Here’s how they can make the trip worth their while.

📆 TONIGHT: Local author Anna Dorn will celebrate the launch of her novel, American Spirits, with readings by Catie Disabato, melissa broder, and others, at Bar Henry. 7 PM, no RSVP required.

Meet the “increasingly clouted” clowns of LA

As far as spokespeople go, the clown community of Los Angeles couldn’t have gotten a better one than Connor Storrie. Tan, chiseled, and wildly famous, he’s also an unlikely candidate for the role. But on his press tour for Heated Rivalry, he couldn’t stop talking about clowning. “It’s like an alternate-comedy theater that’s kind of blowing up,” he told the Cut, describing the “clown scene” in LA. “It’s been around forever. It’s very European. But it’s having a moment right now.”

Indeed. Lately I’ve been seeing clowns everywhere: They’re walking down the runway. They’re protesting on the streets of Bolivia. They’re selling out shows at the Elysian Theatre. LA writer Michelle Tea is editing an anthology about clowns. And on and on. Every day for the last couple of weeks, I’ve googled “clown” and a fresh story appears.

Certainly, the sudden proliferation of clowns—in a time where there’s not much to laugh about—raises some concerns. So I talked to three clowns at different points in their career—including Connor Storie’s own clown teacher—about why clowning is, as he said, “having a moment.”

Photo by Jill Petrcek

Chad Damiani, the Clown Boss

When I started asking around about clowns in LA, more than one person pointed me in the direction of Chad Damiani—aka, the Clown Boss, and a former clown teacher of Conner Storrie. At 54¹ years old, he’s the most senior clown I interviewed for this newsletter (he’s also a teacher of Edib Farhan, the youngest clown in this series). You can find him at the Elysian Theatre, where he teaches clowning classes and puts on clown shows.

NBD: I wanted to get your opinion as the Clown Boss, as a veteran clown—do you feel there’s an increased interest in clowning in LA?

Chad Damiani: Oh, there’s an uptick. In general, our group at the Elysian is hitting a kind of critical mass. Conner’s story can probably be directly associated with it a little bit. He’s a former student of mine, and now he’s impossibly famous, impossibly fast. He’s being interviewed nine times a day. And one of the points people keep gravitating to is all the time he spent doing the LA clown stuff with us.

Also, in this commodified era of comedy, where the algorithm keeps asking us to expect less but care more—to see a bunch of people who care too much. Just out there, giving everything, even in the face of failure. Not even caring if it’s successful or not. Just a sense that they’re desperate to connect with the audience, to care for the audience, to give the audience something special. I think that really speaks against a lot of the comedy that the people who program our streams and control the algorithms are interested in, because it’s more complicated and messier. So it’s an act of counterculture, really.

Interviewer: I’ve been seeing this meme around a lot: “The economy is so bad you might as well follow your dreams.”

Chad Damiani: Yeah. When you have a certain type of idiocy that’s destroying your life—politically, economically, all these bad choices being made by bad-faith actors—and you go out to these shows and you have fools and idiots and clowns making very bad choices for your benefit, you remember that there’s still joy and play and foolishness.

Play is such a fundamental part of how we connect. Play is rooted in games, and games are rooted in rules. So when you see a perversion of play—when you see rules being created to benefit the few at the expense of the many—you feel trapped. Games become torture.

Clown, unlike improv or stand-up or other forms of comedy, is engaging the idea that breaking the rules and things falling apart can also bring us together.

NBD: How did you get into clowning? I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but physically, you don’t look like the type of guy who’d go into clowning.

Chad Damiani: I’ve been clowning for about fourteen, fifteen years. So I was around 39, 40 when I started—I started late, and I still started before it was anything.

I worked in professional wrestling in my twenties. Not a wrestler—I was an announcer. Then I was a screenwriter for over a decade. I found improv during that period because I felt so isolated, desperate for community. I enjoyed it.

But then my partner passed away about fourteen years ago. It was a really catastrophic couple of years. Coming out of that, I went back to improv and it just didn’t give me the same rush. I’d been through this thing that made me feel so deeply and question so much.

Then I stumbled upon clown, because there were a few small groups—like Wet the Hippo—doing shows at improv shows. I was fascinated watching people go up and play in the abstract and seemingly enjoy failing.

So I went to a drop-in for the Idiot Workshop and totally didn’t understand it. I actually got mad at the instructor because I thought he was being too mean to these young people—and everyone laughed at me for being mad, which made me angrier, because I thought I was being a hero, defending them. I left thinking, “I don’t need any of that, I’ll never do it again.”

And then I had this moment of clarity: that’s the show. It’s us. The clowns—it’s all centralized around our experience and how we connect as people with the audience. Everything else is a fiction, and we’re the only thing that’s real.

Interviewer: Do you see regional differences in clowning? Are LA clowns different from New York clowns?

Chad Damiani: Oh yeah. Even within a big city like LA we have different subsets. But a place like New York is very different from LA. That doesn’t mean we don’t play together. I’m in a show called Stamptown that’s actually going to do a Netflix special in May—clowns from New York, LA, all parts of England, a few from Melbourne. We all play a little differently.

In New York, there’s the influence of experimental New York theater—there’s a real theatricality, and a permission to take up more space than I’d say sometimes in LA, for better and worse. I saw a piece in New York at a show called The Idiot’s Hour—young up-and-coming clowns—two women came out in diapers, crawling around. They’d have a person feed one of them and the other would just howl, because it wasn’t them. But then they’d suddenly stand up and give these heartfelt monologues about growing up. I think they meant it to be earnest, but I thought it was fun—so audacious. Just that thing that happens in New York sometimes, at an experimental theater night, where you’re like, what the hell is going on.

The Bay and Chicago—in the Bay you see a lot more circus influence, because Pickle Family Circus came from there. More red-nose stuff, a more affective way of playing. Chicago to a lesser degree, but Chicago also has Second City and the improv influence, so they look different.

Alex Tatarsky, by Maria Baranova

Alex Tatarsky, art clown

I met Alex Tatarsky one night at Taix, where they were celebrating the end of the two-night run of their show Sad Boys in Harpy Land at REDCAT. That entire week, I was getting texts like, “Are you going to the art clown show?” Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it—but I heard, from one friend who saw it, that people were clamoring for tickets in the waitlist line. At Taix, I grilled Alex about their clowning practice—and continued our conversation over the phone a week later.

NBD: First—how did you become clown?

Alex Tatarsky: I think I was always clowning without having a word for it. Since I was a kid I’ve been performing both semi-professionally and at the amateur level, which is basically still my life—it’s been like this for 35 years now.

At some point I got involved with a group of actors in New York, where I grew up, who were meeting on Sundays to do something called Impulse work, where we’d all move impulsively. There I met this amazing clown named Ed Malone. He was the best actor of us all. I was like, “Why are you so good, man?” Turned out it was because he wasn’t an actor — he was a clown. He’d studied with Jacques Lecoq in France, then I think got kicked out of that school and went to the offshoot school with Lecoq’s student Philippe Gaulier, who a lot of LA clowns have studied with.

Ed was the one who said, “You’re a clown, you’ve got to go study with clowns.” So on his recommendation I moved to Philly to study with Pig Iron—they’d all studied with Lecoq in the ‘90s in France. Instead of going to France to dive deep into clown land, I wanted to learn that stuff in the American context, in a fucked-up, incredible city like Philly, making clown that responds to the needs and experiences of my community here. I moved there for ten years to hang with the clowns, and it’s been clown life ever since.

NBD: Describe your style of clowning.

Alex Tatarsky: It’s clowning that plays at the edges of a lot of other traditions. I trained as a dancer and theater person for years before I found the world of clown, and I’ve also been deeply immersed in literary worlds and translation—studies thinking about language and nonsense language. I try to bring all of that in, which maybe some clowns find blasphemous, because it’s mixed up with a lot of other stuff. Also nightlife performance, drag, street performance, club kids—all this stuff I grew up with in New York.

To me, if I really love something, I usually consider it clown. Performers who are acknowledging the audience, acknowledging the reality of what’s going on, and responding with a kind of honesty to the situation. To me, that’s clown at its essence. Radical rejection of the fourth wall. A lot of people who don’t identify as clowns, I view as clowns, and they’ve been really influential to me.

NBD: Have you experienced increased interest in clowning, or your shows, or first-timers?

Alex Tatarsky: Ten years ago people were like, “Ew, gross, clown, what is that?” And I found that to be a helpful way to draw people in. Now I feel like it’s, “Oh god, another clown, enough already.” But it’s amazing—watching the mainstreaming of clown is really special and exciting.

I also perceive that pretty soon we’re going to hit clown saturation point and then clown fatigue, and it’ll be time for something else. That’s just how things go. Also, we’re all clowns and we all should be clowns. It should be totally democratized, welcoming, for everyone to get in touch with their clown. But then the borders dissolve, and it stops meaning anything at all—which is awesome. I look forward to that. It’s a funny moment, the mainstreaming of clown in American culture. A hilarious moment to be a part of.

NBD: What would you say accounts for the mainstreaming of clowning?

Alex Tatarsky: Not to get really heavy but I’ve been really drawn to a way that Jacques Lecoq, the French guy whose pedagogy I’m steeped in, would talk about his practice. He started traveling around Europe teaching physical theater and clown in the 1940s to very traumatized people who’d been living through war and the rise of fascism and authoritarianism. He really thought of his job as helping to de-Nazify the continent—by helping people loosen up in their bodies.

If you think about the classic Nazi salute, it’s so stiff and rigid. That’s what it’s expressing physically—gesture expressing rigidity that causes pain to everyone. Fascism causes pain to everyone. You hold that in your body whether you’re the victim or the perpetrator of violence. It causes trauma. So his practice was: how can I teach large groups of people to reconnect to their bodies and to a kind of looseness and sense of play?

I think it’s pretty clear we’re in a cyclical moment where there’s again rising fascism and authoritarianism. And again, people crave several things—being reconnected to their bodies, when so much of the time we’re all dissociating to get through the day. And reconnecting to looseness and play, because playfulness is the way to combat this ignorance and rigidity and violence we’re seeing and experiencing. It makes a lot of sense to me that this is a moment when people would feel that clown provided a way to respond to — and simply survive — this really brutal, horrifying moment.

NBD There was another clown I talked to, who also traces their interest in clowning to the Syrian revolution, and to the survival of their ancestors.

Alex Tatarsky: That really resonates with me. I started working on Sad Boys in Harpy Land in 2014, a somewhat different moment, but I was trying to grapple with humor as a mechanism of survival among Jewish community, diasporic Jews. And then grappling with, confronting the total horror of watching your community that has been historically oppressed turn into the oppressor and repeat these genocidal crimes against others in the Zionist state.God, how can you use humor to navigate that? When the power dynamics shift such that it’s no longer functioning as a tool of survival in quite the same way. How do you process this new trauma of watching the oppressed become the oppressor and feeling implicated in that?

Sad Boys in Harpy Land collages together a bunch of classic stories of sad little artist boys and tries to reject the narrative arc where a character goes through struggle and then comes out the other side a fully integrated and successful member of society. To be like: wait, what is this period of sadness and melancholy and failure trying to communicate about the sadness and failure of our world?

I’m drawn towards clown because for me, clown is really about trying to practice honesty with a group of people in a room. Often that’s how you alchemize failure and sadness and despair into something else. Simply by acknowledging it together, it starts to transform. Clown is a real gift in that way. These moments of despair can begin to turn into something else, with a group of people in a room. You really feel how tragedy and comedy are so close together, and one can flip into the other so quickly. It’s just a constant, fascinating and terrifying form to be engaging in.

Edib Farhan, by Afrina Razi

Edib Farhan, Syrian clown

Last January, I attended a clown show without meaning to. I walked right into a clown convention at the Lyric Hyperion. I was there to see Edib Farhan, a Syrian clown, who was the sibling of a very old friend of mine. My friend described the show only as a “comedy” when she extended the invite. But when I showed up to the Lyric for Edib’s show, titled Syrian Cheese, I was surrounded by clowns.

In their show, Edib embodies the spirit of one of their Syrian ancestors, wearing a tarboush (or fez) and red keffiyeh around their neck. The song Sanarjiou Yawman—which means “We will return one day”—by Lebanese singer Fairuz, plays in the background while they dramatically pull a Syrian flag out from between their legs, moaning as if giving birth.

NBD: Well, first, how did you get into clowning?

Edib Farhan: For me, doing this work was actually a commitment I made to the Syrian revolution. When some of the revolutionaries—like Raed Fares², who was a journalist, who was really funny and would often use humor in his protests—were killed, it just felt like the Syrian revolution was in a really hopeless place. I asked their spirits, “How can I honor the legacy of what you do?” And the answer I got was: use your voice to tell the truth. That led me to comedy, which was sort of surprising, but made sense. He, and many other revolutionaries, had a way of using humor to pierce through the veil—and did so in the bravest possible way, where you’re willing to risk everything. He was specifically known for his viral, humorous banners, almost like performance art every week.

Then I came to LA and took a class with the Idiot Workshop. I had no idea what I was doing. With stand-up, you can hide behind the text you create, which you workshop a thousand times so that every time you say this thing, you’re probably going to get a laugh. In some ways it’s vulnerable, but in a lot of ways, it gives you protection. Your ego still gets to be in charge. You still get to be the clever one. You rarely see behind the mask, except when someone bombs and has to acknowledge it.

Clowning, on the other hand—the whole setup is: you’re going to fail, and through your failure, you’re going to show the honest truth of what it means to be human. It’s just physical. There’s nowhere to hide. The form of modern clowning I play with really blurs the line between what’s a performance and what’s real. And the point isn’t just to entertain. It’s to make audiences somewhat uncomfortable and push them to see bigger truths, including political truths and truths about power and their own complicity in power.

NBD: Why do you think clowning is having a moment right now?

Edib Farhan: It’s a microcosm and a metaphor for what’s happening outside. With clowning, what you’re going to see is a bait and switch. They start off with something legible, like “I’m going to do some impressions” or “I’m going to sing a song,” and then it quickly unravels into the most bizarre thing imaginable. It’ll happen through failure, or just really earnestly trying to do a thing and it doesn’t work out, and you just let your unrepressed rage come through.

That’s something my teacher John Gilkey calls “decomposing.” Part of the beauty of clown is you get to see the ego decompose, and you get to see what’s actually the raw human impulse underneath that we’re constantly masking. Getting to watch that, getting to play that, is really cathartic—because it’s sort of like the way institutions all around us are crumbling. It’s just a mirror for that.

NBD: Do you find that people are immediately receptive to what you’re bringing to the table?

Edib Farhan: Sometimes I’ll take clown bits I’m working on to traditional stand-up mics, and people get uncomfortable if they don’t have the context for the journey you’re about to take them on. They’re like, “Oh, that was really weird.” In LA it’s more of a known entity now, but there’s also just — it’s hard, as a performer. Sometimes that line between “am I failing and this is part of the performance” or “am I really failing in a just-eating-shit kind of way.”

One of my growth edges as a performer—even in traditional red-nose clown, they call it “the flop”—is being able to, when I’m flopping in an unintentional, not-fun, shame-filled way, have just a shred of self-awareness. To say, “You guys hate this, and so do I.” Just that acknowledgment helps everyone feel like they’re not watching an unmitigated mental breakdown.

But I’ve found that clowning also helps when I’m trying to do traditional stand-up. Sometimes I’ll lean on the clowning when something is happening inside me that I can’t avoid naming.

NBD: How would you describe your style of clowning?

Edib Farhan: I’m still definitely a beginner, but my big influences are the Idiot Workshop, Chad, and Soft Clown — which is Natasha Mercado — as well as Claire Woolner, who kind of came out of the Idiot Workshop scene. These are people who bridge extreme vulnerability and emotional honesty with an equal and opposite level of extreme stupidity and absurdity, and a willingness to confront power and current events. That’s the trifecta I try to bring into my clown work.

I just recently did an improvised piece where I jumped into my friend [Deshawn Ball’s] arms, climbed his body, and I was power-tripping. I was like, “I am War.” And I embodied the evil energy of war, and wore my friend out as I made him carry me around the room, and then tossed his body aside—and then realized what I had done and felt remorse. My heart really did break. I was like, “I don’t want to be War anymore. I don’t want to be a student of war anymore.” And I honestly cried on stage. And then we ended it by both being like, “And that was a metaphor.” That level of silliness but also depth is what I’m trying to embody as a clown.

NBD: Is there anything we didn’t get to talk about that you’d like to mention?

Edib Farhan: I see the role of the clown as channeling something for the tribe, for the community, that they need. It’s not always pleasant or fun, but it’s necessary. And through the process of channeling that energy, something in the community can be seen or healed or made sense of that they can’t necessarily do out in the world.

1. A previous version of this newsletter aged Chad at 64.

2. A previous version of this newsletter listed the wrong name. It has been corrected.