Not a sad clown

I recently posted the following, intentionally provocative, question in the "clown theory" facebook group:

Do you have to be depressed to be funny?

For this question I was inspired by an article I found on the internet with exactly this title, written by the Canadian comedian Bruce Clark. He wrote the article in response to Robin Williams's suicide and opens with the famous joke in which clown Grock (in Clark’s version it’s a comedian) comes to a psychiatrist because he is so sad, and the psychiatrist advises him to go to the circus, to go ‘laugh with clown Grock’, whereupon the client sadly says: "but I am clown Grock". The joke referes to the old cliche of the ‘sad clown’.

According to the author of the article, laughter and depression do not coincidently go together so often. Comedians make themselves extremely vulnerable by speaking in public and by turning heavy themes into something to laugh about. They also often do not have enough work / money and an insecure existence, which can surely be a reason for depression. Another article argues the other way around: the comedian has become depressed and terribly insecure due to ‘childhood experiences’ but, as a self-therapy starts to tell jokes because as long as people laugh at him the pain is not there. Outside the spotlight this falls away and the depression strikes again.

I am doing research on the Fratellini clown family and found out that according to Albert Fratellini the idea of the sad clown is utter nonsense. Here is a quote:

"For there have not been, there are not, and I hope there will not be: sad clowns, ‘poor idiots with a painful mask whose unique talent consits or being hit.’ It's true, we were cheerful clowns, with an indefatigable good mood, both in the ring and in life. "

- Albert Fratellini, Nous les Fratellini, p. 149

I had the impression that ‘the depressed clown’ is an image that’s being blown up by the media to put clowns in discredit. Wouldn’t it be boring to read that clowns are actually as cheerful, naive, innocent, positive as they occur? It’s ‘way more exciting’ to believe that clowns are actually very morbid types and that it is all just a farce. I wanted to test this intuition by sharing this question with the clown group and got it confirmed by its reactions. ‘It is often the first question in interviews’, I am told.

Although Bruce Clark agrees with his own question, I do not. In fact, from my personal experience, I would say the opposite: it’s very hard to be funny when you’re depressed. In an article about depression I read that there is an important difference between people who feel a bit down sometimes and those who really suffer from depression. For the first group it helps to sit in the sun for a bit or get a good night sleep, for the second it doesn’t help because they feel so misarable about themselves that the advice 'do something good for yourself' is nothing good. In fact what helps them is to do something for someone else in order to not have to think about themselves for a bit. The article explains that people suffering from depression are unable to put things into perspective, unable of humor and of seeing things from other people's perspective. While it is precisely these three things that a clown must excel in to create the kind of humor in which he allows people to laugh at his ridiculousness.