The art of clowning has existed for thousands of years. A pygmy clown performed as a jester in the court of Pharaoh Dadkeri-Assi during Egypt's Fifth Dynasty about 2500 B.C. Court jesters have performed in China since 1818 B.C. When Cortez conquered the Aztec Nation in 1520 A.D. he discovered Montezuma's court included jesters similar to those in Europe. Aztec fools, dwarf clowns, and hunchbacked buffoons were among the treasures Cortez took back to Pope Clement VII. Most Native American tribes had some type of clown character. Clowns who performed as court jesters were given great freedom of speech. Often they were the only one to speak out against the ruler's ideas, and through their humor were able to affect policy.
Clowns became a well-known trope in the British-Atlantic world over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Tapping carnivalesque vernacular traditions that date far back into pre-modern European societies, they offered British peoples the perfect foils for fleshing out a cluster of anxieties about class status, ethnicity, and gender in a highly stratified society undergoing seismic economic and social changes. Such carnivalesque energies allowed clowns to become a suggestive tipping point that vacillated between reinforcing social mores and subverting them.
In an early modern British Atlantic world that saw a transition to republicanism, the rise of market forces, migrations from provinces to metropolitan centers, as well as the forced migration and enslavement of African peoples, traditional seams along which power operated-most importantly class status, gender, and race/ethnicity-were in transition. Tropes of the clown from this period, not incidentally, induced mirth by intervening along all three axes of power.
The country clown was ubiquitous in this period, appearing in jest books, theater, literature, and song. In jest books country bumpkins often appeared as provincial buffoons who were to some degree the butt of the joke, but usually also induced even more mirth by “upping the ante” and undermining to some degree metropolitan city ostentation. Referred to either as a country man, a country clown, or at times an Irishman, or Yorkshireman, as well numerous other designations that conjured the image of a crude provincial bumpkin, the interlocutor in the jest was often a haughty city gentlemen. In the ensuing comical altercation both usually suffered to some degree, functioning as the target of the jest, and thereby fleshing out the myriad traits inherent to each position. While the country clown was crude, dim-witted, and ignorant, he boasted a certain simplicity of character and a common-sense, child-like perception of the world that carried some weight in a society anxious about corruption and effeminacy.
The Rise of the Frontier Jester
In Britain, where elites had access to numerous resources, such tropes did not fundamentally challenge long established hierarchies; but in the American colonies and in the early American republic such carnivalesque tropes converged with a revolutionary upheaval that challenged the much less established class hierarchies of British North America. Thus in the wake of the war the gentleman-planter and greatest hero of the Revolution, George Washington, had to share the stage with an Americanized version of a country clown, the Yankee Doodle. As the center of gravity shifted in the young American republic westward, geographically, and towards the common man, politically, the Yankee clown mutated into the frontier jester. The focal point of that transition was the War of 1812 and especially the Battle of New Orleans.
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Just as the war erupted in 1812, James Kirke Paulding launched his career of literary nationalism by publishing The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan, an amusing narrative of the rising hostilities between the British and the United States. By contrast, as the song above suggests, by the end of the war the heroes of the Battle of New Orleans were backwoods Yankees, also referred to as “one half horse Half an alligator.” And by the time the more famous song “The Hunters of Kentucky” became a hit in the early 1820s it enshrined the heroes of New Orleans without mentioning the word Yankee altogether.
By the early 1820s when the famous performer Noah M. Ludlow performed the song in frontiersman garb in front of packed houses, the moniker “alligator horse” became a badge of honor for American backwoodsmen, who would become increasingly known as frontiersmen. The success of the phrase “half-horse, half-alligator” perhaps best captures the rise of frontiersmen-and their expression in jester form-in public imagination. The earliest two mentions I found of the phrase, both in reference to crude frontiersmen, appeared in Washington Irving’s comical History of New York from 1809 and Christian Schultz’s accounts of his western travels in 1807-8 and published in 1810. Though not unfavorable, both appear ambivalent about the character of American frontiersmen and attribute at least some derogatory meaning to the phrase, and by implication to clownish and violent frontier types.
As is quite clear, by the end of the War of 1812, after the Battle of New Orleans, when Americans sought to capture the virility of the frontier and its uncanny capacity to unman British ostentation, they turned to that very phrase. This very dynamic seemed to repeat itself when the iconic theater Yankee quite literally morphed into the frontiersman about a decade after “The Hunters of Kentucky” first captured Americans’ imagination.
In 1830 James Hackett, who had made his fame as a specialist in Yankee stage performances, looked for fresh material and placed an advertisement in the New York Evening Post that offered a prize of $250 for the best comedy “dramatizing the manners and peculiarities of our own country.” Inspired by the news of David Crockett, the peculiar frontiersman who had recently arrived to take his seat in Congress, it was once more James Kirke Paulding that rose to the challenge. The result was the play The Lion of the West tailored for Hackett as the lead role of the frontier jester Nimrod Wildfire of Kentucky, which won the competition. Debuting successfully in April 1831 before a full house at New York’s Park Theater, one reviewer commended Paulding for “an extremely racy representation of western blood, a perfect non-pareil-half steam-boat, half alligator.”
The play The Lion of the West saw much success on both sides of the Atlantic, while over the 1830s numerous versions of the life of Davy Crockett made his character famous, especially once he died in 1836 in the Battle of the Alamo. And by the election of 1840 William Henry Harrison obtained the presidency by casting himself in the mold of frontier jesters, living in a frontier log cabin and drinking hard cider. In the election of 1840 the Whig party successfully flipped the script on the party of Jackson. By nominating Harrison, a famous denizen of the west and a hero of the War of 1812 and the Battle of Tippicanoe, and casting him as the true inheritor to Andrew Jackson, they won the election. Though hand picked by Jackson to succeed him, the Democratic incumbent, Martin Van Buren could not successfully defend himself from accusations of being an easterner and a lifelong political insider.
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The story of the rise of the black minstrel also had much to do with carnivalesque explorations of the power structure in the British world. This time however the category of race loomed far larger than those of class or gender, though both too were surely wired in a host of ways into the manifold black minstrel characters. The difference in this case was that blackness, like Irishness in parallel cases, had been introduced to curtail the subversive potential of the clown.
Black clowns started appearing in the British world over the eighteenth century. One early example was Friday, Robinson Crusoe’s racy-and racialized-companion. Furthermore, in jest books, literature, songs, and in theater from the period we can find numerous mentions and renditions of black slaves. Here too it is not surprising that the fate of the black minstrel loomed larger on the west side of the Atlantic than in the British Isles, for the presence of African American people as well as the institution of slavery were far more ubiquitous in the Americas.
Moreover, as the American Revolution helped release radical notions about inalienable rights into the air, Americans groped for novel ways to discipline the borders of the body politic along newly imagined lines. It is therefore no coincidence that the first black dialect songs started appearing during the War of 1812 as well, and that one of them, even saw a pitched battle between the black minstrel and the frontier jester. Indeed, historians consider the song “Backside Albany,” written and popularized in the wake of the Battle of Plattsburgh over the winter of 1814-15, as the first blackface minstrel song.
Using the voice and dialect of a black sailor, it appeared in numerous songsters from the period and was performed in blackface just a few weeks after the American victory in Plattsburgh. Given the contours of the body politic emerging in the wake of the War of 1812, it is also no surprise that one of the stanzas of the dialect song opening this paper also made a reference to a “pretty garl” with which the narrator expected to have “plenty of fun-e.” According to the song, this insidious intent was, of course, also rebuffed by the brave heroes of New Orleans.
Indeed, as a resurgent nationalism swept the nation in the years and decades following the War of 1812, the different artifacts of contemporary popular culture converged to cast a mental image of the nation along implied, but clear, racial, gender, and class lines. White common men were designed to appear in the foreground as the upright citizens of the republic, while women occupied the background.
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Thus in the 1830s and even more so in the 1840s, as Americans constructed a national popular culture to a large degree around these two iconic clowns, the borders of the American nation would become ever more “self evident,” to burrow Jefferson’s telling phrase. Employing such carnivalesque formulas to flesh out the meaning of the national character, Americans etched basic assumptions about the nature of the nation, citizenship, and polity deep into the communal subconscious.
There was a strong element of clowning in minstrelsy. Caricature and parody were central to minstrelsy. Blackface served the same satirical jester function when the occasion arose.
Note that the fright wig, exaggerated lips and eyes, oversized clothing and props of the American clown, props such a seltzer water, stuffed clubs, exploding cigars, and whistles filled with soot, are not Grimaldi's. They belong to Tambo and Bones.
One of the first truly successful Augustes was Chocolat (Raphael Padilla) ( - 1917), a Cuban born Black orphan. He was sold as a servant to a European, and eventually worked as family servant for Tony Grice, a whiteface clown. Part of his duties was appearing as an Auguste in Grice's clown acts. It was after he teamed with English Whiteface clown George Footit (1864-1921) that he became extremely popular. The duo demonstrated the dramatic comedy inherent in a whiteface- auguste duo.
Footit was the haughty, authoritarian, demanding, physically abusive Clown. Chocolat was a lazy fool unsuccessfully attempting to appear dignified, a naive hapless scapegoat who obeys without complaining and doesn't react to the abuse he suffers. They recreated Grice's train station sketch, and performed some traditional routines, but they were most noted for their original parodies rich in dialogue. Chocolat did not wear make up. Early auguste clowns had a naturalistic appearance as if they had just wandered off the street into the circus ring.
James McIntyre ( -Aug. 18, 1937) and Tom Heath ( -Aug. 19, 1938) created the tramp clown characterization in 1874. They portrayed African Americans made homeless by the Civil War. They based their characters on blackface minstrel clowns which is the origin of the white mouth used by tramp clowns. They studied African American culture attempting to accurately portray it. McIntyre is credited with introducing an African American dance called the Buck and Wing to the American stage. The dance later became known as tap dancing.
It should be noted that there are alternate ‘origins' for the tramp character"one of which was the traveling "hoe boys," or itinerant farm workers, who rode the rails from one town to another, wiping the soot away from their eyes & mouth.
Charles Dibden, the most famous actor who specialized in these "Ethiopian Delineations", would dress in Georgian court costume and sit at his harpsichord to regale the audience with jokes and songs, lecturing comically on black customs. He played the slave "Mungo" in the comic opera The Padlock, including a song and dance in character. Dibden's son was the mentor of Joseph Grimaldi, a nineteenth-century clown who originated the whiteface makeup and costume typical of European clowns.
The English blackface comedian Charles Mathews came to America in 1822 to perform and studied black life and customs. No one knows where the mummers' plays and Morris dances came from. In such plays there is a mishmash of characters including "kings" and "saints", cross-dressing, and blackface roles; the faces of Morris (or "Moorish") dancers were also blackened.
The mummer's plays were not for fun. Most were performed by poor men in the hungry time after Christmas. The plow gangs of Sussex would demand money at the end of a play performed the Monday after Christmas. If denied, they would plow the offender's yard. The Derby Play of the Tup was performed for food and beer by unemployed youths. This usage of blackface for political action disguised as entertainment persisted in America when the descendants of these men blackened their faces to protest taxes. One such protest has entered American history as the Boston Tea Party.
In gaudy outfits and blackface, the "Calico Indians" of the Hudson Valley protested the rent system of New York in 1839-1845, often adding animal masks in a struggle called the Anti-Rent War. A few dozen men seized tea on the eve of the Revolution; over ten thousand joined the "Calico Indians", whose gowns often added sexual reversal to racial. Blackface then had political and emotional connotations in English and Anglo-American society that went far beyond the slave and the plantation. What a white man's mouth could not say, perhaps the mouth of blackface could, and the black faces said a lot more than jokes. George Washington was a fan.
Blackface masks were a staple by the 1820s. Other than the Negro, what better mask than blackface?
Table: Key Figures in the History of Clowning
| Name | Contribution |
|---|---|
| Pharaoh Dadkeri-Assi | Employed a pygmy clown as a court jester in Egypt. |
| Yu Sze | Chinese jester who criticized Emperor Shih Huang-Ti. |
| William Kemp | Star clown and part owner of the Lord Chandler's Men. |
| Joseph Grimaldi | Transformed the whiteface clown into a dominant character. |
| Dan Rice | Clown who commented humorously on current events. |
| Chocolat (Raphael Padilla) | One of the first successful Auguste clowns. |
| James McIntyre and Tom Heath | Created the tramp clown characterization. |
A History Of Blackface
I've been a professional clown for over 20 years. I began this career working for the Big Apple Circus in their Clown Care Unit in 2000. We performed in children's hospitals. I've always found this work to be rewarding. It's a combination of artistry, service, and community that has been consistent throughout my professional clown career. The recent focus on Black Lives Matter and the racial awakening that began last year renew a focus on an issue that I've wrestled with over these 20 years. The question is, what is Black Clowning? What are the unique qualities that can be identified as Black Clowning?
I have spent the majority of my career as the only African-American clown on my local team. During these twenty years, I've been one of the few African-American clowns anywhere with whom I could identify and share. Over these years, I've developed my personal approach-a style that fits me and my skill set and personality. However, my artistic approach is just that, Meredith's approach, Which doesn't apply across the board to everyone. That said, there are unique aspects to being African-American. It only makes sense to assume that this uniqueness could manifest itself with other African-American artists in the field.
As a professional clown, I've noticed how having more women clowns can positively affect the work. When I first began doing this work, there was only one woman on our team. Now, our team of eleven is almost half women, half men. I've watched as female clowns make connections from a female point of view. It adds to the richness and quality of the work. I can only wonder how having more African-American clowns would influence the outcome. Especially since we are in Atlanta, an area with a large Black population.
For a brief time, I had one other African-American teammate. There was a perceptible difference in how we were received and how we were seen by staff patients and families. This was especially true among the African-American staff members at the hospital. They were quick to notice that both clowns were African-American. I've always been aware of the unique experience when I find myself performing for an African-American audience. This is especially true in the hospital where seeing any clown can be a surprise, not to mention seeing an African-American clown, one who looks like you. It reminds me of the "nod "that many African Americans will give each other when we see one of "us" in a crowd of mostly white faces.
Chocolat (Raphael Padilla), one of the first successful Auguste clowns.
The Search for a Black Aesthetic in Clowning
A search for a black aesthetic in clowning is a real journey for me, especially now, in our current social setting. I was at the High Museum here in Atlanta several years ago. I wandered into a screening of a short film. The film was "Love is the Message, and the Message is Death." This was a cathartic experience for me. The film showcased black horror, black delight, black joy, black pain, black celebration, and black destruction, all in seven minutes. It got my attention. It was made by director and cinematographer Arthur Jafa. As I learn more about the artists, I realized he has been addressing some of these same concerns as a filmmaker that I wondered about as a clown.
One of his goals as a filmmaker is to create a form of black aesthetic expression in filmmaking that matches the power of the black aesthetic expression in music. As Jafa put it, there is unquestionably a black mastery in music. Black artists have a history of uniquely black artistic expression in jazz, gospel, R&B, rock and roll, and hip hop. Jafa seeks to have a similar form of expression in his film making. For me, his film "Love is the Message, and the Message is Death" expresses a sense of that blackness.
There are African-American clowns I know, a few I have seen throughout my career. However, my experience has been marked by the lack of these examples rather than the presents of these examples. This got me thinking about my artistic medium, clowning. How do I address this as an African-American clown? I've spent most of my career without significant examples of African American clowns as peers, mentors, and icons. Is there a black aesthetic in clowning? If so, where is it? Who is it?
This site covers a wide variety of issues in clowning. This is the paper I presented at the recent S-USIH conference in Chicago. In the spring of 1815, a few months after the treaty of Ghent had finalized the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain, a suggestive comical song circulated in American newspapers about the Battle of New Orleans. Using the emerging genre of black dialect minstrel songs, it related the events of the recent battle from the alleged the perspective of a runaway slave who joined the British side and partook in ensuing events. This little known song, I would like to argue, was an historical meeting point between the two iconic clowns that would come to loom large in American popular culture in the decades following the War of 1812-and in many ways both are still very much with us.
These two are the black minstrel, the narrator of the song, and his purported interlocutor in the Battle of New Orleans, the frontier jester captured above by the phrases “backwood Yankee” and “one half horse, Half an alligator.” Their respective paths would for the most part diverge from here on out, with each of them commanding their own genre. The black minstrel would become the center of the genre of blackface minstrelsy that would develop over the following decade and explode unto the American scene in the 1830s and 1840s. Yet in order to make sense of the cultural work they performed in the antebellum period, I argue that we must view them together. For in fact, as the song I opened with hints, they both originated in the cultural project that complemented the recalibration of the American body politic in the wake of the War of 1812 around manhood and whiteness. We should therefore view them as foils for each other.
