bramblepatch:

aviculor:

peculiar-little-rabbit:

kouha:

My gf: mimes are to clowns as dogs are to wolves
Me, trembling: what

I love clown shitposting as much as the next person, but for once my weirdly specific college education of mimes has a chance to shine because the opposite is actually true. Modern western clowning is directly descendant from ancient greek pantomime. Clowns are actually the watered down, domesticated funny makers to the raw stylings of mimes.

…Man, I’d even make fun of myself for adding this comment on.

You look at a mime and tell me that doesn’t have the raw, untamed energy of a wolf. The clown is the tamed household one, colorful and designed to warm hearts and bring chuckles and entertain. But a mime…..that is something savage and unbridled from the wilderness. You ask a mime to make you laugh and it will go for the jugular. Not to say a clown is unable to go feral, just the opposite. It’s just that approaching a mime in its natural habitat without due respect, expecting it to be the same creature as your auntie’s pedigree purebred Bozo, will be the last mistake you ever make.

Additionally, mimes within a tradition tend to be fairly uniform in appearance. Of course, this isn’t to say that there is no regional or individual variation among mimes! But pigmentation and patterning tends to be simple and stark and the physical type hews close to human norms, allowing the mime some degree of camouflage in his natural environment. Physical agility and strength is selected for; a mime that cannot pull an invisible rope or descend a flight of imaginary stairs will not survive long in the wild.

Clowns on the other hand display a dizzying array of impractical features, selected for the viewer’s entertainment rather than to benefit the clown; different schools of clowning may produce individuals who bear little if any visual similarity to one another. Bright colors, busy patterns, and attention-seeking behavior render a clown unable to blend in with their surroundings. Exaggerated physical proportions are common, sometimes to the point of interfering with the clown’s ability to perform basic tasks without aid! And most clowns lack their mimic cousins’ finely tuned fight or flight instincts; a clown is just as likley to attempt to befriend a potential threat as to escape or try to fend it off.

Clowns, then, clearly show the hallmarks of a domesticated creature, and like dogs, a domesticated creature with incredible variety within the population, from sturdy working types such as the rodeo clown, to ancient show types with well-defined breed standards such as the various characters of the commedia dell’arte, to social companion types such as birthday clowns. We even see a parallel to the much-maligned and misunderstood “aggressive” dog breeds in the unjustly feared “psycho” or “monster” clown – including the tendency for other types of clowns to be misrepresented as monster clowns by easily startled humans.