Why I Took a Bouffon Workshop (and Why Someone Threw a Chair)

Last spring, I wrote a story about my first job out of grad school at an internationally focused nonprofit in Washington, DC. The organization was dedicated to solving social and environmental problems around the world, while simultaneously being riddled with its own dysfunction. A place constantly telling the world to fix itself while remaining in deep denial about its internal mess.

That kind of contradiction makes for good material.

About a week after writing it, I realized something important: this piece needed to be performed as bouffon.

So—what is bouffon?

Bouffon is a style of French clown theatre that comes out of the Lecoq tradition. Where traditional clowns are vulnerable and seek empathy, wanting the audience to love them, root for them, pity them, the bouffon operates very differently. The bouffon is a social outcast. A subversive figure whose job is to hold up a mirror to society and mock it, so that uncomfortable truths can no longer be ignored.

Bouffons are funny, yes, but the humor is a weapon. It’s not there to soothe the audience. It’s there to expose them.

Given the gap between what this nonprofit claimed to stand for and how it actually functioned, bouffon felt like the perfect lens. The problem was I’d never trained in bouffon. I had Lecoq-style clown training years ago, but bouffon was a missing piece.

So I made myself a deal: the next time a bouffon workshop appeared, I’d take it.

That’s how I ended up in Philadelphia, training with Eric Davis (aka Red Bastard) arguably the go-to bouffon teacher in the U.S.

Eric Davis’s Take on Bouffon

Eric’s approach differs from the more punitive version of bouffon that can emerge from Lecoq training. Rather than leading with anger or contempt for society—which can veer into cruelty—he asks performers to take a more neutral, even playful stance.

His framing is this: 

You are an alien dropped onto Earth.
You observe humans doing strange things.
You assume they must enjoy them—otherwise, why would they do them?

So you imitate these behaviors with enthusiasm. With curiosity. With delight. You don’t know they’re grotesque.

That innocence is key. By approaching the work through lighthearted play rather than judgment, the audience becomes more receptive to seeing themselves reflected back, often in ways they didn’t expect or didn’t want.

How the Workshop Worked

Most of the three-day intensive wasn’t about “making bouffon scenes.” It was about relearning how to play—something adults are notoriously bad at. We self-censor. We edit. We hold back. Letting go of that takes time.

Once we did, the real bouffon work began.

We’d improvise in small groups for 15–20 minutes at a time, then reflect afterward. The play came first; the meaning came later. It was striking how quickly our brains would switch from childlike freedom to sociologist / anthropologist / philosopher mode.

A couple examples:

In one scene, three of us began by twitching our fingers. That evolved into miming texting on phones. The phones grew larger and larger until they filled the room and we had to run and jump to reach the buttons. Eventually, we destroyed the phones and found ourselves creating a farm, plowing fields, harvesting crops.

The scene wasn’t “random.” It was about technology overtaking our lives and a longing to destroy it and return to something slower, more grounded, and more connected to the earth.

In another session, we were given the prompt Valentine’s Day.

We played with purchasing gifts, verbal declarations of love, and exaggerated physical intimacy. By the end, I had become Cupid shitting chocolate into an ever-expanding diaper. If the scene had continued, the diaper might have exploded, covering everything in chocolate shit. The whole world could’ve turned into candy.

The reflection was clear: “love” so thoroughly commercialized that it maps itself onto everything. A holiday that completely colonizes life, for a day.

Are these ideas novel on their own? No. But watching them emerge through grotesque, absurd physicality is entirely different from simply stating them. It’s one thing to say Valentine’s Day is over-commercialized. It’s another to watch chocolate shit flood the room.

This is how bouffon works: the improv uncovers the raw material that later becomes a sculpted, unforgettable performance.

Red Bastard, and the Broken Contract

On the final night of the workshop, Eric performed Red Bastard, the show he brought to the Edinburgh Fringe over a decade ago and has performed around the world since.

A few times during the show, he made the audience get up and rapidly change seats. When he was about to make us do this for the fourth time, a woman stood up and threw a chair at him.

I’m not exaggerating.

The chair slammed down in front of him. No one was hurt, but the sound was loud, shocking, and genuinely unsettling. The room froze.

I’d never seen that happen before. In stand-up comedy, heckling is common—it’s a way for an audience member to try to reclaim power in the room. But this wasn’t heckling. This was something else.

At first I thought, Well… that’s Philadelphia. But the more I thought about it, the clearer it became: he had hit a nerve.

Bouffon is designed to disrupt the unspoken contract between performer and audience. It doesn’t allow passive watching. It implicates. It provokes. It forces people to confront things they’d rather stay unconscious of.

And when that contract breaks, reactions can be volatile.

The chair wasn’t random. It was a response. Which, in a strange way, meant the work was doing exactly what it was meant to do.