What is Bouffon and what can it teach us about humour and Public Speaking?

Bouffon is a satirical performance style with roots in Greek theatre. I love what it can teach us about the ethical dilemmas of being human. Bouffons mock everything humans do, from war to politics and religion, and performances will often take you from laughing to recoiling in disgust in a matter of seconds.

This article is part of my series explaining what we can learn about great public speaking from different forms of theatre.

Bouffon: complete empathy, no compassion

My Bouffon teacher is Italian artist Giovanni Fusetti. Giovanni compares Bouffon to Clown (which I write about in other posts) explaining, “The audience laughs at the Clown. The Bouffon laughs at the audience”.

Giovanni says, “The Bouffon has complete empathy but no compassion. He knows and feels everything you feel, but he doesn’t care about you”.

This means Bouffons will act out scenes we would usually consider troubling, as a game.

Bouffons turn serious issues of human life into play

Bouffons assume that we humans love the things we do all the time, like work, politics or war. A group, or “band” of Bouffons will play big topics – think Australian Senate discussions about climate change, the Vietnam war, or institutionalised sex abuse – as a game. Performances often start out hilarious and ridiculous – until you realise how true the satire is and begin to feel deeply uncomfortable.

The power of alternating humour with tragedy

I was initially terrified of studying Bouffon because it deals with such controversial topics. But I discovered Bouffon is far less terrifying to perform than it is to watch and it can make uncomfortable truths hit home so effectively. One sketch had the audience laughing hysterically as the actors played at posh women clinking champagne glasses, joking about champagne at breakfast. Within moments the scene had turned into babies addicted to screens and the audience was horrified. There’s power when you relax your audience completely with humour then throw the big hit.

The laugh in Bouffon is powerful because of what sets up: the audience feels winded when hit by the hard truths of social commentary.

Does your humour make a difference?

Malcolm Gladwell has a great podcast, The Satire Paradox. He points out (for example) satirists who mocked the US election campaign in a bid to ‘chase the laughs’. Gladwell says that while audiences might be responding, nothing changes in the world as a result. Gladwell distinguishes those performers from those whose laughter gives the audience a different perspective of their life that leads us to change something, or at least think about it.

Many speakers use jokes to make themselves comfortable.

Speakers occasionally tell me they want to open with a joke. They say they think being funny is something we “should” do as speakers, to entertain the audience.
Laughter can send a social message that connects, but I have noticed the desire to make an audience laugh often comes from the speaker’s need to feel comfortable themselves; to feel that their audience likes them. If the joke helps you feel more comfortable and you give a better talk as a result, go for it. However, there are more skilful ways to use humour.

You can make the audience uncomfortable without them hating you.

Once you are comfortable with the comfortable, audience-pleasing talk, I’d love you to learn to go a bit further. I’m interested in pushing the boundaries of public speaking, where we challenge the audience and ourselves.

One way you can start is to separate yourself from the material. Giovanni encouraged us to distinguish between “me” and “the work”, explaining,

“The actor may have a political or ethical issue in mocking the person in the audience, but the Bouffon doesn’t care!”

When you speak publicly about an important issue, you are taking on a role. A bit like when your children are naughty and you respond in the “scolding parent” role. Your child knows there is more to you than “scolding parent”.

Let’s ask better questions about how and why we are communicating.

Here are four Bouffon-inspired questions we can ponder about being a great public speaker:

1. How does your position on a topic relate to all the others?
   In Bouffon we have the group (also known as the “Chorus”) and the individual roles that emerge from the group. For example, a scene of climate activists suddenly gives birth to a coal advocate. The individual role always emerges from the play of the chorus. When you speak on a controversial topic, how is your idea a natural outcome of a previous position?

2. What do you want to achieve with your laughs, and does that happen?
Laughing can be social lubricant. It can also be cruel, such as when kids bully other kids. In Why is that so funny? John Wright describes 4 kinds of laughs in physical comedy – the surprise laugh, the bizarre laugh, the visceral laugh, and the recognized laugh. A joke without purpose can, at best, use up valuable time; at worst it may make you look incompetent. Rather than using jokes for the sake of it, ask, What does my humour make possible.

3. Who am I challenging and am I allowed to?
Giovanni encouraged us to name what we are being funny at and to be very precise about the effect. Who are we mocking? Do we have the right to? Whose voices are not represented? When you mock the company president, whether at a major event or Christmas awards night, why are you doing so? The satirist can be dangerous: Be aware of unintended consequences of your work.

4. Are all voices represented?
Our society generally thinks it is OK to mock people of the same or higher class or ability. We don’t tend to think it is OK to mock minority groups. The question raised by Bouffon performers is: If we only mock those who are like us, how do we ensure all voices are represented and heard?

Rachael West is a strategic speaker coach interested in the link between how we move, how we think and what our ideas do once we share them with the world.

Image: Christian Santiago