Musings on the MICF: Why we still need the Clown

There is something almost defiant about buying a comedy ticket right now.

You hand over your twenty-odd dollars, you find your seat in whatever converted bar or hotel meeting room or museum the festival has taken over this year, and for an hour you decide, collectively, that the world outside can wait. It’s not escapism, exactly. It’s more like a refusal — a small, deliberate act of not letting things be quite as terrible as they keep insisting on being.

This year is the festival’s fortieth anniversary, and it feels different. Not because the program is unusually strong, though it is. More because the world outside has become so relentlessly grim that sitting in a room full of strangers and laughing together feels less like leisure and more like a form of maintenance. Something you do to stay functional. Something, maybe, that we’ve always needed and are only now willing to admit is serious.

I keep coming back to clowning. Not the red-nose shorthand, not the horror movie version — the actual tradition. The thing that runs from Commedia Dell’Arte through Vaudeville and Slapstick all the way to whatever is happening on small stages across Melbourne right now in late-night slots and converted warehouses. Clowning tends to get dismissed as niche, as a novelty, as something adjacent to real performance rather than central to it. But I think it might be one of the most honest forms we have — and one of the oldest.

The clown, at its core, is not simply a person who does funny things. The clown is the figure permitted to say the unsayable — to trip over the thing everyone else is carefully stepping around. There’s a reason the court jester was the only one who could tell the king he was wrong. Not because the jester was harmless, but because laughter creates a brief, radical space where the normal rules of power get suspended. You can’t really be furious at someone who just made you laugh. That’s not weakness; it’s a kind of magic.

And it’s old magic. The impulse to laugh at a body doing something wrong — slipping, falling, miscalculating — predates cinema, predates the word slapstick itself. It lives in Commedia, in the masked stock characters tumbling across stages since the sixteenth century: the clever servant outwitting the pompous master, desire and power and status negotiated entirely through the body. Little Devil and the War Machine did exactly this at MICF this year — Renaissance Italy, da Vinci and Machiavelli, the whole thing refracted through masks and physicality and the ancient Commedia grammar of hierarchy coming undone. The parallels to the present accumulate quietly and then all at once. History keeps rhyming, and the clown keeps noticing.

This is what I think people misunderstand about clowning as a contemporary form. They hear the word and picture something broad and unserious — and yes, it can be those things, and the best of it often is — but the training behind serious clown work is rigorous and strange and often deeply philosophical. Philippe Gaulier, whose influence runs through so much of the physical comedy you’ll see at this festival, built a whole pedagogy around the idea of “le jeu”: the game, the play, the essential quality of pleasure that a performer must find and share with the audience or risk losing them entirely. The clown is not performing at the audience. The clown is playing with them. That distinction matters enormously, and it’s the difference between a show that lands and one that doesn’t — whether the performer knows the word “clowning” or not.

The Umbilical Brothers understand this as well as anyone. Speedmouse — back at the Regent for its twenty-fifth anniversary — is two bodies in a space, no props, no set, creating entire worlds out of timing and sound. They freeze, rewind, fast-forward. Things appear that aren’t there. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, and it absolutely does. It’s a reminder that physical comedy at this level is genuinely a craft; something trained and practised and refined over years, not a fallback when the words run out.

Mel McGlensey is Normal is a good example of what that looks like when the form pushes into new territory. The conceit is absurdist — McGlensey is trapped in a simulation, an AI called NorMel will only release her if she can prove she’s normal, the audience votes on her tasks in real time — but the underlying question is entirely earnest: what is normal, and who decides? The show bends itself around whatever the room wants, and McGlensey meets all of it with a full-body commitment that makes you realise clowning is, among other things, a profound act of trust. She is at the mercy of the audience and she knows it, and that vulnerability is precisely what makes it work.

Garry Starr (whose Classic Penguins I wrote about here last year) is doing something quieter and stranger in the late-night work-in-progress Too Clowns: a clown waiting for a partner who never comes, turning to the audience to fill the gap. It carries a weight that catches you off guard. Both are a reminder that funny and meaningful aren’t mutually exclusive — something the clown has always known, even when the rest of us forget. Con Coutis’ Joke Protocol works in a different register but the same instincts are underneath — the spy-movie frame and the stage full of tech are the bit, but what holds it together is Coutis himself: the physical precision, the timed pause before the disaster, the face that registers what the words won’t say. Classical instincts in a very contemporary package. Which is really just another way of saying: the clown found a new costume.

None of this is separate from the straight stand-up happening at the festival. The best stand-up has always had clown in it — the self-exposure, the willingness to be ridiculous, the sense that the performer is genuinely at risk and choosing to be there anyway. That’s not a technique. That’s a stance toward the world. And it’s the same stance that makes absurdism work: you can only really play in the gap between how things are and how they’re supposed to be if you’re willing to stand in it without flinching.

Which is why comedy matters more, not less, when everything is terrible. Not because it fixes anything — it doesn’t — but the laugh, the real involuntary shared laugh in a room full of people who don’t know each other, is one of the few collective experiences left that cuts through the noise. You can’t curate it. You can’t consume it alone on a screen at 11pm and have it do the same thing. It requires bodies in a room, and a person willing to stand up in front of those bodies and be seen, and an audience deciding, together, to let themselves go.

Forty years of the festival. Forty years of April in Melbourne having this particular quality — the weather turning, the chalked A-frame signs appearing outside venues, the city filling with a slightly different energy for a few weeks. The MICF has been through things in those four decades. It cancelled in 2020 and came back changed. It navigates, every year, the grind of arts funding and cost pressures and the ongoing question of who gets to make comedy and who gets seen. None of that is resolved. But every year it opens, and every year people show up.

The clown is still here. And we still, badly, need them.

---

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival runs to the 19th of April.