I personally know some people involved with them and donating their time to help out with shows in very risky areas of the world.
After hearing some of their stories I got a deep appreciation for the work they do, it might sound silly or borderline stupid to some people but to me it's such a beautiful social experience, to go into conflict areas, extremely poor regions of the world afflicted by disease and bring something that is pure joy to an audience that doesn't have access to that. There are some extremely beautiful souls volunteering for CWB, knowing their work won't solve any parts of their audiences' social situation but trying to give them inspiration to keep dreaming, I definitely feel something deep inside my soul was touched after meeting some of them.
Clowning in modern/new circus is much more related to physical comedy than to "traditional" clown as we expect. There are still some of the traditional roles like the whiteclown, the auguste, the character but they are reinvented/remixed with more outlandish comedy and acts like acrobatics and body tricks (one of the best clowns I've seen has some amazing ping-pong balls juggling with very physical acrobatics in them).
The people I know who worked in CWB have very different styles of clowning, they all work to adapt their acts to the local culture, it's really important for CWB volunteers to understand and cater to the local culture, they do research to avoid anything that could be remotely offensive, etc.
Just to source this a bit: my girlfriend is a circus artist here in Sweden so I have some insider view into it, it's actually a very fascinating part of the performing arts.
A friend of mine is a professional clown (https://www.clintbolster.com/) and honestly it's such a respectable profession and form of art. So much goes into a ten minute show - years of work and planning and practice. More work than software, I'd say.
Interestingly enough (although not surprising) he is friends with a close friend of my girlfriend, an Australian aerial straps, swinging pole, and Chinese pole artist :)
> More work than software, I'd say.
Living around many of these performers really put that into perspective to me. Working in the arts is such a completely different game than whatever white-collar job we might have, more akin to scientists in STEM (in the sense of how much passion they have while not being well paid).
There's so much that goes into what looks like a simple show that really made me appreciate much more any form of entertainment or art the past years.
> Interestingly enough (although not surprising) he is friends with a close friend of my girlfriend, an Australian aerial straps, swinging pole, and Chinese pole artist :)
It's a surprisingly small community!
> There's so much that goes into what looks like a simple show that really made me appreciate much more any form of entertainment or art the past years.
I also grew an appreciation for much I was willing to pay to see good art being performed when I learned of the effort going into it. Sometimes if a musical or play doesn't quite hold my interest, I still find it highly enjoyable due to the sheer skill and work involved in just DELIVERING the content, regardless of the content itself.
Looking at some of the videos and pictures, it seems they aren't always wearing what I'd call "stereotypical" clown outfits - just maybe some light makeup and clothes that clearly stand out, while they do "funny things". Juggling bowling pins and dropping them is probably universally understood, even if you have no idea what bowling is.
Funny to see CWB here. I ran into CWB's founder Moshe Cohen[1] at FOO Camp back in the 2006[2]. His performance there was sweet and funny. I had a coffee with him post-FOO too.
IMHO there are few nobler acts than going into high-conflict areas to help people reconnect with the inherent humanity in shared experience and laughter. The work CWB is doing is beautiful.
I used to work in the humanitarian sector, which is frankly a complete shit-show.
I once was drinking with our local EU humanitarian representative, a grizzled veteran of many missions. It's his job to oversee projects running on EU money, which is one of the largest chunks of any response. I really respected the guy, one of the smartest and capable people I met in the business.
He'd been in Haiti, which is famously one of the worst of the worst, and I asked him what the best piece of work he saw there was.
Without hesitation, he said it was these guys. Refugee camps can be bleak and miserable places, and he said that when CWB were doing their thing, the whole atmosphere lifted.
When we think about aid, we think about food and water and shelter, but we're dealing with normal people who've often been severely traumatised. It's hard to understate the value of work like this. Particularly when most of the aid-workers you encounter just wander around doing surveys asking the same questions the last lot did.
This took a solid ten minutes or so for my cynicism to die down, but I'm glad I took the time to read the comments because it is a deceptively good idea for people without a lot of hope or material benefits coming their way.
I wish them luck, this is probably a very difficult thing for volunteers to go and do
FWIW, they don't yet have a rating from Charity Navigator (note that this doesn't indicate anything negative, only that the org hasn't yet been evaluated):
There's quite a few of these circus outreach projects (off the top of my head I know performers without borders and the flying seagull project, but there are lots more) and they all seem to be small, scrappy, run by one or two long term organizers and with projects staffed by volunteers. It's not the type of charity that receives enough money to grow big enough to have the structure and paperwork that can be evaluated against the metrics used to judge larger organisations. I know that they often seek grants from larger charities and that requires a decent level of review & documentation.
Neat. I've heard of celebrities doing USO performances for troops during wartime, but don't recall any organized effort to entertain people, say, facing disasters.
Interesting question. I don’t know if there is but I presume there isn’t, unlike doctors, artists, or journalists, engineers usually need a lot of thing to come together to perform our specialized skills, which means we probably need local and financial support far greater then the previous.
It can be argued that the same applied to doctors, and I agree with that, however MSF is such a massive organization, with such high recognition that they are able to perform a lot of good work despite the complexity of logistics and support needed.
Perhaps the immediate benefit of even rudimentary medical aid is still highly appreciated even if lacking compared to if there were systems in place to fully support the skill. I think the benefits of skilled engineers are not nearly as universal without support.
EDIT: I found this article called A-To-Z Guide of the World’s “without Borders” Groups[1], which included a Technology without Borders group[2]. And I see some of the areas they focus on include water, energy, and waste. I can actually see how rudimentary waste management infrastructure can be of great help for impoverished communities, so perhaps I was wrong to doubt it.
To me clowns are just like kindergarden teachers, they make me cringe beyond belief even though I understand their target audience is successfully being taken care of. I am happy for their work but I never want to see one in action again
Probably less triggering at scale, but similarly to a lot of comments posted here, my mother is deathly afraid of magicians. I have seen the blood drain from her face as she grips the arms of her chair and looks around in a panic at the mention of magicians. I have witnessed full out panic attacks on encounters with real life magicians, and discomfort that one would only typically associate with watching "torture porn" or a particularly squirm-inducing Dr Pimple Popper when magicians appear on TV. Revulsion when learning that the actor Ricky Jay was more known for his work as a magician.
Conversely my mother had regular conversations with a woman who worked as a clown at a local restaurant, which caused her no displeasure.
Interesting. So it's not even a specific aesthetic, just the concept of magicians? I.e. The tuxedo and mustache guy with a top hat and a wand is just as scary as Criss Angel and/or David Blaine?
[random guy on street] tuxedo top hat guy = actual tuxedo top hat magician = david blaine. Any type of magician or perception thereof or association with the idea.
Edit: she is not particularly religious or superstitious either. Her relation to this fear is similar to that of anyone who is extremely uncomfortable/scared of clowns, just a different elememt of the circus.
I'm waiting for someone to mention how buying bed nets would be better but, in the mean time: their work is emotionally impactful and it's a great project.
I get the fear of crazy looking ones like Pennywise, but how is that different from the fear of any non-clown maniac with a crazy look on their face and intent to murder? You could put a guy in a Pluto (Goofy's dog) costume with a serial killer grin on his face wielding a machete and I'd be just as scared.
I will say thought that as an adult perhaps a dislike for clowns cause they're terribly unfunny is logical. Cause someone trying hard to make you laugh especially through slapstick humor rarely works out. But I'm sticking to the fear definition of phobia and not dislike definition.
But a fear of all clowns just cause .... I don't get it.
If the clown face is always happy, or always sad, even if the person shouldn't be. Are they looking at you, can you track where they are looking? Are their eyes open or closed?
The facial recognition wiring in the brain could be sending "I don't know what to do with this" signals to the rest of the consciousness and that's leading to the corresponding anxiety that then manifests as a fear of clowns.
Reminds me of Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey from Saturday Night Live:
To me, clowns aren’t funny. In fact, they’re kind of scary. I’ve wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my dad.
If I see a clown in the midst of a performance, it's fine. It feels "right". You're kind of far away from where they are, and them wearing colorful clothes and strange makeup makes sense because it helps a large crowd see their movements a bit easier. It's the "home" of the clown.
If I see a clown doing anything mundane, or just not actively "on" performing in front of a crowd it feels repulsive and weird. Clown just walking down the street? Horrible. Taking pictures with a group of people? Gross. It feels unnatural. It's like the hairy child vomiting photo. [1]
The worst is if I see a clown eating or smoking. A clown is a mechanism of performance and entertainment. For them to be "merely human", to be doing something relaxing evokes a kind of juxtaposition that leads to a kind of horror and disgust I can't quite describe. It's like walking down the road and coming across a Silverback Gorilla casually sipping a cup of coffee, reading the newspaper - it's an incongruity.
Also, I'm pretty sure the initial spark for my weirdness with clowns started with The Simpsons. [2]
That's what it is for me. I also get the same feeling from certain common manga/anime drawing styles (e.g., "moe") with exaggerated eyes and exaggerated responses, despite moe apparently being seen to be cute by most people. (I get this feeling especially strongly from styles where no nose is drawn.)
No, "moe" in the Japanese sense. Typically, a petite face, large eyes dominated by enormous black pupils, etc.
The way it makes me feel is a little like the response evoked by the movie Coraline, which used dolls with big black button eyes and no noses to evoke a queasy kind of horror-lite response.
It doesn't have to be large features though, it can be exaggerated small ones too. For example, Art the Clown has a small black dot on the tip of his otherwise white nose. It's unsettling.
That makes sense though in this case, if you look at the banner video on the homepage, none of them are wearing masks, just some light makeup. So perhaps that will make it better for any coulrophobics in the audience.
I tried making a clown using stable diffusion one day by blending 3 different clown-generating prompts together, and the result that came out was a horrifyingly grotesque inhuman monster. I've never had that happen just blending prompts together to make normal people. The clown makeup screws with how their faces are embedded or something. It ended up with Giger-esque multiple sets of teeth. I can only assume there's a similar phenomenon going on in peoples' imagination.
Clowns don't bother me, but I think it might be an uncanny valley thing. Clowns have exaggerated human features, ones that could be grotesque if they were real. I think that means they can share an element with body horror, which does bother me.
What causes fear of clowns? Probably the prevalence of both evil clowns (John Wayne Gacy, Stephen King's It, the recent Evil Clown meme). That, and the prevalence of the fear of clowns.
for me it was a hobo clown painting in the family room whose eyes always followed me as a child. told my parents it was scary but it never came down, i just assumed it had a lock on my parents souls or something.
I always thought it was a joke, until I met someone that was genuinely afflicted by it. On the plus side, it's really fun to go through haunted houses with them around Halloween.
on the contrary, Ive found it an incredible validation of the Clowns with out Borders effort in its entirety. Circuses, parties, TV, movies, war zones, my nightmares, you name it...clowns can always reach it.
The perfect murder is to trap a mime inside a real glass box, in the park where everyone can watch him desperately try to get out while horribly suffocating.
True, but these children have real problems and don’t have the luxury to concoct feelings of grief by other people’s peaceful self expression. I think it’s a win.
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Why clowns??
Just setup some nintendos or something.
...
The worst / funniest thing about clowns is the dunning kruger effect they all seem to have about their efficaciousness.
Like the clown doctor in the 'childrens hospital' adult swim show.
After hearing some of their stories I got a deep appreciation for the work they do, it might sound silly or borderline stupid to some people but to me it's such a beautiful social experience, to go into conflict areas, extremely poor regions of the world afflicted by disease and bring something that is pure joy to an audience that doesn't have access to that. There are some extremely beautiful souls volunteering for CWB, knowing their work won't solve any parts of their audiences' social situation but trying to give them inspiration to keep dreaming, I definitely feel something deep inside my soul was touched after meeting some of them.