“Oh my God! You were at my improv class last week, right? Courtney?”

“No. Sam. Sorry. Must’ve been a different white girl.”

But the circle ended all that nervous chatter. The circle was a sign, heralding the coming of the Clown Boss.

Bald, bearded, all dressed in black, with a little belly and big biceps, he took his place in the circle and proceeded to share a string of perfectly anodyne observations—we’re here to have fun, don’t touch strangers in ways that may make them feel uncomfortable, that sort of thing—before pausing and looking around the room, meeting each and every gaze.

“Above all,” he said, his voice growing slower and more steely, “I ask you this: Remember me as I am now.”

And with that, the jacket came off, and the Clown Boss was left in a tight-fitting black tank top and elbow braces, looking as if he were about to climb the ropes of a wrestling arena and deliver a perfect diving elbow drop. The four-hour clowning workshop, one of L.A.’s hottest events, has begun.

The first exercise, he announced as the kids scattered to find a plastic chair and sit down, is called The Borg. “It’s about being the same but different.” Volunteers were called for. Two brave souls raised their hands.

The Clown Boss beckoned them to the makeshift stage in the front of the room, instructed an associate to play some raucous music, and asked each of the contestants onstage to improvise a dance move. The man—whose name was lost in the din but who looked like a Chad or a Brad, complete with a hoodie, shorts, and a ratty baseball cap worn backwards—pretended to hit a baseball. The woman, willowy and framed by pants that rode well into her midriff, pretended to be one of those colorful nylon figures outside used car lots, swaying wildly in the air.

As the two were doing their thing, the Clown Boss gave the rest of us our marching orders. One by one, we, too, were to take the stage, spend a few moments observing each dancer, and then choose a team. The first two or three dancers followed his instructions mechanically and with few signs of life, but the Clown Boss was having none of that.

“You all look like you’re about to join an incel group!” he bellowed. “Come on!”

Slowly, we young clowns-in-training opened up. Slowly, we were not just mechanically copying movements but also really watching each other, making eye contact, improvising, having fun. One young man, aware that most of the guys before him had chosen Team Baseball while the girls had gravitated to Team Flailing, walked right up to the sluggers, pretended to examine an invisible baseball bat, and then tossed that bat over his shoulder and moonwalked over to the women on the other side. People were cheering and laughing—not the nervous laughter you hear, say, at some cerebral stand-up show, but laughter that was guttural and freeing and real. Off to the side, the Clown Boss, Chad Damiani, stood, his massive arms crossed across his chest, and smiled.

Why were so many adults eager to quite literally clown around on a rainy weeknight? And why did they let Damiani playfully and publicly push them around? If you hear “clown” and think red nose, oversized shoes, and silly wigs, think again. Modern clowning is more avant-garde theater than yukfest, a performance art that thrives on audience engagement and flirts with fiercely absurd premises—like a man strapped in a suicide vest awkwardly getting up to leave in the middle of a play, apologizing and saying he has to be at work early in the morning, or a near-naked clown shouting that he’s been locked up in a warehouse for a week and refusing to believe that he’s a performer in a sketch. Contemporary clowning doesn’t go for easy chuckles; it goes for emotionally fraught situations designed to evoke emotional responses. And that, maybe, is why the art form is now fast-growing in popularity, hailed as the cure for comedy’s ongoing slump.

‘Improv Is Over’

It doesn’t take a Roger Ebert to know that Hollywood is in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad place. Blame it on woke politics, shifting business models, new distribution platforms, or shrinking attention spans, but no matter your favorite culprit, the entertainment industry clearly is struggling to produce the kind of fun, profitable movies and shows that, not too long ago, it could turn out in abundance. And nowhere is this truth clearer than in the comedy space.

Once upon a time, in a mythical golden age known as the late 1990s, behemoths like the comedy institution and training center Upright Citizens Brigade preached the gospel of improv, delivering unscripted comedy that unfurled onstage as performers discovered new ways of being in the moment and playing with each other. From UCB alone came such luminaries as Amy Poehler, Aubrey Plaza, Adam McKay, Kate McKinnon, and Donald Glover, and soon even normies could talk confidently about improv staples like “yes and,” which meant accepting every premise thrown your way and expanding on it.

Improv delivered great comedy and a steady pipeline of talent, until it didn’t. “UCB is not dead … [but] it’s a shell of itself,” said one Hollywood comedy writer who, the town being small and its memories and knives being long, asked to remain nameless. “And that’s because people don’t have the same expectation that UCB is some pipeline to start them the way they used to. The system itself broke under its own weight of getting way too big.” There was a glut of people competing for so few slots, and over time, institutions resorted to tactics resembling pyramid schemes.

Improv was getting too cerebral, with younger generations of aspiring talent coming to the art form not as blank slates, but as eager and knowledgeable fans who, too often, were performing mainly for other comedy nerds rather than trying to connect with bigger themes and larger audiences. It also got too popular; it’s now offered on corporate retreats, cruise ships, and college campuses.

“Improv is over,” one comedian who switched from improv to clowning told Tablet. Whatever the reason for improv’s slow descent from the zenith of the funny heavens, a replacement soon arose: clowning. And with that, smaller, more experimental theaters that helped clowns like Damiani rise to prominence. And he’s not the only one: Clowns like Natalie Palamides have Netflix specials, while Estonian clown Julia Masli’s award-winning show became the talk of the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In L.A. and beyond, people now talk about clowning as a movement, a movement here to secure the future of the funny business.

“It’s like the best part about theater,” said the comedy writer. “You’re in this space, and you’re having a singular experience with the performer and the audience.”

That unique spontaneity became apparent as Damiani introduced the next exercise to his fawning students.

He invited four volunteers to come onstage, played ridiculous music, and once again asked each volunteer to create a dance move. The audience then voted for their favorite, and the winner got to lead the little troupe onstage. But lead how? And in what? The volunteers themselves had no clue. They eyed each other’s movements, trying to figure out just what on earth they were supposed to do next. Ape the leader? Offer variations on the theme? Do something else altogether and try to steal the spotlight?

And, quip by quip, something happened: The strangers on the stage started working together. One dancer, with a dramatic head of curls, pretended to gasp and swoon and faint; the other three pranced about, pretending to catch her. All four were laying the melodrama on thick, as if they were all Lillian Gish, doing her best to emote for the camera in some silent-film tearjerker, before collapsing into a joint embrace as all of us watching applauded, hysterically laughing.

It wasn’t, I noticed after two or three rounds of this exercise, the sort of laughter you hear at a comedy show—a nasal chortle when a joke catches you by surprise or a guffaw when a premise keeps delivering on its promise. This was something else, a bodily sort of laughter, a laughter that was brewed somewhere in the abdomen and soon spread up and down, making your arms and your legs tremble slightly, like a depth charge.

Because the body was exactly the target of the Clown Boss’s ministrations. His mostly Gen Z students, particular about their pronouns as they might have been, were members of the first truly disembodied generation of Americans, young men and women who had grown up primarily on screens and who had their last years of high school clipped by COVID. Cut off from each other, they grew up unsure of how to approach simple tasks like looking a peer in the eye or even occupying space by carrying themselves upright. If a parent told them to make eye contact, shake hands firmly, or stand straight, they’d likely cringe. But coming from the Clown Boss, it was a revelation, a glimpse at a promised land of possibilities American adults of previous generations had no problem accessing.

Which, in turn, made the workshop’s participants feel something all too rare in the usually detached humor offered by improv: vulnerability. When you speak to Angelenos today, depressed and anxious and angry about the demise of Tinseltown—which is to say, feeling very, very vulnerable—they will tell you straight up: Clowning is meeting the moment.

The Sad Clown Rises

It makes sense that Damiani would be their guide to parts previously unknown. He began his career a quarter of a century ago by observing another kind of physical storytelling: professional wrestling. He rose through that industry’s ranks as a writer and an announcer. But wrestling, you may be shocked to learn, is fake, and Damiani is anything but. He politely declined an interview, but it’s not too hard to see why he’d gravitate first toward improv and then, pretty quickly, to clowning. 

Even if you knew absolutely nothing about clowning, or about Damiani, you could tell, just by watching him, that he’s a man marked by grief. Those who have never experienced loss may see only a middle-aged man prancing about, telling jokes and doing weird little dances; but those who have will spot the scar tissue that turns sorrow first into rage, then into despair, and finally into the deepest empathy.

Damiani captured all of these emotions well in a 2024 blog post titled “A Clown Writes About Grief.” He wrote candidly about how confused he’d felt when his life partner, Kiera Goodman, was diagnosed with cancer. How mad he was—first at her for upending their lives and then at himself for being so selfish. How helpless he felt, not being sure which treatment to pursue. And how shattered when Kiera passed away in 2012, at 35.

It took six months after her death for Damiani to even consider retaking the stage, he explained. But when he did, he was not the same clown. He observed that he was no longer obsessed with certainty, liberated from his pursuit of success:

Play is a simulation. It allows us to give meaning to imaginary things. That’s what makes it fun. But we can trick ourselves into believing it matters. We construct stakes, based on our fears and insecurities. The audience will reject us. People we admire will think less of us. We’ll be embarrassed and exposed as frauds.

I used to be debilitated by these kinds of doubts.

But after Kiera’s death, I knew better. I’d experienced actual devastation. Shows were exercises in make-believe. An opportunity to construct a better reality. I could experience joy without guilt. I was fearless and free and the audience noticed.

What the clown needed, in other words, is what we all need and all too rarely truly get: permission to feel helpless.

A trace of that helplessness remains even as he dons the black macho outfit of the Clown Boss. He can saunter over to a performer onstage, look him in the eye, and say something like This feels empty and soulless, like listening to an episode of Joe Rogan, and people will laugh, but the quip wasn’t delivered at the expense of the poor trainee doing his best to shimmy to the beat. It was there to rip up the veil that separates us—teacher from student, performer from spectator, human from human—and give the timid apprentice and everyone else watching permission to feel something real for a moment, something not governed by the strictures of carefully constructed, zealously guarded, and breathlessly ideological social norms. Permission to take risks, permission to fail.

It was getting late, and it was time for the workshop to end and the performance to begin. Damiani and another clown named Artun took the stage. They were pretending to fix a broken washing machine as a drummer in the corner was giving their high-octane nonsense a syncopated heartbeat.

It was fun to watch for a few moments—exaggerated expressions and arms flailing about and comical frustration with the imaginary machine breaking down—but then it morphed into something else. Something surreal. A scene that soon developed its own logic and dared you, like Twin Peaks, to try and make sense of its inner workings. Audience members were soon engaged. Damiani was trying to find someone who wore a watch, and when he couldn’t—who under 40 wears a watch anymore?—he grabbed a young woman’s iPhone from her hand, placed it horizontally across her wrist, and leaned in close as if he were trying to tell time.

It was a hilarious moment—the sleek, large device on the slender wrist, the clown pretending to be comically shortsighted—but it went deeper. It urged you, without words, to think: about time, about technology, about life in a digital world. But before you could think too much or too deeply, the Clown Boss was already on to the next zany gag, pulling out an unending stream of make-believe socks from his make-believe machine. And for a few minutes there in East L.A., the world felt chaotic in a wonderful way.