Clown Class: The Dignity Games

I want you to do an experiment.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to do it, either. But let’s think we’re going to do it.

Here’s the experiment:

Take a dozen, twenty, thirty people of your acquaintance and line them up, mentally, in order of whom you perceive to have the most dignity to whom you perceive to have the least dignity. Do it with stick figures on a piece of paper, do it with index cards. Or, hey! Invite the real people to a park and put them all in a line and don’t tell them what you’re doing. Just peer at them and make notes and shove them around until you’re satisfied. Then, when you have their dignity scores and you’ve given them each a can of soda and a lemon bar and sent them home, see if you can articulate how you arrived at their individual scores. 

Who’s in competition for the highest score? Who’s not doing great? How do you feel about the people in the middle?

Do you think you give dignity scores the same way that other people do? Are the measures of dignity more or less universal or is dignity in the eye of the beholder? 

Think of the person who’d be your top scorer. What makes them so dignified?

• Does your Most Dignified Person possess a quality of reserve? 

• Does your MDP hold a certain kind of place in society? Does it have to do with their job? Does your MDP do noble or high-paying work, or both, or neither? Is the amount of money they have connected to their score? 

• Are your MDP’s social connections a factor? 

• Does your MDP dress well? Do they have a good haircut? 

• Does your MDP’s race affect their score?

• Does your MDP have good posture? Are they agile or athletic? Quiet? Outspoken? Stern? Charming? 

• Is your Most Dignified Person funny? 

Remember, this is a dignity score, not a likability score. 

Now think about the person who’d score the lowest on your dignity scale. 

What’s up? Do you like this person? Do you love this person? Do you disdain this person? Do you enjoy spending time with the Least Dignified Person or do you avoid it? What’s this person’s deal?

• Is your LDP out of control in some kind of way?

• Do they manage their emotions poorly, in your opinion?

• Are they rude?

• Do they people-please overly? 

• How much money do you think your LDP has? Is it a wrong amount? Are they employed, unemployed, or employed…incorrectly? 

• Does your LDP talk too much?

• Is your LDP highly, publicly emotional? 

• Is your LDP too effusive or clingy or demonstrative?

• Is it me

When you’re considering the factors that play into a person’s dignity score, do certain qualities feel unrelated to dignity, like they exist on a separate plane? Kindness? Intelligence? Can a person be kind and intelligent and still be the least dignified person you know?

Is health, mental or otherwise, a factor? Could poor health pull a score down? Be honest for your own records.

Does absence or ubiquity play into the score? Do you wish you’d see and/or hear from your low scorers less? Do quiet and absence make dignity? Is negative space inherently more dignified?  

Nobody’s going to do this. Me neither. What a pity because I’d like to see all of our results. 

I want it out there, you know? We’re always sizing each other up and knowing we’re getting sized up but it’s all so hush-hush. I want everyone to have to be overt about their personal dignity rating system and take whatever character hits go with it. Just get it on the table. 

Wouldn’t it be exciting? I mean, it would be terrible! Fucked! But great! You go to a party and everybody takes turns arranging everyone in a dignity-order line but this time everyone has to say why they put everyone where they put them, and then everybody throws up, and then people fistfight, and some people go home, but after that everybody who’s still there is thoroughly relaxed and exhilarated and the party is a total banger. Conversation is popping.

I’m on this dignity trip today because of my last post*. I want to have the right amount of dignity, whatever amount I think that is, and after that post I feel like I need to try for some restoration. Maybe saying the word “dignity” fifty times is medicinal.

*The link is for anyone who’d appreciate some context

I was going to talk about shame today—same reason, flipped—but that would have meant getting all up in shame to feel it and see it and describe it and you know what? Too soon. 

Back when I started Clown Class, I searched the web for cool and dignified images of clowns. (Hahaha, dear god, the world’s longest image search. I grew a beard, died, etc.) If I was going to have the word “clown” glued to me, creatively, I needed to see an image I could get with on a spiritual level. 

<search> clown </search>

NO, oh my god

<search> pagliacci </search>

no + pizza 

What’s it, who’s it, who’s the…

<search> Pierrot </search> 

There we are. 

When I first saw the image up top of Paul Legrand as Pierrot, I took a screenshot to stick in my Notes app. I wanted to remember the sentence underneath it as much as I wanted to remember the image itself:

Pierrot's character developed from being a buffoon to an avatar of the disenfranchised.

That last phrase, whew. The idea that a sad clown could be out there being an avatar for the disenfranchised was thrilling. Ennobling. I had a hopeful flash that I, too, could be an avatar for the disenfranchised via being a public wreck from time to time.

One of my favorite movie tropes is when the unassuming old janitor is sweeping in one corner of the screen, beneath notice, while the hero’s about to lose the big fight we’re all paying attention to. Then the janitor puts down their broom and we get a close-up of their face looking grim and purposeful and

HOLD THE FUCK ON, THEY’RE A JEDI/KUNG-FU EXPERT/SECRET AGENT

and they throw themselves into the center of the action and demolish everybody and it’s amazing.  

I love that trope because we can be counted on to not have conferred any major dignity on the old janitor because we’ve absorbed a lot of dumb ideas about class and age and dignity and also because the movie didn’t want us to yet. But then OH MY GOD, WE WERE WRONG. 

And that’s exciting because inside

OH MY GOD, WE WERE WRONG 

is

They’re wrong about me! I might still be something, too!

and then inside that is

Wait, we’re wrong about everyone! We don’t know anything!

and, for the briefest split-second, all the way inside

we could turn this whole thing upside-down

everyone’s innate dignity will be restored