How am I funny?

Friday p.m. – post school. Feeling fragile, frustrated and about as funny as a funeral. This clown stuff is hard. Put Marvin Gaye on the I-pod to try and write my way out of these unfunny blues. Okay, so far I’ve discovered that the audience like me when I get beaten up. From the cabaret duo I do with Alice I kind of new this already. There was one moment when Philippe said that I was the second worst, not the worst and I let out an excited cry so I guess that means they like me when I’m excited, or is it when I react to his provocation? I can’t pin it down. Whatever it is when I try to find it again onstage I am normally drummed off within a few seconds. So far, I am pretty sure they don’t like me when I talk. How the hell am I funny on stage? Todays exercise came in 2 parts, first we had to pretend to be a doctor using only the line “Come in, take off your clothes.” There were a couple of successes but he had banged everybody off within ¾ of an hour. Then we got into the meat of todays lesson; The fun to pretend to be each others clowns. We swapped costumes and 1 by 1 came in to music then had to pretend to be each other.
Dan did a really bad impersonation of me he ambled on, shook his tits and contorted his body in a strange manner, Steve had mentioned to me that I have a habit of collapsing inwards when I flop, my body obviously says what I am experiencing even though I try to hide it with smiles and I think that this what Dan was going for. Maybe it’s my mood today but I did get a little offended, surely there’s more to me than my wobbly bits. Okay, admittedly since Chunk truffle shuffled his way through the Goonies, a fat lad jiggling is generally funny but is that it. Will people pay me for that? I doubt it. The other reason is that whereas several people, myself included pretended to be Dan because he has begun discovering a lot in class and was fun to play, it seems that I like some others have discovered a lot less and so there is a lot less to play with.
At the end of class Philippe talked about us needing to enter into a contract with the audience, that we had to sell more. I don’t have much of an idea what this means. I can’t work it out we are not a character, we are not ourselves we have to sell parts of ourselves to make the audience laugh. ??? My brains all fuddled thinking about it, trying to understand it, to grasp this elusive thing called clown that strikes for a few seconds a week but the rest of the time is hiding in the shadows laughing at me. Maybe I’m just thinking about it too much, trying to intellectualise pleasure is like trying to describe the taste of a peach to someone who has only ever eaten potatoe.
Le Jeu ended today, it wasn’t what I expected from the module but it has been a brilliant few weeks, I’m still a world away from understanding all its lessons but a few have sunk into my head, if not my body. Still with 6 weeks left of school there is plenty of time to discover I just have to keep getting up. I want to discover what I want to do. How I can play. How I have fun. I’m a bit lost right now. The path has disappeared. I’m fumbling through the undergrowth, the vines are starting to grow up and around me, binding my legs and creeping up my body. I need a sword to hack them off and find the path below. But not the same path. A new path. The path to my imagination and fun. The road to creativity.