Send Out the Clowns

Could the era of the charismatic con merchant era be over? wonders Tom Hodgkinson

Is the time of the clowns drawing to a close? It looks like it. For many of us, this is a relief. The clowns were in charge for a long time, and not all of us found them terribly amusing.

Why do clowns get to the top? Because people like clowns. In their excellent study The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow describe the anthropologically observed phenomenon of the “clown king”. This clown king wasn’t expected to behave like ordinary citizens. In fact, the more he broke the rules, and lied and fornicated and boasted, the more the people liked him. The clown laughs at the essential absurdity and drama of everything. But his clownish antics have terrible consequences, because he doesn’t really care about anyone’s welfare. Clowns are amoral.

In the world of politics, those brilliantly entertaining conmen Donald Trump, Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson were of course classic clown kings, and at least half of each country fell for them (it helped that Trump spent millions on advertising). When they were at the top, they were in the papers every day. We loved talking about them, either with outrage or approval. The same cannot be said for their more sensible successors.

There are clown capitalists, too. Elon Musk is the classic example. He’s rarely off the front pages and is probably the most famous man in the world, saying and doing daft or “amazing” things every week. Like clown Boris, he has lots of children and appears to see the world and its doings as a colossal joke.

And people love him. He entertains us. Elon Musk gave his game away in an interview in the FT recently. The editor Roula Khalaf asked him: “Why does a serious guy with serious ideas indulge in silly Twitter games that could also cost his followers dearly?” To which Musk replied: “Aren’t you entertained? I play the fool on Twitter and often shoot myself in the foot and cause myself all sorts of trouble…” His clownish persona was possibly a factor behind last year’s bubble in Tesla shares which seems now to be ending. (A non-clown capitalist, Bernard Arnault, who looks more like your traditional scary Mr Burns type boss, has pipped Musk to the post as world’s richest man.)

That’s not to say of course that these clown kings won’t have a successful post-monarchical career. Boris has by all accounts wasted no time in getting paid top dollar for his clowning. In December he spoke at a blockchain conference in Singapore and the papers speculate he’ll be getting at least £100,000 per talk.

The clowns are not always immediately obvious. Lots of people considered Sam Bankman-Fried to be a serious businessman. It’s only recently that he’s been revealed as a clown. But if you think about it, he had all the classic characteristics of the clown: he was a PR man through and through, a skilled entertainer, a dazzler, a showman, a conjuror.

Perhaps, as people like Noam Chomsky argue, the role of the clowns is to keep us all distracted while, in the background, the elites get on with their job of increasing their wealth and power.

There are lots of clowns in the world of journalism, of course. Jeremy Clarkson springs to mind as one of the nation’s favoured clowns. Piers Morgan is another. He’s a clown in the court of Murdoch. They’re not arbiters of truth, nor do they expand our horizons or teach us anything. They’re simply very good entertainers, and as a nation we reward them very well. The late A.A. Gill was another clown: he made a spectacle of himself, entertained people with his spleen, bile and venom, and was well paid.

Twitter itself reduces people to clowns, performing monkeys. Significantly, I think, two of my favourite actual clowns, Adam Buxton and Stewart Lee are not on Twitter. And they are far more serious-minded people than Boris Johnson. They have morals and principles. We should call them not clowns, but wise fools, in the Shakespearean tradition.

So what do you think? Have we sent out the clowns?

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SELECTED COMMENTS

These comments were mailed to us after an earlier version of this piece was sent out as a newsletter. We like to publish a selection and reserve the right to edit them for clarity. Feel free to drop us a line with your thoughts.

Sir: What an interesting reflection. We do love the clowns, even though they tend to bring ruin if given important decisions to make. But then so do most of the non-clowns, come to think of it. What to do?
Neville Hodgkinson

Sir: Significantly, you don’t mention the left wing and numerous woke clowns bringing our country down. The clowns you mention are by contrast mostly achievers and I’d rather they were in charge.
Duncan Collins

Sir: Your “Clown” post is just brilliant – worth a year’s subscription on its own! Such a creative way to reframe this dire situation and there’s no doubt you’re right. Did you ever read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death? Published in 1986 it’s so prescient. Anyway, you cheered me up no end so thanks and all good wishes.
Yvonne

Sir: I would thoroughly recommend the foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Though Trump was more trickster than clown – the Loki politician – well, a version born for the attention and entertainment era.
Hugh Knowles

Sir: I can’t help but notice that all your examples of clownish politicians are, nominally at least, from the “right”. What about David Lammy and Diane Abbot? They too are constantly entertaining. It must be said though that, even if they are equally incompetent, many left wing politicians do seem joyless, puritanical and shrunken, as if raising a chuckle must first be approved by some board or other. Would Sadiq Khan, Jeremy Corbyn or Keir Starmer be a barrel of laughs? I think I prefer the clowns.
Toby Pilling

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