By Brad "Mustache" Byers

Email: brad.ceo@dufferz.com 

This is a new special section that will lead you to some great clown books for your continued clown education.

These videos will knock your socks off laughing! They are true comic gems that you should consider adding to your clown library! Not only will you laugh and have a good time watching, you will certainly learn a few things about comedy movement, slapstick and timing, you'll learn about character development and even adding music background and musical sound effects to make a great presentation! I highly recommend this video and you can buy it here!  Slapstick Encyclopedia 

--Duffer

Creative Clowning
By Bruce Fife

 This book was once considered the definitive text book on clowning, as it came out long before many of today's instructional books for clowning, at a time when printed material on clowning was scarce .The book is a clown encyclopedia of sorts, and in actuality has eight contributing authors. The contributing authors are Bruce Fife, Tony Blanco, Steve Kissel, Bruce Johnson, Ralph Dewey, Hal Diamond, Jack Wiley, and Gene Lee.
 The book has 20 chapters and covers the usual topics most basic clown how-to books cover, such as juggling, skits, balloons, makeup, and magic, etc. But this book goes quite beyond that including chapters on the history and origins of clowning, as well as touching on ground floor elements of lesser covered topics such as writing material, marketing and business aspects of your clowning, and even an overview of various possible venues for clowns and some of the capacities to work in them. They also include chapters with some pointers and basic instruction on how to go about learning performance skills that many other books do not touch on such as stilt walking, ventriloquism, and unicycling.
 While this widely covers the art of clowning, with tons of information, it does tend to lack some of the pertinent information and small details that brand new beginners need. But on the other hand it does cover other topics that appear in few other books, and I recommend it be in everybody's clown library. It was one of the first books on clowning I ever bought, and now I would never be caught without a copy of it in my clown library. Click here if you would like to own a copy of it!

*ATTENTION CLOWNS! Rumor has it that Creative Clowning will be going out of print soon, so make sure to click on the link above to get your copy!

*NEW* Dewey’s Amusing Rubber Antics by Ralph Dewey

 Dewey’s Amusing Rubber Antics is a book that provides many ideas for comic bits and routines you can do within your balloon act and balloon sculpturing. A great book seeing as how we should be clowns who use balloon sculpture as a tool, and not just be balloonists in makeup! Dewey is a prolific author with many books to his credit.
 This is a fairly small and inexpensive book, costing only $4.00. But don’t let that fool you, it is 100% applicable and useful information for any level of clown or comedic performer. It’s not really a how-to or philosophical book, it’s more of an idea launching pad.
 Dewey follows his typical writing style, the writings and ideas are short, sweet, and to the point.
 This is a great book to take a first step towards making your ballooning funny and entertaining, and not just a spectator sport.
 For more information on how you can obtain a copy of this book, or other books by Ralph Dewey, visit his website at http://www.flash.net/~balloonz/

Clown Scenes by Tristan Remy

 Clown Scenes is a book put together by Tristan Remy who conducted interviews with great European clowns, and through those interviews and viewing performances he came up with scripts for some of their classic routines and entrees. Some of the great clowns routines which appear in this book are those of  Pipo Sosman, Rhum, Dario, Bario, and the Fratellini’s. Many routines were just passed down from generation to generation and kept pretty much ‘inside the circle’, and many are lost forever. But thanks to this book, we have a record of some of the best.
 

The routines in this book serve as great models how many European clowns work in a trio format. There are several dozen routines, and although historical, many can be used as spring boards to create routines to be performed for modern day audiences. With time minor details change, but the essence and premise stay the same.
 This would be a great book for anyone interested in clown history, European clowns, or for finding ideas for creating routines for multiple clowns. For information on how you can purchase a copy of this book, click here.