Shakes the Clown is a 1992 American film directed and written by Bobcat Goldthwait, who performs the title role. It also features Julie Brown, Blake Clark, Paul Dooley, Kathy Griffin, Florence Henderson, Tom Kenny, Adam Sandler, Scott Herriott, LaWanda Page, Jack Gallagher, and a cameo by Robin Williams as Mime Jerry (using the pseudonym "Marty Fromage", an homage to an earlier film they worked in together called Tapeheads in which Goldthwait used the pseudonym "Jack Cheese").
The movie is a dark comedy about a birthday-party clown (Goldthwait) in the grip of depression and alcoholism, who is framed for murder. Different communities of clowns, mimes and other performers are depicted as clannish, rivalrous subcultures obsessed with precedence and status. This was Goldthwait's bitter satire of the dysfunctional standup comedy circuit he knew as a performer.
Famous quotes containing the words shakes the, shakes and/or clown:
“through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“When I lie down to love,
old dwarf heart shakes her head.
Like an imbecile she was born old.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“They tell us sometimes that if we had only kept quiet, all these desirable things would have come about of themselves. I am reminded of the Greek clown who, having seen an archer bring down a flying bird, remarked, sagely: “You might have saved your arrow, for the bird would anyway have been killed by the fall.””
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)