Clowning Around Your Embarrassing Moments
Have you ever had one of those days where you’ve just run errands at the bank, the post office and the gas station on your way to work, and by then you were running late and had trouble finding a parking place, so you dashed into work just in time for a staff meeting, only to have a coworker tell you discreetly, afterwards, that the back of your skirt is tucked into the top of your pantyhose? And then you wanted to just crawl in a hole and die–any hole, as long as it was out of sight of other people? In fact, you thought, why can’t the earth just open up and swallow me right now?
I almost added “dropped the kids off” to your list of errands, but if your kids saw you like that, they would either have gleefully pointed it out, or been giggling in the backseat all the way to school, and you would have wondered what they were up to in time to salvage the rest of your dignity.
Learning to Laugh at Yourself
What if you could make yourself immune to embarrassment? Watching the work of Grock, one of the world’s most gifted clowns, it dawned on me that a good clown is impervious to humiliation. The rest of us hold our dignity too hard, wearing it like a shield, until those moments when it is forcibly wrenched away from us by the vicissitudes of life, and then we find ourselves entirely bereft, with no idea how to cope without it.
Watching someone hold onto their dignity during the worst adversity is an inspiring experience. It’s an admirable quality to strive for. The trouble with it is only that there are times when life is going to take our dignity away from us in spite of our best efforts, when we are powerless to prevent its loss. So how do we survive and bounce back from those times?
How to Bounce Back
A brilliant clown can entertain an audience with simple humility, laying his or her dignity at the feet of the public as a voluntary offering. The clown falls down or fails, and then gets back up to try again. We, the observers, laugh at the clown’s mistakes and misfortunes, but it is not the scathing laughter of scorn that we so fear to have turned on us, if we let our dignified shield slip even the tiniest bit. Instead, it is a redeeming human laughter, as we recognize ourselves in the clown’s mishaps and misfortunes, and connect with our entertainer through compassionate humor.
Next time a car splashes your good clothes from head to toe with muddy water on your way to an important event, tell people it’s the latest fashion, and you just had it done at the salon. When you accidentally upend your purse in a crowded store, scattering loose change, makeup and feminine supplies across the floor, tell the gathering crowd, “I just wanted to see if you were paying attention.” When your foot slips out from under you, and you find yourself flat on your face in a busy parking lot, or worse, in an ambulance with a broken bone, say, “I’ve just been practicing my triple axel for my new hobby, Olympic figure skating. A little more practice and I’ll have it down.” And when your coworker points out the back of your skirt stuck in the top of your pantyhose after the staff meeting, cover your ass, then pretend to do the can-can and say, “Those meetings are too boring–I think we should change the dress code and liven them up,” or how about, “Oops! I thought today was casual Friday!”
Please comment and share some of your own funny embarrassing moments, and don’t forget to laugh at yourself. We’re all human.
