The wisdom of the fool: Lessons Aditi Mittal learnt at clown school

“Clowning is all about channelling the child in you,” says Mittal. “And who doesn’t want to relive a bit of their childhood? It requires you to shed the things you know about adulthood and regain a sense of wonder about the world around you, look at the same world with brand new eyes. That’s what appealed to me.”

So she made a recurring deposit account to attend Ecole Philippe Gaulier, a clowning academy just outside Paris, run by 79-year-old master clown Philippe Gaulier. Slots fill up years in advance. Gaulier counts the actor and improvisation master Sacha Baron Cohen as one of his students.

Over the years, Mittal also attended clowning workshops by the actor and world-renowned clown Rupesh Tillu and used what she learnt to polish her stage presence. “The basic difference between the clown and the comedian is that a comedian uses jokes to be funny, a clown just is funny. To learn how to just be is an almost spiritual experience and that’s where channelling, the ‘child’ in you helps. The clown is the child in you, the innocent, naive, doesn’t-know-any-better fool at their most vulnerable, their intention only to engage and entertain,” she says.

Mittal flew to Paris in August for a two-week workshop with Gaulier. She joined 30 participants – among them a sketch comedian, a circus performer, actors, a hedge-fund manager, a real-estate content writer, a children’s entertainer who works with kids in hospice – from around the world.

It was pretty intense. Morning warm-ups included games designed to interact, trust and let go. This session was called Le Jeu, as in “to play”.

Gaulier and his protégé, Michiko Miyazaki, took over the afternoons. The instruction for every class was simply to make the audience laugh. “My over-tuitioned brain kept asking ‘How?’, ‘Should I say something?’, ‘What should I do?’,” Mittal recalls. Gaulier would shrug and look away. Miyazaki would say, “How would we know what you should do? Entertain us.”

On day three, the participants were given clown costumes. Mittal was surprised when Gaulier picked out a Minnie Mouse one for her. “I was in the costume for ten days, and his choice made sense to me much later: My natural impulse on stage is to be cheeky, energetic and some say fiery, and those qualities are not generally considered Minnie Mouse-like. My classmates later told me that the contrast of the costume v. the person wearing it made for interesting viewing.”

Mittal is headed back next year, to specialise in embodying a specific type of clown: possibly the bouffon, who lives at the edges of society and subverts rigid social codes. Clown school ended up teaching her as much about life as about clowning. Here, in her own words, are some lessons she’s learnt.

Fail. Fail a lotFail spectacularly. Your success is great; but your failure is fascinating. It’s the single most audacious thing I have ever heard. We are a country where the penalty for failure, especially if you’re a woman, is inordinately high. You are discarded, written off, and disposed when you are not perfect. Even though I have failed and survived time and time again, it is a constant fear. Clowning teaches you that your failure and your vulnerabilities are terrifying to showcase, but the reward for it is always worth it. Look your audience in the eye, try your best, and if you fail, try again.

Make it personalPut your personal pleasure in everything you do on stage and in life. Really, what’s the point if you don’t? Sure, the world is a brutal, terrible place. But it offers opportunity to take and give genuine pleasure at every single turn. Don’t let that go. If you’re not having fun, how will the audience?

CompliciteIt is the French word for “complicity.” Be complicit with who you’re working with on stage and in life. This is a universal instruction for comedy performers across crafts. Even improv (in which you’re supposed to make up scenes on the spot with suggestions from the audience) follows the principle of “Yes, And?” The idea is that if your scene partner is pretending to be shopping, you agree (Yes), and build on it by being a shop keeper, or another shopper, or a jar of jam (And?) to keep the scene going. That’s how some of the greatest comedic performers work in pairs: Laurel and Hardy, Key and Peele, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry and closer to home, Krushna and Sudesh.

When you are “in complicite” with your partner, your tasks are accomplished faster and easier. It doesn’t mean you blindly comply with everything and everyone. Recognising that you may not get along, agree with someone or perform well with them is a form of complicite too.

Account for the unexpectedWith clowns, no one knows what’s going to happen next. Those who seem too confident end up being the idiots. Life is similarly unpredictable. And to think that you can hold it all in control is sheer arrogance – and there’s nothing more idiotic than arrogance. When you bow down to the unpredictability, realise you have no control over it, is when you truly begin to live.

It’s about being humanI read this list out to my mother. She frets. “Arrey, but all this clowning nonsense is the exact opposite of what we Indian parents teach our children,” she says. “If you’re going to tell people that you paid someone to learn how to be stupid, they’ll laugh at you.” It’s not the kind of laugh you want. So I tell my mother that she’s given me free rein to be pretty stupid already. She thinks about it. “I think you’re stupid, but I trust that you are doing it with awareness,” she says. That, I realise is simple enough wisdom: Be stupid, and when you know you’re being stupid, is when you are human. Aren’t stupidity, the ability to fail, the humility of realising that life is unpredictable, and being complicit with each other- the most human qualities of all? They are what makes us build rocketships that go to the moon, slip on banana peels, write novels and save money to go to a clowning course all the way in France and come back not being entirely sure what you learnt.