When A24 bought and renovated the Cherry Lane Theater, a storied Off Broadway space in the West Village, the chic film company didn’t kick off with a star-studded drama by a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright or a buzzy experimental piece from the Wooster Group.
It sent in the clown.
This tells you something about the comic dynamo Natalie Palamides, writer and star of “Weer,” a solo show currently playing to roaring crowds at the Cherry Lane. But it’s also a sign of the ascendant state of clowning, which, not long ago, resided in the bargain basement of artistic respect, alongside ventriloquists, mimes and jugglers. No longer.
At a time when stand-up can seem stuck and improv comedy is still rebounding from the pandemic, clowns have run amok in the culture, invading streaming services and establishment theaters while becoming magnets for rave reviews and awards at fringe festivals in Edinburgh and Philadelphia.
These artists won’t remind you of the red-nosed comic relief you saw at the circus as a kid. And it’s probably no coincidence that this vogue followed a period when new shows by Cirque du Soleil steadily marginalized clowns in favor of acrobatic spectacle. They still appear in the circus but have increasingly set up shop on their own, in comedy and theater spaces. How did the form of Bozo and Ronald McDonald become prestige entertainment?
To be sure, arty clowns are not new. David Shiner and Bill Irwin led a theatrical movement called the New Vaudevillians in the 1980s and ’90s. Two decades ago “All Wear Bowlers” was a high-water mark: The bowler-hatted Beckettians Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford played silent film stars who simulated popping out of a cinema screen.
But our contemporary clown car of performers is different in number and influence, and also in aesthetic. Theatrical in theme and narrative, their shows are more visceral, verbal, transgressive, sexual and female than those of previous generations.
No figure represents the heights of the new ambitions more than Palamides. That she’s best known as the star of Progressive commercials is itself a joke, because onstage, she’s far from the comforting figure you would expect to represent an insurance company. Her breakout was the 2017 production “Nate” (available as a Netflix special) in which she played a toxic, handsy bro who drove a motorcycle onstage, guzzling beers, groping audience members and creating chaos. “Weer” brings that same confrontational energy but focuses it, delivering a radical spin on the rom-com.
It begins, as so many great comic triumphs do, with a ludicrous conceit performed with unshakable commitment. Half her body is the bearded, Chuck Taylor-wearing male side of this story and the other half is in makeup, skirt and heels. Imagine the Batman villain Two-Face doing a solo version of “When Harry Met Sally.”
It’s a silly idea, and Palamides knows it, periodically pivoting not just to switch roles, but also to glance at the audience, as if to say: Can you believe this nonsense? She smirks at herself before drawing you in with the rigorous detail of her portraits of two equally foolish romantic leads.
She’s spoofing rom-coms: When her male half whispers the sweet nothing “You complete me,” it hits differently. But she’s also returning to issues of consent and abuse between proudly dumb bits. Her show is packed with “Can you believe she did that?” moments: gratuitously explicit sex, preposterously drawn-out deaths, wild animals that fly from the sky, masturbation, topless showers and a rather transcendent portrait of heaven. It’s a lot.
More than any other production in the city right now, this one aims to show you something you haven’t seen before.
The same thing could have been said about the Estonian clown Julia Masli, whose acclaimed “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” was a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival before moving to the SoHo Playhouse in New York and then the Public Theater earlier this year. A twee, quiet presence in a thick accent, she approached audience members muttering, “Problem,” emphasis on the second syllable, then sat in the awkward silence until the audience suddenly started opening up, about loneliness or anxiety or political fear. Then she tried to help, which led in unexpected directions, whether it was ticket-buyers taking a nap onstage or confessing their deepest secret.
There’s a woo-woo emotionalism at the heart of her work that will not be for everyone — I include myself — but there’s no denying its power. Masli doesn’t just have a cult audience. This is a show that replicates the feeling of being in a cult.
Masli and Palamides are opposites, the difference between earnest new-age vibes and snarky provocation, Freudian analysis and shock therapy: That clowning encompasses both extremes demonstrates range. But what these artists share, notably, is an aesthetic of intensity that invites obsession. They embrace emotional and physical mess and play with social taboos while projecting a certain playful innocence. Most of all, both emphasize the live experience, integrating the audience into the narrative. Masli crowd surfs. Palamides kisses a patron on the lips. The crowd work feels more like an environmental theater happening from the 1960s than the small talk with the front row that standup comics engage in today.
In a busy entertainment landscape, audiences increasingly want events even more than well-made entertainments. They are looking for unpredictable experiences, the kind of mind-scrambling images that aim not just for enjoyment but also passion. These clowns deliver.
It can be hard to define what separates a clown from a comedian or a performance artist, but the simplest way is just their training. Whereas the veneration of legendary improv teachers like Del Close has waned, the clown guru remains a powerful force in the culture.
regularly hear from young performers who once would have trained at the Upright Citizens Brigade but are now flocking to clown schools. Asked how he developed the character of Dwight in “The Office,” Rainn Wilson was recently quick to cite his training in clowning. The most consistently raucous showcase in the city is “Stamptown” (at the Bell House), inspired by Etampes, the small burg in France that is the home of the clown guru Philippe Gaulier.
When I visited the bushy-bearded Gaulier for a profile in 2022, he preached the virtue of rigorous play and harsh feedback. You could tell how he could both inspire — and repel. If he’s one of the gods of the current clown movement, one of his most important disciples is Phil Burgers who started his own influential school. Burgers directed several early shows by Palamides. (Masli trained with Gaulier.)
This year, the Los Angeles-based Burgers, who goes by the stage name Dr. Brown, took a rare trip to New York, producing two solo shows in a small room in Brooklyn that were more sparsely attended than I expected. He’s a dynamite performer brimming with comic intensity. Among his bits, the one that stood out was a tremendously funny silent vignette in which he pantomimed an attempt to crucify himself.
Even though this was entirely in mime, he made you feel the pain of hammering a nail into his wrist. Every hammer blow had specificity and force. This violence turned absurd when he realized that with his right hand nailed down, he couldn’t finish the job with the left. So, he changed course and ripped the nail out and started on the other one. Which failed, of course, so he switched hands and did it again. And again, with escalating comic exasperation that was as hilarious as it was perverse. It’s funny because it’s futile.
That could be the slogan of the contemporary clown. If the scene has a dominant theme, it’s the comedy of failure. Every mistake that Palamides made in the show I saw, she drew attention to, mishandling a prop, then turning to us with a thumbs up. A friend told me that at Masli’s show, when an audience member said he had no problems, she ordered him to leave the theater.
There’s something about this chaotic, defiantly flawed spirit that resonates in an age of algorithms and artificial intelligence. In our absurd reality, where human beings are spending billions of dollars for technology that everyone agrees will probably eliminate at least some of our own jobs, these clowns seem quintessentially, necessarily human.
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
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