Customer Reviews

Clowns for Beginners (Writers and Readers Documentary Comic Book)

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Having great deal of respect for the Readers and Writers series in general, I was truly disappointed by Joe Lee's _History of Clowns for Beginners_. First of all, be forewarned: Lee's subject is not so much circus clowns per se (they get about two pages), but the various incarnations of the trickster archetype in general, from the Paleolithic era through the present.
Besides the utterly groundless statements made about the disposition and mentality of preliterate civilizations, there are numerous major historical errors of an elementary nature. For example, Lee claims that no text of a Greek satyr play has survived--if, in fact, any "had ever even existed." What on Earth is he talking about? Evidently Lee isn't familiar with Euripides' _Cyclops_ or the fragments we have of dozens of other satyr plays. Another of Lee's bizarre statements is that Erasmus translated the New Testament "into Latin and Greek." Apparently Lee is unaware that the original language of the New Testament is, in fact, Greek.
Neither of the silly errors should have escaped the notice of a decent editor. Nor should the countless grammatical and punctuation errors which riddle the text, sometimes rendering it unintelligible.
After spotting various errors on subjects in which I am well versed, I began wondering how much I could trust Lee's representation of periods and concepts relatively unfamilar to me. And it's hard for a reader in that kind of skeptical posture to be impressed or intrigued by anything at all.
In short, this book was a disappointment--it's such a shame, since it's such a good idea for a book in the first place. I can only hope that Writers and Readers releases a new edition of _Clowns for Beginners_ after subjecting it to a major overhaul.
To Lee's credit, some of his wordplay is funny and his art is excellent.

I thought the book was exceptionally written despite the fact that it lost it's meaning many times throught the important sections.