Old God on Feeling Humor

Adam Talkington -

 

Humor today is largely digital, ironic, memetic, and politically charged.

We scroll. We laugh. We feel affirmed in our beliefs.

We scroll on to the next thing.

Modern comedy seems to divide more people then it connects.

Like so much else in our lives, the internet has made humor calculated and centered on individual experience. It rewards with dopamine, but drains emotion and limits shared moments.

Something about that feels incomplete and distorted, like a Xerox copy of a Picasso.

What of feeling the energy of people in a room recycling the air of shared laughter with a crowd of strangers?

 

time to bring in the clowns. 

 

To better understand the world of clown and the shared spaces that clowns create with their audiences, I spoke with Alec Jones-Trujillo, a life-long performer, student of the art, and clown world insider.

Alec is the artist behind a strange and wonderful show, Old God, that’s been popping up in intimate bars and stages all over the world. 

F&F: Who is Old God? Is that the name of the character?

AJT: The character goes by Old God because he’s a being so old he has forgotten his own name. In the sort of lore, he was born from the mud, and then wandered around the earth talking to the mountains for years and years. He has seen civilizations rise and fall. For a while, people would come talk to him. Perhaps he was something of an immortal god at one point. He’s seen it all, every petty display of humanity, the illogical love and sacrifice. But by now, for Old God, nothing is good, nothing is bad. What is, is. And there is beauty in that. Before shows, I yell out from off stage “Before the Roman Empire rose and fell. Before the Egyptians built the pyramids. Before the Amazon river etched its way towards the ocean, there was —Old God!—a being so old they have forgotten their own name.”

F&F: How do you characterize what you do? What kind of performance is it?

AJT: I went to clown school years ago, and I was doing stand up at the same time. The clown people were like, ‘why are you doing stand up? You should learn to juggle. It's a waste of your time.’ And the stand ups, once they found out I was doing clown, it was just open season to disrespect me and give me shit. That was 2007.

In a sense, what I’m doing now is a bit of both. This is where we get real nerdy. I think the Old God character is a Buffoon, rather than a clown. 

F&F: What’s the difference?

AJT: Clown is more like getting the audience to laugh at the performer, and the clown looks and breathes and tries to do things and fails. The laugh is at the clown.

A Buffoon is a little more like theoretically holding a mirror up to society. It’s a little more outward, pointed at the people in the room, so the laughs might come at the expense of the audience a little bit. Like, Old God might say, ‘look at you, you think you're so fancy because ohhhhhhh, you have that fancy little Louis Vuitton bag. Ohhhhhh, look at me, look at me, I have a Louis Vuitton bag. Oh, oh, oh, hold my handbag while I step over this homeless person sleeping in the street. Ooh, disgusting, get a job.’ You know, it’s more like making fun of people who are there as members of the world we live in right now.

But I think as much as Old God, in the live show, is pointing at people and making fun of them, it’s also like, the guy's an idiot. He’s both high status and low status. So you're laughing at him at the same time, and I think that's nice to ride that line.

F&F: How did you get into clown?

AJT: In college, I was a history major at UC Santa Cruz. I'd satisfied most of my major by the end of my sophomore year. But I burned out, so I took time off and went to Argentina, and then I was going to quit school. My parents were like, ‘God, dude, come on, you're two years in, finish this thing.’ So I went back, but didn’t need many required courses, so I took a bunch of fun, weird classes.

I went to the park and I took acrobatics class. I took a stand-up comedy course. And I ended up taking a clown course, and at the end of the class, I was like, ‘where do I get more of this?’ The teacher recommended I go to the clown conservatory at San Francisco.

Patty Gallagher was my first clown teacher at UC Santa Cruz. I didn't realize it at the time, but most people don't have a female clown teacher, especially not as their first clown teacher. I think there's a lot of great male clown teachers, but a lot of male clown teachers just teach a different way. She taught such a beautiful, loving way — because it's very vulnerable.

Like, the early clown stuff, you're up there and you can't really talk. You're just kind of breathing, you know — oh, and you smile. If it's fake, everyone knows it's fake, but if it's kind of real, people like it. You're on stage trying to be authentic and not force it or be self-aware or be like, ‘Oh, I'm going to kill it with this smile.’ ‘Cause as soon as you’re aware that you're going to kill it, people in the audience, whether they can articulate or not, they're like, ‘this guy's disgusting. He wants it too much.’

You fail so much, and failing with Patty Gallagher was really nice. She was such an encouraging teacher.

F&F: So how did Old God come about?

AJT: After Trump got elected, around 2018, maybe 2017 more people were doing white face clown. For a long time, white face clown s like Ronald McDonald, Bozo the clown, like really bad connotations, and I remember being like, ‘all these comedians are doing Trump jokes, but they're just quoting him. He's so extreme, you can't out satire the guy. He's already at a fucking nine or a 10 with the insane shit he says.

I remember seeing all these comics trying to like get after him and it never really seemed to work.

My initial thought about Old God, and it's not an anti-Trump character at all, but my initial thought was like, we live in such extreme times, I want a character that is just as extreme as the times we live in. I want this white face to be like a non-human and the costuming looks like something you maybe have seen before in like a painting or a photo, but it's not anything you've ever seen in the real world. So when you see it, you're like, ‘I kind of know this guy, but I've never met a guy like this.’

I've got a particular enjoyment with using a lot of language when I do comedy, and so I think that's an interesting juxtaposition with a clown, who you expect to be a little less verbal, being extremely verbal. And then also I went to mime school after my first two years of clown school. So I do mime and I move all pretty, but then I also like talk fast and fuck shit up, verbally. I think those things are kind of at odds and create a friction, which I think is interesting.

Putting on that white makeup is really powerful. It's like becoming a non-human, and it kind of distances me from the commentary. 

F&F: What do you see as the role of humor in society today? What does that look like in your shows?

AJT: Sometimes I get humor fatigue. I feel like humor has kind of been weaponized. You know, there's funny car insurance ads. And I like funny car insurance ads, but it's like, does everything need to be drenched in humor? Funny is money, as people say. So that's kind of strange, but I think humor is also incredibly beautiful.

When you're in live humor, you become one with a group. You're all laughing together. What's required of laughing? Breathing. You’ve got to breathe to laugh. In the middle of a laugh, you have to breathe. So you're breathing and laughing with others. Often when you watch a movie or something, you want to look to the people next to you. Are they laughing at it too? I'm laughing at it. You're laughing, oh my God. So yeah, the guy was moved by my show, but I think if he would have gone out and seen any standup show, any comedy show with a group of people, he would have had that catharsis. And that's something beautiful that humor brings.

It connects people. It's shorthand to connection. It can also take the pressure off moments. Like a bunch of times in my life, I've been in moments where maybe things are getting tense, and I’ve used humor to change the energy, to redirect.

I think the live stuff is so beautiful. I love watching live shows. I know as a performer, I'm connecting, I'm in touch with magic and energy and things that are bigger than my own little ego and the things my ego knows, like that kind of dissolves and true magic can happen. A lot of performers talk about that. And music, my God, it's beautiful, I love that.

The times when I've done more film things, it’s all quiet on set and the camera's there. The camera just consumes energy. It doesn't give anything back. It takes, takes, takes. So I always found as a comedian trying to be funny on a camera, you don't have that sixth sense. At least I never have, I'm sure some comedians do. In a live room, I know how to wiggle at the right time and how to drop my shit and deliver a line and pause and breathe, or when something fails, allow it to fail and then people are gonna laugh because you failed, but then suddenly the failure becomes success.

I do consider it my responsibility to people who come out to see me to give them something that reminds them that it's worth leaving the house. It's a beautiful thing going on that I'm also in process with. I gain so much. My life when I'm not performing is, you know, I'm lying on my couch looking at my damn phone. I'm trying to read a book and struggling. I'm still learning the guitar. I've been learning the guitar for 20 years. I still suck, you know, and I'm still not seeing friends that much because everyone's busy and, you know, everyone's on their phone and, you know, so it's good for me too. 

F&F: What is the clown community like these days?

AJT: Definitely the clown community has got some major mojo. I think RuPaul has got people interested in clown. A lot of the drag queens are doing clown. There's a fun thing going on this dovetail between drag and clown, clown comedians who are kind of doing a bit of a drag with it and drag performers that are kind of doing a little bit of clown. And that's really cool.

I think also with identity politics made it so improv was more limiting.

I've been really tickled and so happy and really surprised by that the appeal of an Old God show is really broad.I’ve seen a basic seeming 55 year-old couple really liked it, but also like the queer Gen Z person come up to me afterwards and comment on how much they loved the way the character is dragging my masculinity a little bit. I didn't plan that, but I've been told that. So I'm like, oh shit, that's cool. I like that.

Take it from Old God, 

Humor can be intimate and vulnerable. Humor can be tied to a place and time, a moment of shared experience. Humor can unite, and it can poke fun at the things that divide us. So, go out and support your local clown, or buffoon.

Find him on Instagram: @oldgodshow