Clown Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Clown trivia quiz questions and answers

Clown Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is a Clown?
A: A clown is a comic performer who employs slapstick or similar types of physical comedy, often in a mime style.

Clowns have a varied tradition with significant variations in what?
A: Costume and performance.

The most recognizable modern clown character is the Auguste or "red clown" type, with outlandish costumes featuring what?
A: Distinctive makeup, colorful wigs, exaggerated footwear, and colorful clothing.

Their entertainment style is generally designed to entertain what?
A: Large audiences.

Modern clowns are strongly associated with the tradition of the circus clown, which developed out of earlier comedic roles in what?
A: Theatre or Varieté shows during the 19th to mid 20th centuries.

Many circus clowns have become well known and are a what?
A: A key circus act in their own right.

The first mainstream clown role was portrayed by whom?
A: Joseph Grimaldi (who also created the traditional whiteface make-up design).

In the early 1800s, he expanded the role of Clown in the harlequinade that formed part of British pantomimes, notably where?
A: At the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and the Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden theatres.

The comedy that clowns perform is usually in the role of a what?
A: A fool whose everyday actions and tasks become extraordinary—and for whom the ridiculous, for a short while, becomes ordinary.

Some writers have argued that due to the widespread use of such comedy and its long history it is a need that is what?
A: Part of the human condition.

The "fear of clowns," circus clowns in particular as a psychiatric condition has become known by what term?
A: Coulrophobia.

When was the English word clown was first recorded?
A: c. 1560 (as clowne, cloyne) in the generic meaning "rustic, boor, peasant".

It is in this sense that "Clown" is used as the name of fool characters in Shakespeare's what?
A: Othello and The Winter's Tale.

The sense of clown as referring to a professional or habitual fool or jester developed soon after 1600, based on what?
A: Elizabethan "rustic fool" characters such as Shakespeare's.

The circus clown developed in what century?
A: The 19th century.

The modern circus derives from what?
A: Philip Astley's London riding school, which opened in 1768.

Why did Astley add a clown to his shows?
A: To amuse the spectators between equestrian sequences.

American comedian George L. Fox became known for his clown role, directly inspired by whom?
A: Grimaldi, in the 1860s.

Tom Belling senior (1843–1900) developed what character c. 1870, acting as a foil for the more sophisticated "white clown"?
A: The "red clown" or "Auguste".

Who did Belling work for?
A: Circus Renz in Vienna.

Belling's costume became the template for what?
A: The modern stock character of circus or children's clown, based on a lower class or "hobo" character, with red nose, white makeup around the eyes and mouth, and oversized clothes and shoes.

In the early 20th century, with the disappearance of the rustic simpleton or village idiot character of everyday experience, North American circuses developed characters such as the what?
A: Tramp or hobo.

Examples include Marceline Orbes, who performed at the Hippodrome Theater(1905), Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp (1914), and Emmett Kelly's Weary Willie based on what?
A: Hobos of the Depression era.

Another influential tramp character was played by Otto Griebling during the 1930s to when?
A: The 1950s.

Red Skelton's Dodo the Clown in The Clown (1953), depicts the circus clown as a what?
A: A tragicomic stock character, "a funny man with a drinking problem".

In the United States, Bozo the Clown was an influential Auguste character since when?
A: The late 1950s.

The Bozo Show premiered in what year?
A: 1960 and appeared nationally on cable television in 1978.

McDonald's derived its mascot clown, Ronald McDonald, from what character?
A: The Bozo character in the 1960s.

Where did Willard Scott, who had played Bozo during 1959–1962, perform as the mascot?
A: In 1963 television spots.

The McDonald's trademark application for the character dates to what year?
A: 1967.

Based on the Bozo template, the US custom of birthday clown, private contractors who offer to perform as clowns at children's parties, developed when?
A: In the 1960s to 1970s.

The strong association of the (Bozo-derived) clown character with children's entertainment as it has developed since the 1960s also gave rise to what in children's hospitals by the mid 1980s?
A: "Clown Care" or "hospital clowning".

Clowns of America International (established 1984) and World Clown Association (established 1987) are associations of what?
A: Semi-professionals and professional performers.

The shift of the Auguste or "red clown" character from his role as a foil for the white in circus or pantomime shows to a Bozo-derived standalone character in children's entertainment by the 1980s also gave rise to what?
A: The evil clown character, the attraction of clowns for small children being based in their fundamentally threatening or frightening nature.

The auguste character-type is often a what?
A: An anarchist, a joker, or a fool.

He is clever and has much lower status than the what?
A: The whiteface.

Classically the whiteface character instructs the auguste character to do what?
A: Perform his bidding.

The auguste has a hard time performing a given task, which leads to what?
A: Funny situations.

Sometimes the auguste plays the role of an anarchist and purposefully has trouble doing what?
A: Following the whiteface's directions.

Sometimes the auguste is confused or is foolish and does what?
A: Makes errors less deliberately.

Traditionally, the whiteface clown uses "clown white" makeup to cover the entire face and neck, leaving none of the underlying “what”visible.?
A: Natural skin.

In the European whiteface makeup, the ears are painted what color?
A: Red.

Who was America's first great whiteface clown?
A: Stage star George "G.L." Fox.

The character clown adopts an eccentric character of some type, such as what?
A: A butcher, a baker, a policeman, a housewife or hobo.

Prime examples of this type of clown are what two famous circus tramps?
A: Otto Griebling and Emmett Kelly.

Red Skelton, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Sacha Baron Cohen would all fit the definition of a what?
A: A character clown.

The character clown makeup is a comic slant on what?
A: The standard human face.

What is the most prevalent character clown in the American circus?
A: The hobo, tramp or bum clown.

Clowns International claims to be what?
A: The oldest clown society in the world.

When was it set up?
A: It was set up in 1946.

Apart from being a membership organization, Clowns International has set up a what?
A: A museum of clown memorabilia and a register of clown make-up.

The latter also has a collection of full egg shells decorated as replicas of what?
A: The specific clown's head.