THE CHARLIE RIVEL MEMORIAL IN CORNELLÀ: AAAAUUUU!

The Grandma visits Cornellà de Llobregat

Today, The Grandma is in Cornellà de Llobregat. After leaving the Ebre Lands, The Grandma has done an interesting stop before returning to her home in Barcelona.

The Grandma has visited the International Clown Festival which is celebrated every year in this city of the Baix Llobregat and which is dedicated to one of the best clowns along the history, Charlie Rivel, an old Grandma's friend.

Marta Jones told The Grandma about this festival and she hasn't wanted to lose the opportunity to enjoy this wonderful event.

During the travel by boat from Deltebre to Cornellà de Llobregat, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her First Certificate Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 15).

More information: Health and the body I & II

 

A clown is a comic performer who employs slapstick or similar types of physical comedy, often in a mime style.

Clowns have a varied tradition with significant variations in costume and performance. The most recognisable modern clown character is the Auguste or red clown type, with outlandish costumes featuring distinctive makeup, colourful wigs, exaggerated footwear, and colourful clothing. Their entertainment style is generally designed to entertain large audiences.

Charlie Rivel

Modern clowns are strongly associated with the tradition of the circus clown, which developed out of earlier comedic roles in theatre or Varieté shows during the 19th to mid 20th centuries. Many circus clowns have become well known and are a key circus act in their own right. The first mainstream clown role was portrayed by Joseph Grimaldi, who also created the traditional whiteface make-up design. 

In the early 1800s, he expanded the role of Clown in the harlequinade that formed part of British pantomimes, notably at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and the Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden theatres. He became so dominant on the London comic stage that harlequinade Clowns became known as Joey, and both the nickname and Grimaldi's whiteface make-up design were, and still are, used by other types of clowns.

The comedy that clowns perform is usually in the role of a fool whose everyday actions and tasks become extraordinary, and for whom the ridiculous, for a short while, becomes ordinary. This style of comedy has a long history in many countries and cultures across the world. Some writers have argued that due to the widespread use of such comedy and its long history it is a need that is part of the human condition.

More information: Clown Bluey

The fear of clowns, circus clowns in particular as a psychiatric condition has become known by the term coulrophobia.

The clown character developed out of the zanni rustic fool characters of the early modern commedia dell'arte, which were themselves directly based on the rustic fool characters of ancient Greek and Roman theatre. Rustic buffoon characters in Classical Greek theater were known as sklêro-paiktês or deikeliktas, besides other generic terms for rustic or peasant. In Roman theater, a term for clown was fossor, literally digger; labourer.

Stephen King's Pennywise provokes coulrophobia

The English word clown was first recorded c. 1560, as clowne, cloyne, in the generic meaning rustic, boor, peasant. The origin of the word is uncertain, perhaps from a Scandinavian word cognate with clumsy. It is in this sense that Clown is used as the name of fool characters in Shakespeare's Othello and The Winter's Tale. The sense of clown as referring to a professional or habitual fool or jester developed soon after 1600, based on Elizabethan rustic fool characters such as Shakespeare's.

The harlequinade developed in England in the 17th century, inspired by the commedia dell'arte. It was here that Clown came into use as the given name of a stock character. Originally a foil for Harlequin's slyness and adroit nature, Clown was a buffoon or bumpkin fool who resembled less a jester than a comical idiot. He was a lower class character dressed in tattered servants' garb.

More information: Smithsonian

The now-classical features of the clown character were developed in the early 1800s by Joseph Grimaldi, who played Clown in Charles Dibdin's 1800 pantomime Peter Wilkins: or Harlequin in the Flying World at Sadler's Wells Theatre, where Grimaldi built the character up into the central figure of the harlequinade.

The circus clown developed in the 19th century. The modern circus derives from Philip Astley's London riding school, which opened in 1768. Astley added a clown to his shows to amuse the spectators between equestrian sequences. American comedian George L. Fox became known for his clown role, directly inspired by Grimaldi, in the 1860s. 

A clown

Tom Belling senior (1843–1900) developed the red clown or Auguste, Dummer August, character c. 1870, acting as a foil for the more sophisticated white clown. Belling worked for Circus Renz in Vienna.

Belling's costume became the template for the modern stock character of circus or children's clown, based on a lower class or hobo character, with red nose, white makeup around the eyes and mouth, and oversized clothes and shoes. The clown character as developed by the late 19th century is reflected in Ruggero Leoncavallo's 1892 opera Pagliacci, Clowns. 

Belling's Auguste character was further popularized by Nicolai Poliakoff's Coco in the 1920s to 1930s.

The English word clown was borrowed, along with the circus clown act, into many other languages, such as French clown, Russian, and other Slavic languages, кло́ун, Greek κλόουν, Danish/Norwegian klovn and Romanian clovn.

Italian retains Pagliaccio, a Commedia dell'arte zanni character, and derivations of the Italian term are found in other Romance languages, such as French Paillasse, Spanish payaso, Catalan/Galician pallasso, Portuguese palhaço, Greek παλιάτσος, Turkish palyaço, German Pajass, Yiddish פּאַיאַץ, Russian пая́ц. 

More information: BBC

In the early 20th century, with the disappearance of the rustic simpleton or village idiot character of everyday experience, North American circuses developed characters such as the tramp or hobo. Examples include Marceline Orbes, who performed at the Hippodrome Theater (1905), Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp (1914), and Emmett Kelly's Weary Willie based on hobos of the Depression era.

Another influential tramp character was played by Otto Griebling during the 1930s to 1950s. Red Skelton's Dodo the Clown in The Clown (1953), depicts the circus clown as a tragicomic stock character, a funny man with a drinking problem.

Ronald McDonald

In the United States, Bozo the Clown was an influential Auguste character since the late 1950s. The Bozo Show premiered in 1960 and appeared nationally on cable television in 1978. McDonald's derived its mascot clown, Ronald McDonald, from the Bozo character in the 1960s. Willard Scott, who had played Bozo during 1959–1962, performed as the mascot in 1963 television spots.

The McDonald's trademark application for the character dates to 1967. Based on the Bozo template, the US custom of birthday clown, private contractors who offer to perform as clowns at children's parties, developed in the 1960s to 1970s. The strong association of the, Bozo-derived, clown character with children's entertainment as it has developed since the 1960s also gave rise to Clown Care or hospital clowning in children's hospitals by the mid 1980s. 

Clowns of America International, established 1984, and World Clown Association, established 1987, are associations of semi-professionals and professional performers.

The shift of the Auguste or red clown character from his role as a foil for the white in circus or pantomime shows to a Bozo-derived standalone character in children's entertainment by the 1980s also gave rise to the evil clown character, the attraction of clowns for small children being based in their fundamentally threatening or frightening nature.

More information: Business Insider

I think we all have the urge to be a clown, 

whether we know it or not. 

Ernest Borgnine