The Rise of the Clowns
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At a recent lunch on the Westside of Los Angeles — generally improv territory, if you divide the city by comedy types — I overheard two women passionately discussing the problem with clowns. (Clown, as I understood it, dominates the town’s Eastside.) One of the women was waiting for confirmation of a plan, desperate for a work drink to happen, because if not, she had no excuse. She’d have to go to her friend’s clown show.
“I want to support her, but I don’t want to see her naked again,” she said, sighing. Her dining partner looked confused. “Clowns are just always getting naked,” she sputtered.
Before she could say more, I had to lean over and interrupt: “Excuse me, but are you guys talking about the L.A. underground alt-clown scene?”
The concept of a clown scene had first entered my field of consciousness just a few months earlier via Heated Rivalry’s cheeked-up “It” boy Connor Storrie, who in an interview casually mentioned taking clown classes. Apparently, we have his clown training to thank for the staggering physicality of the series’ sex scenes. In L.A., almost everywhere I went, I met a practicing clown, or talked to someone who had been to a clown show, or had tickets to one, or knew someone who was a clown, or their agent had recommended they dabble in clown. Someone had dated a clown and recommended it because of clowns’ ability to access true mask-off vulnerability; someone else had dated a clown and warned me off doing the same because of clowns’ affinity for telling lies. When dealing with a clown, there’s always a chance you might end up the fool.
The L.A. clowns are performance artists working with a turducken of comedy forms. There are elements of sketch (but it’s not sketch), character work (but not every actor can be a clown), experimental theater (but it’s more), stand-up (without the tight fives), and improv (but it’s not as rigid; many clowns say they’re the rejects of the improv scene). It includes strains of street performance, drag, weird dance, and, to quote a clown, “funny poetry.” But really, I hear again and again, clown can be anything. “There’s no regulation. It’s like supplements,” says Chad Damiani, a popular clown teacher. Natasha Mercado, who has been clowning for much of the past decade and also teaches — recently at the Lyric Hyperion in Silver Lake — says that as long as a performer has learned to “prioritize human connection,” “childlike joy,” “vulnerability,” and “play,” then whatever they do onstage can be considered clown. (Real practitioners know: The art doesn’t take the gerund.)
There are clowns in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Montreal, France, and London. But the L.A. scene is, according to those paying attention, clouted. There hasn’t been this much interest in clowns since the Great Juggalo Fascination of 2011. “I have friends who are professional theater artists who go and do workshops and training over in Europe and Eastern Europe and France,” says Chas Harvey, 33, an actor who started taking clown classes last summer. “And their fellow students are like, ‘Oh, you’re from L.A.? Like, I hear clown’s craaaaaazy over there.’”
What’s happening over there, I was told by a rotating Greek chorus of clowns, is “exciting,” “vital,” “radically unique,” “punk,” “DIY,” “scrappy,” “subversive,” “disruptive.” “I’ve been in L.A. for 15 years,” a clown and film editor I run into one morning at a Highland Park coffee shop tells me. Despite being a self-described “real New York guy who thought he’d go back,” he “unfortunately and very fortunately” has to tell me he “will stay in L.A. for the clown community.”
Between their day jobs as copywriters and graphic designers, would-be screenwriters and actors, teachers and therapists (a good job for clowns, I’m told, owing to an ability to access their inner children and their shadow selves), aspiring clowns take classes and intensives and workshops. Social groups have formed loosely around the city’s different teachers and teaching styles. “There appear to be a handful of clown gurus people worship out there,” says Alex Tatarsky, a Philadelphia clown who recently spent some time doing shows in L.A. The city has always loved its cults, they say.
Some clowns gravitate to the Idiot Workshop (headier, a little older) taught by John Gilkey, one of two white Gen-X men often referred to as the “father of L.A. Modern Clown.” Some prefer what Mercado calls her “soft clown” pedagogy (more mindful), and others are drawn to Jet Eveleth’s Clown Church (more woo-woo). Everyone passes through workshops helmed by the other father of L.A. Modern Clown, Damiani (more practical). Many of these teachers borrow philosophies from traditional clowning — particularly the idea that the clown is a trickster — and from the French school, but it’s all got a distinct regional flavor, I’m told.
The clowns see each other at Playspace — a weekly jam — attend one another’s house parties (clowns are “better hangs” than the improv guys because they don’t do constant bits), and loiter together outside their chosen theaters. They “put up shows” as ensembles, duos, and solo acts, which sometimes sell out and sometimes barely sell a ticket, but each has the potential to be, as many flyers boast, “the clown show that helped start a comedy revolution.”
I receive a flurry of recommendations. Everyone has a favorite: “Go see Biz Baz” (a variety act), “Go see Cruel Babes” (Gilkey’s troupe), “Go see Bill O’Neill’s show The Amazing Banana Brothers,” “Go see Catsby,” “Check out Clowns of Color,” “Go to Stamptown” — and once again, “Check out Clowns of Color.” “Make sure to see Rachel Troy’s one-woman clown show, Baby”; “See anything with Claire Woolner”; “Make sure you check out Clowns of Color.” (Everyone is aware the scene has a problem with whiteness.)
The insiders — performers, students, teachers, and fans — compare what’s happening with clowns on the Eastside of L.A. to other notable counterculture happenings with rarefied spontaneous energy, cheap beer, and sparsely attended shows. “It’s like grunge in the ’90s” or “the Beatles in Hamburg,” “the Greenwich Village that gave us Bob Dylan,” the chorus of clownery says. Harvey compares it to the “East Village in the ’60s”: “You go around and you see a lot of the same people, and you feel kind of like a jazz musician who’s going in and doing things that are really potent to people.” I’m told clowns even dress better than other comedians. “They’re sort of the cool kids of the L.A. comedy scene,” says Allegra Rosenberg, a writer and producer, who isn’t brave enough to clown but wishes she could. Mercado puts it differently: “It’s the island of broken toys.”
Jamonté Williams and DeShawn Ball perform as Clowns of Color, often at the Elysian Theater in Echo Park. They were one of multiple clown acts featured in this spring’s Netflix Is a Joke festival.
Bill O’Neill plays two siblings in his show The Amazing Banana Brothers and clowns with an ensemble, the Underground Monk Show.
Chad Damiani, one of the fathers of L.A. Modern Clown, is best known for teaching clown to Heated Rivalry star Connor Storrie.
Courtney Pauroso plays a sex robot in Vanessa 5000, a one-woman show and cult classic in the scene.
Jamonté Williams and DeShawn Ball perform as Clowns of Color, often at the Elysian Theater in Echo Park. They were one of multiple clown acts featured in this spring’s Netflix Is a Joke festival.
Bill O’Neill plays two siblings in his show The Amazing Banana Brothers and clowns with an ensemble, the Underground Monk Show.
Chad Damiani, one of the fathers of L.A. Modern Clown, is best known for teaching clown to Heated Rivalry star Connor Storrie.
Courtney Pauroso plays a sex robot in Vanessa 5000, a one-woman show and cult classic in the scene.
In December, in New York, I went to see a one-woman show, Weer. I was following the vibes and buzzwords: “A24 produced,” the first show at the newly reopened Cherry Lane Theatre, some seats might be in a “splash zone.” Besides that, I had zero information. Even if I’d read every review and every story on the creator and star, Natalie Palamides, I still would not have been prepared.
Palamides, 36, came up in the L.A. clown scene, though I didn’t know that (or that clowns were a thing) when I found my seat in the small theater one Sunday night. Her show was an absurd take on the classic ’90s Manhattan rom-com. While breaking up on New Year’s Eve, a man and a woman look back on the highs and lows of their on-again, off-again three-year relationship. To complicate that simple premise, Palamides plays both man and woman, her costume and makeup split right down the middle (she makes good use of a wiggly prosthetic penis and fake chest hair). To complicate it more: Yes, the couple has sex. To complicate it more and more, she coaxes several audience members (including, once, Kevin Bacon) into participating (that is, she made out with Kevin Bacon). To complicate it more and more and then some: You really can’t ignore how big that prosthetic penis is and the fact that the audience in the splash zone gets doused with more mystery liquids than at a Gallagher show.
It was like watching a child imagine a love story — the most deranged love story — with a plot loosely inspired by Pearl Jam’s 1999 cover of the ’60s ballad “Last Kiss.” Palamides’s energy is unhinged, and the show often veered into incomprehensible chaos just before she’d pull it back. Somehow, she swung the audience from laughter to pathos.
After the show, I sat at dinner with a friend, bubbling with the sort of embarrassingly hyperbolic praise you can get away with only in the immediate aftermath of seeing something genuinely surprising. I was moved! It had been joyful and unruly! It sparked insights about love and connection and toxic relationships. Multiple moments had come so dangerously close to being bad — but the risks Palamides took all added up to something undeniably good.
Watching something that didn’t reek of the algorithm or AI generation, or covert Casamigos sponsorship, made me realize how passively I’d been absorbing my entertainment over the past few years and how fucked my brain may be because of it. I’d become so creatively lazy I’d entered into an existential free fall. Weer made me want to be fearless enough to try something that could be bad (that probably would be bad) but might be genius. It seemed going to one clown show was the equivalent of doing the entirety of the The Artist’s Way.
Months later, when I spoke to Palamides for the first time, she told me the dumb stuff was what it was all about. Clowning, she said, is essentially finding “the stupidest solution to the simplest problem.” To explain, she referenced a famous bit from I Love Lucy: In a 1952 episode, Lucy and Ethel work at a chocolate factory and can’t keep up with the speed of the conveyor belt. Their solution is to start cramming bonbons into their mouths and hats and shirts. “You could just stop the conveyor belt,” Palamides said, “but no. Shove all the chocolates in your mouth.” The bit achieves the highest compliment anyone can give a clown, she said: “That was so stupid.”
The art in it — and the mystery for me — seemed to be in how the stupid was transformed into the sublime. Tatarsky, who has clowned everywhere from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to the 2024 Whitney Biennial, tells me the key is confronting the ego, considering failure a gift, and staying present. “Not to be extremely corny,” they say, “but it truly has a spiritual dimension.”
While Tatarsky insists Philly is largely responsible for the new clown movement (thanks to a few clowns who studied in France and started the Pig Iron Theatre Company) — and also contends the New York scene is “more demented” than L.A.’s “in a good way” — they can’t deny that L.A. clown is rapidly growing. As Palamides puts it, it’s the “beating heart of the American clown renaissance.” The new fools, like so many before them, are heading west for spiritual expansion — or at least to figure out how to be successfully stupid.
Natasha Mercado teaches what she calls “soft clown,” an approach rooted in sensitivity and pleasure.
Natalie Palamides, widely admired in the clown community, played both sides of a couple in her show Weer.
Cruel Babes, a clown troupe, is led by John Gilkey (seated, with beard), another father of L.A. Modern Clown. Other members include John Bradford, Ian Bratschie, Amrita Dhaliwal, Kami Dimitrova, Chas Harvey, Meera Kumbhani, Araceli Lemos, Eli Leonard, Joe Mitchell, Karin Nord, and Zach Steel. Gilkey also runs the Idiot Workshop, a six-week intensive.
Rachel Ho, a hub of the clown community, runs Playspace, a weekly jam at the Elysian.
Natasha Mercado teaches what she calls “soft clown,” an approach rooted in sensitivity and pleasure.
Natalie Palamides, widely admired in the clown community, played both sides of a couple in her show Weer.
Cruel Babes, a clown troupe, is led by John Gilkey (seated, with beard), another father of L.A. Modern Clown. Other members include John Bradford, Ian Bratschie, Amrita Dhaliwal, Kami Dimitrova, Chas Harvey, Meera Kumbhani, Araceli Lemos, Eli Leonard, Joe Mitchell, Karin Nord, and Zach Steel. Gilkey also runs the Idiot Workshop, a six-week intensive.
Rachel Ho, a hub of the clown community, runs Playspace, a weekly jam at the Elysian.
In a Highland Park black-box theater, John Gilkey, 59 years old and 40 years a clown, instructed his students to circle around him with the peaceful magnetism of someone raised at Esalen on a steady diet of Bragg Liquid Aminos and Transcendental Meditation. Even the cockroach wandering the floor seemed drawn to his presence. Tall and spry with wild salt-and-pepper hair, and eyebrows like toilet-bowl brushes, Gilkey sat cross-legged and pulled out a weathered original edition of Zen and the Comic Spirit, by M. Conrad Hyers, a classic work on the philosophy of humor. It was the first day of a new six-week session of the Idiot Workshop, which he launched in 2012.
There were about a dozen students, mostly 30-somethings, and nobody was in white face paint or curly wigs; the closest to a clown shoe was a pair of Tabis. Nobody wore a red nose, though they all understood its symbolic importance. It’s the foundation of the art, as Palamides, who was one of Gilkey’s early students, explained: The nose is considered a sacred tool of transformation. Called the “smallest mask,” its literal or figurative use distances the clown from their everyday self and reminds them they carry a clown’s unique responsibilities.
Gilkey finds much of traditional clowning passé — his own variation is more confrontational — but today he wanted to talk about this idea of responsibility before getting to the business of laughter. These days, heavy is the nose that wears … the nose.
He read a long selection from Hyers: Clowns have “often functioned at their best as the great levelers in relation to all hierarchies and all distinctions, however sacred … It has always been the primary function of the clown and the fool to annul just such distinctions by reducing the sublime to the ridiculous, by profaning the sacred, by turning reason into nonsense, by giving the prize to the ugliest man in town. Theirs is the Emersonian motto: ‘I unsettle all things.’”
When he finished, he closed the book and looked up. “It’s a tough time out there,” he said. He meant the world at large. “We need some joy. Joy is resistance. We need you. So that’s why I’m asking a lot. You want to be a clown, you want to play that role, then you gotta fucking deliver. We’re going to have fun, but we’re going to dig, okay?”
The students let the message wash over them with a reverence akin to a Stanislavski acting class, then stood and dove into a warm-up, some sort of nonsense stream-of-consciousness conversation. One turned to another and said, “Baseball bat, alphabet motherfucking bitch. You bitch. I’m Jesus Christ.”
Their partner responded: “I’m gonna cry on the people, feet, balls, tomatoes!”
The first volleyed back: “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.”
Then the second: “Oh, red light, green light, red light, blue fish, two fish, five fish, two, pick your fish. I like salmon. I like poopy.”
And so on and so forth, until everyone was ready to dig.
Gilkey is often credited with igniting L.A.’s clown scene. In 2012, after finishing a run with Cirque du Soleil, he says, he took stock of the city’s comedy landscape — ruled by stand-up, sketch, and improv — and thought it could use something experimental and avant-garde and surreal. L.A., he thought, could use a little clown. He started teaching one class a week and eventually created Wet the Hippo, an absurdist, improvisational troupe that was nominated for Best Comedy at the L.A. Fringe Festival in 2013 and still influences the scene.
Today, Gilkey’s students were learning to work as duos, and he called up the first pair, giving them a prompt to interpret — “Break the rules” — and sent them off with a conspiratorial wink: “Play as you wish, play as you do.”
The pair started with a piggyback ride, the taller one carrying the shorter. As a unit, they stomped across the stage, grunting and ha-hup-ing like old-timey bodybuilders. The rider talked about wanting to grow taller and how her apartment was leaking gas. I wondered if this was a metaphor.
They flailed for a while before Gilkey stopped them, confused: “What rule have you broken?” They had no answer. They tried again. More piggybacks and mounting frustration. Again, Gilkey interrupted. “Hey, guys, look at all our faces,” he said firmly. “Are we satisfied?”
The shorter one started to cry a little. She couldn’t get out of her head this week. She was having a bad one, she explained, and had brought her baggage onstage with her. Gilkey nodded, sympathetic but stern, thanked them for starting it off, and called up the next pair.
“Be brave,” Gilkey reminded them. “Don’t forget the audience.” The two clowns stalked the stage trying to find where to begin. One, a nonbinary person with dreadlocks tied up in a messy bun, decided to confront the observing students in their folding chairs. They walked up to various classmates and demanded “Am I a joke to you?” over and over; the gravity behind the question grew until tears started rolling down their face. Their scene partner, a short, energetic white woman, jumped in as backup, their emotional security guard. In a thick Italian accent, she ranted about collecting her partner’s tears and sprinkling them onto penne vodka. “That’s right — that’s dinner tonight! And I am going to eat it up,” she said, pacing the stage. “And then I’m gonna be so supercharged and powerful, and I’m going to also guard their body because that’s my job.” This was the sort of challenging interaction that makes Gilkey come alive, but for the sake of time, he stopped them for a quick postmortem. This was starting to get somewhere good.
Up next: a gamine brunette — in a spandex unitard and what appeared to be lace-up wrestling shoes — and a guy in cargo pants whom I had recently seen in a bit part on a network sitcom. Out the gate, the guy took the expressway to his innermost fears. “I’m scared of failure, loneliness,” he said. “I’m scared that one day I’m gonna, like, snap and have a mental breakdown and forget everything and everyone in my life.”
“Go off, 40-year-old king,” the brunette responded; she was doing vigorous calisthenics.
“I don’t want to be king,” he said.
“Go off, king!” she shouted.
They were not communicating well.
It went on like this for some time: him, stuck and upset, while she carried on. But soon she was crying, and it didn’t appear to be part of the game.
“I feel like a loser,” she said. “I’m crying,” she said, while crying more.
Gilkey cut in and asked them to unpack what was going on. The sitcom guy felt awful — he’d genuinely upset her. He realized now how alone she’d felt. She told him how she’d needed him to show up for her and he hadn’t. I wondered if the two were dating or if this was still somehow a clown act. The intensity made me squirm. It felt like I was watching Couples Therapy: The Clown Show.
Over the course of the three-hour class, I did not laugh. I did not cry. When the performers cried, I cringed. I was entertained, but also annoyed, alienated — once even a little scared, when I became the target of a redheaded clown’s game to sniff out who was “good” or “bad.” (The verdict was undecided.) I was sometimes impressed.
Throughout, Gilkey was as pleased as I was uncomfortable. As for the maybe-couple, this was what he was looking for. “You were going into, like, real shit,” he said. “And it was funny, it was engaging. It was arresting. It was risky.” It was clown.
Though clown had spread gradually in L.A. since 2012, public awareness began to pick up in 2020, during the pandemic. With time on their hands and no way of performing in their usual indoor spaces, a group of clowns, including Palamides and Damiani, started Clown Zoo, a scrappy weekly production in the abandoned animal enclosures at the former Griffith Park Zoo. The emphasis on connection, on fun and openness, and the guerrilla, DIY quality of the location felt right for that fever-dream summer. “People were so hungry to feel free and be together,” Palamides says.
Six years later, the world is arguably a lot worse, and that hunger has not abated. At the same time, the film-and-television industry has become a black hole collapsing in on itself. From the start, L.A. clowns have taken pride in offering an alternative to more established Hollywood training grounds (acting conservatories, big-name improv programs), which no longer reliably lead to jobs and, many say, feel too big and too systematized to produce anything exciting. For the unemployed looking to express themselves, why not go as weird and singular as possible? “At least clowns,” Tatarsky remarks, “are not threatened by AI.”
“One of the reasons why clowning is popular now is that it is, I would say, the perfect medium for resistance,” Gilkey tells me. (This was one of a few times he mentioned “resistance.”) “Every king needs his fool. We have a king right now. And so the fool has to rise in response.”
Harvey, who studies with Gilkey and teaches commedia dell’arte in California prisons, describes turning on the news and thinking, “What the fuck is going on? Like, this is really — this is like a clown show. Our president is just talking about aliens?”
“I’m trying to work in a decolonized space,” he goes on. “I’m trying to provide, like, functional anarchy in order to explore, you know, what it means to liberate people.” He’s currently perfecting a bit in which he dresses up as Thomas Jefferson and sells a white audience member at a mock slave auction. The last time he did it, he says, the guy “danced like Trump” and didn’t even realize it. He sold for $1.
“Clowns come in at the end of things,” says Tim Reid, one of the original L.A. clowns, who’s now writing a dissertation on the art form at NYU. “Oh?” I ask, hoping he’ll say more. He prods me to come up with the rest. A clown comes in at the end of a tragedy to provide levity, I suggest, so maybe we need clowns now, at the end of civilization? His replies grow only more cryptic. Very clown.
On a rainy Tuesday at Echo Park’s Elysian Theater — the nerve center of the L.A. clown scene — the old velvet seats released the olfactory history of all those who had sat before, and eager performers swapped jokes and notes, awaiting the start of the final day of Damiani’s three-day clown intensive. The students were an aesthetic cross-section of people interested in clown: some in the floral shirts and dad jeans of the ’90s stand-up comedian, others in the black stretch pants of conservatory movement classes. There were regulars — people who call the theater “the clubhouse” — and new faces, some of whom had traveled from Baltimore, New York, and San Francisco. All of them were spending hundreds of dollars to be there, shaping solo acts for an end-of-class showcase.
Jude, sweet and in their 70s, had come down from Washington to spend seven weeks taking various comedy classes in L.A., they explained as they stretched and pulled on their kneepads. They were relatively new to clowning but had heard they had to take a class with Damiani, who’s widely beloved. For years, he was best known for his bit as a guy with his dick stuck in a bear trap, and now, as he brings up often, he’s known as the clown who taught Connor Storrie (he has recorded two podcast episodes about it).
I’d liked Jude since the second day of class, when they totally tanked onstage during an exercise to help students find new personalities to play with. One by one, the clowns identified how they thought people saw them — as loud, as silly, as timid — and then exited the stage as the rest of the class chanted, “The opposite is true / The opposite is true / Come on out as the opposite of you.” Upon reemerging, the timid became bombastic, the gregarious became small and shy, the independent turned needy. Almost every male student emerged as hypermasculine and domineering. After Jude went offstage, they remerged as some sort of goblin, crouching and making a strange whiny noise as they shuffled across the floor.
“What are you — ” Damiani, short and solid as a cannonball, broke in with a bewildered laugh. “Jude, what are you doing? What is that?” He instructed them to go back and try again, this time embodying a trait people could recognize. When they returned, they were once again a strange goblin, this time so committed they fell down laughing hysterically. Damiani was laughing too; so was the class. To my surprise, I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes.
Every student had arrived on the first day of the workshop with an idea or two for a solo act, and Damiani helped them refine the rough material. It was now the final run-throughs before the showcase that evening. For their five-minute act, Jude had decided to play a Catholic priest who exorcises possessed appliances. Dressed in a full robe and wearing a cross, they blustered, in an attempt at a Scottish accent, that something in “the house” felt evil. They asked if anyone in the audience had an appliance so they could “get the devil out of it.”
Damiani interrupted with some notes and questions, kindly ribbing them in the process. First: Had they brought an appliance? No. Had they asked anyone to bring an appliance to the show? They shook their head. A fellow performer raised his hand and offered to bring one from home; he’d be the plant.
Damiani gave each student advice. To a dollar-store vampire, he said, “Make sure you believe the stakes.” To another, Annie, playing God as a manosphere-friendly comedian in a bald cap, Damiani suggested slowing down and trusting that playing the same bit over and over (holding a dumb facial expression) would get really funny, even if it stopped being funny first.
Caleb, an actor with a southern drawl, performing as an exaggerated version of himself desperate for love, screamed “Who’s with me? Are you with me??” at the audience while the omnipresent song “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters played through his iPhone speaker. Damiani urged him to consider whom he was really trying to get to love him. Near the end of his time, Caleb called his father and announced, “I’m not gay anymore!” There was a moment of silence before his dad responded, “Are you drunk?” It was perfect.
With each bit of guidance, Damiani was gently bending the performers to the workshop’s real purpose: finding their clown. In L.A. clown, Damiani says, this means “stripping away the masks we’ve adopted to control how other people see us. Our goal is to be our truest selves. This is the clown that exists underneath all of our characters.” Finding it, he says, “allows the audience to love you more quickly.” Damiani asks his students to listen for the laugh — it will point them in the right direction.
He started his performing career as an announcer for World Championship Wrestling before trying screenwriting and the improv circuit, and he believes the searching process is part of why people are attracted to the art. “They find us,” he says, “and we go, ‘Be you. Can we find a way to maximize being you?’” People take a lot of LSD to reach this level of self-actualization.
For Dave, a student in the workshop who discovered clown a couple of years ago, finding his clown has meant accessing and embracing a part of himself he was previously insecure about: “a white boy influenced by Black culture.” (Having dated this type, yes, I can attest, this is a clown.) Sometimes he plays a basketball-obsessed character, but today, it’s his Li’l Brunch Guy, a white rapper who raps about food. He puts on chef’s whites and oven mitts and performs “Tiramisu,” rapping a list of Italian foods he likes over a 2012 Drake-esque track.
That night, the students got up and did their bits in the theater’s smaller performance space, also known as the Skunk Room. The vampire finished his monologue; the “Are you with me” guy called his dad again, though this time he didn’t answer. Nothing was as successful as it had been in rehearsal, but the final performance had never been the point.
I messaged my friends as I left the show that night: “It’s possible we all should be clowns.”
The week I spent in Los Angeles was a great week to be a clown. Storrie was about to be on Saturday Night Live, and there was a surprising amount of chatter in the press about his involvement in the scene. Everyone kept comparing Storrie stories (“He had us over for dinner and cooked us a bunch of ground beef,” Dave, of the Li’l Brunch rap, told me). To celebrate, there would be a watch party at the Elysian. When he went on that Saturday, Storrie performed a sketch rumored to have been dreamed up in a clown class, playing a nearly nude stripper who’s been hit by a car but is still determined to give lap dances.
Palamides is tripped up by the idea that clown is now a subject of mainstream fascination. She’d known things were changing when her first solo show, Nate (about consent but funny), became a Netflix special and when, in 2022, she was asked to appear on an Apple TV show, Gutsy, to explain clowning to Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. She gently cupped Chelsea’s boobs (consensually).
The Weer run last year landed her in Vogue, the New York Times, and this magazine. Stamptown, a longtime L.A. show by clown Zach Zucker, will soon become a Netflix special after years of enjoying a comedy-nerd following. Multiple clowns were featured in this spring’s Netflix Is a Joke festival.
“I don’t want it to just remain like a tiny little thing,” Palamides tells me. “I’d love to see it grow. But I would love if it doesn’t become an industry, if it instead remains a community.” That community, she says, is the reason clown has “so much flexibility in what is allowed, and what can fail, and then what can succeed through that failure.”
Yet plenty of people in the comedy world — and even some in clown — don’t regard the L.A. community so highly.
“There are six clowns in L.A. that, if given the chance, I would put behind bars,” said the comedian Caleb Hearon on a February episode of his podcast, So True. His guest, Chris Fleming, whose wild physicality onstage could easily be mistaken for clown — “They try to claim me,” he told Hearon — said that “Really, clowning … it just teaches you to be comfortable bombing … being okay with wasting an audience’s time.” Both noted how often clowns take their clothes off, something I didn’t see much of but heard threatened. (Palamides, Fleming said, is “different”; “She’s great.”)
“I personally reject the L.A. clown scene,” Zucker told me. “I think it sucks.” He could be considered a purist, having studied with the late famed clown Philippe Gaulier in France. (In fact, Stamptown is named for Étampes, the town where the school is located.) There he was taught that it doesn’t matter how he feels — it matters how the audience feels. And once he finds what makes the audience laugh, he makes sure he can repeat it night after night. He was sick of people in L.A. who take one class for “two to five days,” he said, “and make being a clown their new personality. They start championing this thing that is like the world to me. An art form.” He was really ramping up now. “If you don’t choose it, it chooses you and you hold it with great responsibility. Clowns, to me, are truth tellers and healers.” What’s going on in L.A., in his view, is bad comedy, bad theater, bad stand-up. “I find this thing so sacred,” he said, “that when people waste my time with it, I go, ‘Fuck you.’”
Though he can cite only “like, four good clowns” (Palamides among them), Zucker said many of the original L.A. players are his friends and people he respects, including Damiani, who is part of the Netflix Stamptown show. But, he says, the people coming out of Damiani’s class “are like menaces to this art form and are terrible audience members and make garbage. And then they go out and shout about it louder than everybody else.” He says that when he hears someone talking about clowning as “‘healing or exploring their inner child,’ it’s like, ‘Brother, you got to go to therapy.’”
Zach Zucker, who thinks the L.A. clown scene “sucks,” hosts the clown variety show Stamptown, soon to be released as a Netflix special.
From left, Kaylin Mahoney, Gwenmarie White, Alison Ormsby, and Tillie Steele are the Law Offices of MOWS — an acronym of the performers’ last names. They’re the 2026 company in residence at the Elysian.
Rachel Troy’s one-woman show BABY won the Top of the Fringe Award at the 2024 Hollywood Fringe Festival.
DeeDee Anderson, Bobby Bergin, Aubrielle Hvolboll, Siena Jeakle, Matthew Sater, and Mori Wexler are the core members of Freak Nature Puppets, a former company in residence at the Elysian.
Zach Zucker, who thinks the L.A. clown scene “sucks,” hosts the clown variety show Stamptown, soon to be released as a Netflix special.
From left, Kaylin Mahoney, Gwenmarie White, Alison Ormsby, and Tillie Steele are the Law Offices of MOWS — an acronym of the performers’ last names. They’re the 2026 company in residence at the Elysian.
Rachel Troy’s one-woman show BABY won the Top of the Fringe Award at the 2024 Hollywood Fringe Festival.
DeeDee Anderson, Bobby Bergin, Aubrielle Hvolboll, Siena Jeakle, Matthew Sater, and Mori Wexler are the core members of Freak Nature Puppets, a former company in residence at the Elysian.
Toward the end of my time in Clown Town, I spent a night watching shows at the Elysian. It was a Monday, but the lobby was full of people draped over the hodgepodge vintage furniture, sipping wine and eating popcorn from the concession stand. I noticed an actor from an ABC drama lingering by the house doors. We were waiting for the evening’s second performance, Damiani’s monthly show, Stand Up and Clown. Outside, the line was down the block.
Once inside the theater, an audience member in a slutty clowncore costume — a cleavage-bearing Harlequin dress, hair in pigtails, face painted white — hopped onstage and began hitting a series of pouts and sultry poses while her boyfriend snapped photos with his phone. The person sitting next to me leaned over and told me they come to the show every month; “Something amazing always happens.”
My first show of the night had been a cult classic, Courtney Pauroso’s Vanessa 5000, which made good on many of the heady promises of clown. Pauroso plays a sex robot who, over the course of an hour, while giving a product demonstration, becomes ever more confused about technology, sex, and her role in it all. Dressed in fishnets, black patent-leather Pleasers, and a black bikini, she gyrates to Nine Inch Nails and then pulls an audience member onstage (that night, a reluctant man) and makes them spank her. Her software glitches and she gets stuck; she swipes a CD-ROM disc between her butt cheeks; and, while earnestly singing a rendition of “Fake Plastic Trees,” she describes the anguish of being 39 and single and taking comfort in Taco Bell. Some of it made me consider the ways in which maybe I, too, am a sex robot. But Vanessa 5000 was a well-oiled machine: Pauroso had been performing it since 2023 and had already discovered its peaks and valleys. While it was a feat to pull them off over and over, she knew that shit worked. I was still hoping to experience something more raw and unfiltered.
Luckily, Damiani’s show wasn’t rehearsed at all. Each month, he invites mostly novice clowns to get onstage while he directs them live from the front row: He yells prompts, and they try to do whatever they think clown is. Tonight was the show’s fourth anniversary, so some veterans, like Pauroso, joined the baby clowns onstage.
The result was chaos and a lot of poop jokes. At one point, Pauroso, attempting to rescue a scene that was going in circles, whipped out her boob and tried to squirt breast milk onto the crowd. She’d done this before — it was canonical L.A. clown lore — and produced a stream of milk that hit an audience member and saved the show. This time, however, nary a drop of breast milk was expressed. The show continued to devolve.
I had heard of the flop — the clown version of bombing — and now I was watching it in real time, and my God, it was awful. Damiani had told me that flopping was integral to the art: “You find gold in the failures. If you don’t flop, there is nothing to save.”
Tatarsky had said much the same: “The flop is beautiful. The point is that you’re still trying. You’re still trying to save yourself, and you’re still trying to save the show, and you’re still trying to make gold from shit. That’s clown alchemy.”
It was hard not to reach for the big metaphor, as many clowns had taught me to do during my short time in the community — to think about how we’re in a societal flop era and that maybe (maybe?) it would all turn out to have been necessary. I’d heard continually that clown is the art form of our time; maybe respecting the flop was a part of our way out.
“But — ,” Tatarsky started and then hesitated. They wanted to tread carefully. “I have heard that in L.A. the flop has gotten a little bit out of hand.”
The story of Harvey’s first flop is so painful I clenched my jaw through the entire retelling. It was November 2025; he’d been doing a bit where he talks to the sun and the sun tells him to go back in time and save Baby Hitler. So he was cradling a Hitler baby doll, he told me, and the crowd was prompting him to kill it, when an audience member came onstage and ripped the doll’s head off, killing the act instead. “I’m just standing there with my nuts in my hand,” he said. “Not literally but metaphorically.” He decided to embody that feeling — or come as close to it as possible — and took off most of his clothes. There he was, in just his underwear, cradling a headless doll, still not getting a laugh. At a total loss, and feeling as vulnerable as a clown can, he turned to the audience. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Is anybody here going to pray for me?” He didn’t know if he meant it for real.
One dude stood up and said, “Amen, I’ll pray for you.” “He just comes down out of the audience,” Harvey recalled, “and he’s like, ‘I don’t know if you’re serious about this.’ And he holds me, and he says a prayer.” The guy said he knew then that Harvey was serious — he could feel it — and asked him to go to church the next day. “I’m not a church person,” Harvey told me. “I’m like not at all about that. But everyone in the room was arrested, including me.” It wasn’t funny, but it was a moment that could never be repeated, a transcendent connection between 100 people — “a little miracle,” Harvey said. It could only have happened in the flop.