Clown vs. Comedian

American reviewers were in almost unanimous agreement, this spring, that Peter Sellers now challenges the position of Alec Guinness as master of English screen comedy. Time even spoke of the things Sellers has learned from Guinness in order to beat him at his own game. Fortunately, this widely advanced comparison can be tested. The Mouse That Roared is being given broad American distribution, and Guinness at his best can still be seen in Our Man in Havana. In some places the two films are being conveniently billed together.

Alec Guinness is a wonderfully disciplined actor, who, in his comedies, maintains the precisely etched lines of a single character, while the lines of the surrounding world are crazily dissolving. The whole trick is in his maintenance of this incongruous role, and Guinness carries it off because he is an actor. Peter Sellers is not an actor; he is that far nobler thing—a clown. He is a mimic, a manipulator of his voice, a self-caricaturist who incorporates in that ever-changing self all the things that cry for caricature. The actor plays in a part, the clown plays with it, slipping out and looking back at it, joining his audience and laughing at the simulacrum he has left standing on the stage. Purists object to this, but it is the method of Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Rabelais. Shakespeare had the writer’s fear of ad-libbing clowns, but Armin brought new depth into comedies when he joined Shakespeare’s troupe; he made the clown step out of the action to reflect and refract its lights in different ways, striking at the audience from many different directions. The clown in Shakespeare is the play’s consciousness of itself.

GW

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Garry Wills

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American reviewers were in almost unanimous agreement, this spring, that Peter Sellers now challenges the position of Alec Guinness as master of English screen comedy. Time even spoke of the things Sellers has learned from Guinness in order to beat him at his own game. Fortunately, this widely advanced comparison can be tested. The Mouse That Roared is being given broad American distribution, and Guinness at his best can still be seen in Our Man in Havana. In some places the two films are being conveniently billed together.

Alec Guinness is a wonderfully disciplined actor, who, in his comedies, maintains the precisely etched lines of a single character, while the lines of the surrounding world are crazily dissolving. The whole trick is in his maintenance of this incongruous role, and Guinness carries it off because he is an actor. Peter Sellers is not an actor; he is that far nobler thing—a clown. He is a mimic, a manipulator of his voice, a self-caricaturist who incorporates in that ever-changing self all the things that cry for caricature. The actor plays in a part, the clown plays with it, slipping out and looking back at it, joining his audience and laughing at the simulacrum he has left standing on the stage. Purists object to this, but it is the method of Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Rabelais. Shakespeare had the writer’s fear of ad-libbing clowns, but Armin brought new depth into comedies when he joined Shakespeare’s troupe; he made the clown step out of the action to reflect and refract its lights in different ways, striking at the audience from many different directions. The clown in Shakespeare is the play’s consciousness of itself.