The DISC of clowns: Understanding outsized Incandescents by their subdominant motivation.

Sunday at Church I talked about deploying my notion of the subdominant motivation in my recasting of the DISC system of personality assessment to understand how particular people will express and pursue their dominant motivation. I went through this for all of the DISC motivations to some extent, but I was paying particular attention to the Incandescents because I was talking about politics. There were all kinds of side issues I didn’t hit – although, if you watch the video, I give you just in passing the DISC of Cheech and Chong’s Sister Mary Elephant. But one that seem fun to me is in that neighborhood: The DISC of clowns.

You call them comics or comedians. I distinguish them from humorists, who are not quite so frenzied in their Incandescent need. All true clowns will be Incandescent first, and, accordingly, it should be possible to distinguish them by their subdominant characteristic: Incandescent/driven clowns will have an agenda they are trying to effect, Incandescent/sociable clowns will seek to make people feel warm and fuzzy and Incandescent/cautious clowns will seem to strive to whip their audiences into more-compliant behavior.

Consider the types of clowns brought to us by Shakespeare: Id: Feste. Is: Falstaff. Ic: Malvolio. The first and last are from Twelfth Night. Sir Toby plays the Falstaff clown in that play, albeit with his own Id agenda. Malvolio is foiled by another Ic clown, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the two together form the basis for every succeeding Ic clown duo, modeled and perfected in the modern era by Laurel and Hardy. The Oliver Hardy/Malvolio Ic clown thinks he’s wise but doesn’t know he is actually stupid. The Stan Laurel/Aguecheek Ic clown knows he’s stupid but doesn’t know he is inadvertently wise. These forms show up again and again in cinematic and television comedy, from Charlie Chaplin to Lucille Ball to Sheldon Cooper.

Three examples from stand-up comedy: Id: Lenny Bruce. Is: Jay Leno. Ic: David Letterman. Audiences love the Is comic, but the Id is much more common – stand-up being a socially-approved form of public pugilism. Mainstream media critics love the Ic comics because they like to see people being pushed around.

Three more, from Late-Nite television: Id: Jimmy Fallon. Is: Jimmy Kimmel. Ic: Stephen Colbert. Fallon wants to sway, Kimmel wants to play and Colbert wants to flay.

I know nothing about the world of actual clowns, from the modern-day circus back to the medieval mock-mandarins, but it would be interesting to see how those forms sort out in this way. Perhaps someday I’ll go back and play with Plautus and Aristophanes, to see how I might sort their clowns. Meanwhile, this is something you can do as you surf the idiot-box: How do the professional idiots distribute themselves DISC-wise?