Award-winning Singapore clown Shanice Stanislaus on why we need to embrace failure

**Kai Wen** (0:05)
Are Singaporeans too rigid to be funny? How do we find humour in our own lives? In today's episode, we talk about how we can release our inner child to embrace our inner clown. Hi, my name is Kai Wen, and you're listening to Headstart On Record. Now, I'm definitely not a psychologist, but if you love a conversation about human behaviour like I do, I think you're in the right place. I have with me today a world-winning clown and actor, Shanice Stanislaus!
Hi, Shanice.

**Shanice Stanislaus** (0:41)
Hi!

**Kai Wen** (0:42)
Where did you come from? Did you stay in a basement?

**Shanice Stanislaus** (0:44)
From the clown world.

**Kai Wen** (0:46)
From the clown world. So are you a good kind of clown or a bad clown?

**Shanice Stanislaus** (0:50)
I'm a fun clown.

**Kai Wen** (0:51)
Or a killer clown.
Shanice studied at Yale NUS and fell in love with clowning during her exchange at NYU Tisch. She has honed her craft since then with her comedy clown mail ordered winning three Canadian Awards in 2023 So you're wrapping Singapore quite hard, right?

**Shanice Stanislaus** (1:05)
Yeah. Putting Singapore on the map as a clown.

**Kai Wen** (1:09)
As a clown. The red dot on the red dot.

**Shanice Stanislaus** (1:12)
Red nose on the red dot.

**Kai Wen** (1:13)
Red nose on the red dot. So Shanice, can you roughly tell us what clown is and what you love about it?

**Shanice Stanislaus** (1:19)
I always tell people clowning is just this sort of child-like character who loves being silly and makes people laugh. But if we go back in time, clowns have always existed in our world for like centuries. I mean, you think about like hot gestures. Their role was always to, you know, use jokes and make the king laugh and, you know, get him to guess all these riddles. But I always feel like clowns are more than that. They're just here to talk about society's problems packaged up in humor and laughter and fun things so that we can process what's happening out there. The red nose and the funky outfits that you see are coming from like the circus clowns.

**Kai Wen** (2:01)
Right, circus clowns.

**Shanice Stanislaus** (2:02)
And then, you know, you have birthday clowns. But I'm a bit more of a different kind of clown.

**Kai Wen** (2:07)
Cool clown?

**Shanice Stanislaus** (2:08)
I'm a theatrical clown. So I'm more modern day. I work more in the theater, you know, TV and film. But across whatever culture or whatever kind of clowning you do, I think one thing that is shared within us is that silliness and the playfulness of the clown. That quality, it exists all the time.

**Kai Wen** (2:30)
Right. Another thing that I like about clowns is that they are very, should I say shameless? They are not scared of being judged.
They are really, really okay with people laughing at them. Because I think many of the times, I want people to laugh with me but not laugh at me. So, as a Singaporean, I do feel like I'm afraid of being judged. And I'm afraid that, you know, I don't really want to do anything funny or out of turn so that I don't get more attention than I should. So, do you think that Singaporeans are too uptight?
Who wound up to be funny?

**Shanice Stanislaus** (3:04)
Okay, I feel like I'm in a very interesting position because I get to teach clowning and perform clowning like all over the world. So, I always tell people, I actually Singaporeans are one of the funniest people I've ever met.

**Kai Wen** (3:17)
You think?

**Shanice Stanislaus** (3:17)
Yes.

**Kai Wen** (3:18)
Really?

**Shanice Stanislaus** (3:18)
Yeah, in my professional opinion.

**Kai Wen** (3:20)
In your professional opinion?

**Shanice Stanislaus** (3:21)
As a clown.

**Kai Wen** (3:23)
Award-winning clown?

**Shanice Stanislaus** (3:25)
Yeah, as a clown with experience all over the world. Whenever I teach clown workshops here, Singaporeans are the funniest people I've ever met. But the problem is that at the beginning, you don't think that they are capable of being funny. Because I think it's something about our culture that we have here that we feel very ashamed of being judged. And failing.
I wonder if it's because there's so many rules and there's so many perceptions of like how you're supposed to be. It kind of creates this like pressure cooker in us that like our creativeness and our expression gets kind of cooked in this pressure cooker. And that has no outlet to come out normally when, when, you know, maybe in other places, you know, it's more natural that we can have that. But here, it's not. And so, I think it kind of builds.