Clown Behavior Quotes

The koshares are far different from a Western clown in a red nose and big shoes. With the koshares there is a shock value to the spirit embodied by the clown. There is an intentional effort to draw attention through behavior that creates a disorienting presence as unsettling as it is humorous. Koshares appear around adult themes of fertility and sexuality. They exhibit our mixed attitudes toward subjects that can make us both aroused and embarrassed at the same time. They are ambivalence personified; they are also raw energy and life.

As a teacher, no matter what grade level, no matter how hard you try to engage the entire class or implement the suggestions above, you will still encounter “that one kid” who will get under your skin: the class clown, the smart-ass, the student who acts like you are pulling his teeth every time you ask him to do something, the kid who always has to say “this is stupid.” They are just part of the clientele base we serve and they can drive us to drinking (figuratively speaking…and sometimes literally).   Please remember that you are the adult.  The negativity or resistance “that one kid” radiates can be handled in a way that does not disturb the class structure.

Like a koshare, John the Baptist stands out in the crowd. He is memorable by both his costume and his behavior. He stays in the mind of all who see him. His presence breaks the normal pattern. His unsettling actions toward the religious hierarchy is shocking. In this way, John, as a sacred clown, introduces an element of chaos into order. This is precisely the theological task of the koshare. John invites people to participate in a solemn ceremony, baptism, designed to bring them life. At the same time, he reminds them of imminent death and destruction. The ambivalence, the tension makes us want to shudder in fear and sigh in relief. John mixes our emotions in the same way a koshare scrambles reality.

No matter what our predicament, even the most sinister, there was always a clown on hand to lighten the situation with a humorous comment; one cannot change human nature. Even after dreadful events, man’s natural optimistic behavior seems to reassert itself very quickly.

As a teacher, no matter what grade level, no matter how hard you try to engage the entire class or implement the suggestions above, you will still encounter “that one kid” who will get under your skin: the class clown, the smart-ass, the student who acts like you are pulling his teeth every time you ask him to do something, the kid who always has to say “this is stupid.” They are just part of the clientele base we serve and they can drive us to drinking (figuratively speaking…and sometimes literally).   Please remember that you are the adult.  The negativity or resistance “that one kid” radiates can be handled in a way that does not disturb the class structure.

We are so irritated by the behavior of the new monks that, if we had enough money, we would manage the work with paid people. Those who come don't want spiritual life; it is as if they had come for a job. In many ashramas, there is not much discussion about spirituality at all, and in many places, the ideal of Swamiji is unknown. As a result, ashramas have become social service leagues. Spiritual seekers desirous of liberation have now become workers. Only one who can give up everything can become a monk. Otherwise, he is merely pretending to be a monk, like a clown in the circus. This life is very difficult. It is not like fighting from within a fort but from the middle of an open field.

We often see people who do things that look a bit crazy. We see somebody all the time not succeeding at things they could succeed at, or they are pulling out of relationships that looked promising, or they are putting up a wall when anyone tries to love them, or they’re sabotaging their chances, or whatever. And we think “Why does that person do it, it’s completely crazy, there’s no logic to it?” Here’s a very important point, there is always a point. Those behaviors once upon a time made great sense. I want to go further, not only did they make great sense, they were very often the difference between life and death, between managing to continue with life and giving up on life. We needed those patterns. Imagine someone growing up with a parent who is suicidal, they are threatening suicide, how on Earth does a child survive that experience? One of the ways they might learn to survive that experience is to shut down completely, right? They will never ever let anyone in because to let someone in is to risk their own annihilation. That when you’re 5 years old, to work that out, that is near genius, to work out that in order to survive you need to shut the drawbridge very tight. Fast forward 25, 35, 45, family situation resolved itself in whatever way, and you’ve moved on and you’re trying to have relationships or whatever, but in a horrible way that defense mechanism is still active, and now it’s trouble because now it means that when somebody comes along and says “Oh we could have a relationship”, “Umm, no not possible” because the drawbridge is still shut so a lot of the behavior that is suboptimal in adult life, once had a logic which we don’t understand, and we’re not sympathetic to it, we don’t even see it, but if we can learn to see that logic we can largely then come to unpick it. Or imagine somebody who, let’s say, we all know these people, who can’t stop joking around, somebody who is completely optimistic and sunny and even when something’s sad they’re at a funeral, they make a joke around the casket, and you go “Why are you not able to get in touch with your sadness?” Again imagine that former child has come through a journey where once upon a time it was absolutely essential that they be the clown and cheer up maybe a depressive mother or a father who was very angry and couldn’t find anything optimistic. That child needed to become a clown to get to the next stage of life, but now that precise behavior starts to be extremely negative. Another thing that children constantly do, is when children are brought up in suboptimal surroundings with parents who maybe are not that nice to them, it would be devastating to the child to have to see that the fault lies with their parent. Right? To imagine when you’re a four-year-old that your father or mother is really not a very nice person and maybe really quite disturbed and kind of awful, this is an unbearable thought. This was the pioneering work of the Scottish Psychoanalyst Ronald Faban. He was working with very deprived people in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the 1930s and he arrived at a fascinating conclusion. He talked to children from the most deprived most violent abusive families and he discovered that those children spoke very highly of their parents, they would say “My father is a great man”, this is the guy who was hitting the child, “My mother, she’s amazing”, mother you know left the kid unclean and unfed for days. In Faben’s view, it’s better to think that you are the problem than that you’ve been born into a problematic situation, so what happens when you’re in a suboptimal parental situation, is you start to hate yourself, and blame yourself and feel bad about yourself because it is preferable to the other bit of really bad news which is to think that you’ve been born into such an inadequate family, that you may not survive it.