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The Art of Clowning. By Eli Simon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. xv + 165. $26.95 paper.
In his pastoral comedy As You Like It, Shakespeare assigns Touchstone the exhortation: "It is meat and drink for me to see a clown." Touchstone, the courtly fool, is not speaking of himself, but rather the dullard William and his attempt to woo the lovely Audrey. This sets up the difference, in Touchstone's mind at least, that there is a distinction to be made between the dimwitted souls whose humor comes not of their own doing but simply as a result of their stupidity, and the studied, trained, and practiced wits whose humor comes from craft.
In The Art of Clowning, Eli Simon gives an "advanced treatise" to those interested in experiencing the latter. "We all have a clown living somewhere inside us," Simon notes (2), and through the carefully mapped exercises and even "Failure Charts," the reader can expect not only to find his or her inner-clown, but bring it to life, trot it out onstage, and keep it around for lifelong adventure. Simon uses this book to expertly build on a chapter from his first work, Masking Unmasked: Four Basic Approaches to Acting. It is a pleasure to see the clown-work so firmly rooted in the craft of acting, and a not-so-subtle reminder that some of our greatest clowns were fine dramatic actors as well. One thinks of Steve Martin and his transformation from the frantic, slapstick act of...