Updated September 13, 2026 at 8:15 AM PDT
John Simpson spent 15 years reporting on crime in Britain before leaving journalism for a profession that requires a different relationship with disaster: clowning.
But you won't find Simpson at a circus. He practices what he calls theater clowning, without the big red nose, white face paint or exaggerated costume often associated with circus clowns.
In Simpson's acts, things can still go wrong onstage. Sometimes, that's the point.
In one act, Simpson appears as a pompous spiritual guru expecting a spotlight and ceremonial gong. Neither is there, so the audience has to improvise them. Eventually, the serene guru loses his temper, storms offstage and begins shouting positive affirmations.
"I am a kind and loving man who wants to inspire people," goes one.
Simpson spent 11 years as a crime correspondent for The Times of London and later became home affairs editor at The Observer. He has written about organized crime, policing, murder investigations, the far right and, more recently, pro-Palestinian protests and the account of an activist aboard a Gaza-bound flotilla.
His own summary of his old career is less restrained: "I've been undercover as a football hooligan. ... I once solved a murder."
Now he performs and teaches clowning.
"A stand-up comedian makes jokes," Simpson told NPR's Steve Inskeep. "A clown is the joke."
When Simpson's story first came up at a Morning Edition meeting, something unexpected happened. Several people knew someone who had been to clown school.
A cousin. A sister. We even learned that NPR Middle East correspondent Daniel Estrin had recently studied clowning.
Simpson thinks there is something to all the attention. He connects the interest in clowning to people searching for "meaning, authenticity, humanity" at a time when, he said, the world feels like it is losing those things.
What exactly is clown school?
"It's quite unclear what anybody actually means by 'clown school,'" said Tim Reid, a doctoral student in performance studies at New York University.
Reid is writing a dissertation called "The Buoyancy of Clowns," tracing a European tradition of clowning into the United States over the past 25 years.
Reid says clowning is "certainly current" across the United States and Canada, as well as England and France. Classes that once clustered around a few traditions and schools are now easy to find in places like New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Toronto and Austin, Texas.
But most people who use the term "clown school," Reid said, are really talking about workshops or classes. Degree-granting physical-theater programs have undergone what he called "serious contraction," even as their style of training has spread into traditional acting programs and independent classes.
"Anybody seemingly can do it," he said. "Training may even get in the way. No prerequisites."
To Reid, the moment looks a little like the improv craze of 15 or 20 years ago.
"Whatever boom [there might be] doesn't seem all that different from when everyone was taking improv classes," he said.
People took improv to "get out of your head," play with other people or simply have somewhere to perform.
Then many improv schools became, in Reid's words, "overly codified, hierarchical and pricey," just as streaming, smartphones and digital media were changing the entertainment industry around them.
Clown workshops have moved into some of that space.
The trouble with clowns
"My sense is that the popularity of clowns has more to do with a sense of danger or threat than connecting to some wider feel of our own humanness," Reid said.
A clown can be funny or frightening, pathetic or powerful. Reid calls the figure morally ambiguous.
"There's a pretty deep moral ambivalence to it all," he said. "Clowns seem able and aligned with power as much as they oppose and critique it."
That makes clowning a little harder to package as a wholesome cure for modern life.
Which may be useful, because Simpson did not arrive at it through a grand theory.
Learning to fail
By the time Simpson found clowning, the career he had once considered a dream had become something harder to live with.
He has written about how watching depleted newsrooms, screaming headlines and repeated cycles of outrage and dysfunction slowly wore away at what he once loved about reporting.
"For most of my newspaper career I was sustained by the great dream of journalism," he wrote in The Observer.
In his interview with NPR, Simpson described becoming worried about the daily "intellectual diet" of death, murder, terror and destruction he was helping produce.
"Do I want to commit the rest of my life to adding to that daily diet?" he remembered asking himself.
His personal life was unraveling too. Simpson said he "was an alcoholic" and had used drinking as an escape from the pressure of the job. He eventually got sober. Through recovery, he met a retired stand-up comedian who talked enthusiastically about a clown course.
Simpson signed up.
It became the first of hundreds of hours of training.
Clowning gave him a remarkably simple problem: walk into a room and let people see you.
Early in his training, Simpson walked onto a stage, looked at the wall and suddenly lost all his confidence.
"I walked straight back out and slammed the door behind me," he said.
Then he did it again.
"And it became the game," Simpson said. "It was just honest behavior."
Much of contemporary clown training revolves around the idea of the "flop," the moment something fails and the performer cannot pretend otherwise.
Reid is less romantic about the flop.
"There's something about this compulsive description of the flop and failure that seems to excuse bad or abject performances and even makes bad performance the point," he said.
But for Simpson, the lesson was practical. If his hand was shaking, he could acknowledge the shaking hand. If the room became awkward, he could stay there.
"The audience is almost like an X-ray machine," he said. "They can see right through you."
Clowning in the age of the algorithm
There was another appeal for Simpson, beyond learning how to fail: Clowning happens with people in a room.
"I'm really trying to get away from tech, social media, AI, all of that stuff," Simpson said. "I want to live in the real world with real people around me."
Reid, asked separately about clowning in the age of algorithms, pointed to a different kind of connection. A clown watches an audience, notices what gets a reaction and adjusts. In that sense, he said, the process is not entirely unlike TikTok: Both can produce increasingly strange things in response to what keeps people watching.
Simpson is still trying to make a living from the considerably less-automated version. He runs workshops through London-based Clown Lab and writes a Substack called The Shiny Things. He admits there are "more clowns than paid gigs."
Maybe that is where clowning most sharply departs from the profession he left behind. Journalism trains you to interrogate a premise, anticipate what could go wrong and challenge an idea before it gets very far.
Clowning asks almost the opposite: Commit to the idea first. Walk onstage before anyone has time to kill it.
The radio interview was produced by Julie Depenbrock. The digital version was written by Majd Al-Waheidi and edited by Suzanne Nuyen.
Copyright 2026 NPR
