> There are Zen monks who have used absurdity to teach their pupils existential principles.

I get a sense of how those pupils must have felt because I don't feel like I've learned anything about clowning from this post.

One of my pet peeves are tutorials that only make sense after you understood the topic being explained, and I feel that these guidelines fall in that category. "The clown enters the stage to accomplish a task, not to get laughs. If there are laughs it is an interruption" sounds very deep, but I'm not sure how to square that with "The clown offers energy and fun for the audience to enjoy".

All the clowns I remember aimed to get laughs from their audience. Does that make them bad clowns? Or is it a "no true clown comes from Scotland" situation?

Most of them are incredibly untalented, and the ones that are talented don't need to dress like a clown at all.

Sometimes in life I come across people, colleagues mainly, that are one-to-one a fucking clown except they are not wearing make up, so I'm confused, are we setting the bar too high for these assholes to actually become a clown, or for a clown to become a software engineer?

There's the kind we all think of -- white face, red nose, at the circus.

But there's other kinds too. I know the most about two related forms: commedia dell'arte and bouffon.

In commedia dell'arte, performers play different "stock characters" based on Italian society in the 1600s, when commedia was originally developed. Commedia is concerned with status within a society: rich/poor, servant/master, young/old. Each character has its own specific mask. One character might be the blue-collar working person, who isn't learned, but is not dumb. Another character is the rich person who thinks themself smart and cultured, but is neither. These performances are often partially scripted, partially improvised. One example is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DjGoDEks7U

In bouffon (mentioned in the article as the group Mil Grus). These characters are grotesque (physically -- often these performers put foam inside their clothing to make the character look inhuman) and outcasts. You might think of them as a tribe of people thrown out of society in the middle ages, who the king invites back in once a year. Because of their outcast status, they are allowed to say things that people inside that society cannot. One modern example is Red Bastard (who I've studied with), who can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFJWnfNUXnc.