So you are a professional clown, and there is a global pandemic. Sounds like a setup. Alas, no.
For longtime Mission District resident Moshe Cohen, AKA Mr. Yoohoo, it meant separation from his patients (he performs in local hospitals as part of the Medical Clown Project), his students (he teaches workshops in “clown” all over the world), and his beloved global community of theatre artists and collaborators.
That he was missed was clear on a recent autumn morning when, back in action, Mr. Yoohoo dropped into the San Francisco Campus for Jewish Living, his red clown nose glowing over his KN595 mask. The nursing staff greeted him with smiles and waves as he strode down the corridor with a ukulele slung over his shoulder, brandishing a gigantic paper sunflower. His hair stuck out, Bozo-like, from under his hat.
“Hello, hello,” Mr. Yoohoo called softly to an elderly man in bed, “so good to see you again.” He doffed his hat, “Shall I put my hat back on?” and deftly rolled his hat down his leg to his foot, then kicked it back onto his head.
“How do I look? Better?” He gamboled around the small room, waving the sunflower as a cascade of confetti petals poured out onto the floor.
“Sometimes I can balance a flower on my nose,” Mr. Yoohoo said. “It’s not so easy.”
“Ah, that’s nice, how good to see you again,” said the man in bed, smiling widely. “Thanks for coming.”
“Lovely to be with you today,” said the clown as his hat rolled down his arm, into the air, and back onto his head.
Mr. Yoohoo strummed his ukulele and sang, “When you’re smiling, when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.” The nursing assistant, fixing the patient’s bedding, hummed along.
Cohen bowed farewell to the man, then skipped (he never seems to just walk) into a sunlit activity room, where he was soon encircled by six women residents in wheelchairs or with walkers. Greeting each one by name — “Hello, Alice, so good to see you” — he pulled quarters out of their ears, juggled bright red and yellow cellophane bags, and concluded with a sprightly version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on his ukulele.
“You make me very happy,” said Alice softly, “Thanks for coming.”
The Medical Clown Project
As Mr. Yoohoo, Cohen visits the skilled nursing and rehab facility twice monthly as part of the Medical Clown Project. He and other specially trained clowns also visit Laguna Honda Hospital, UCSF Benioff Hospital, and California Pacific Medical Center.
A lithe and slender 67, with kind eyes and a generous, luminous smile, Cohen shuns the standard clown gimmicks —the unicycles, the torches — in favor of smaller movements that bring him closer to his audience. He moves gracefully, whether juggling or slapstick falling, whether waltzing with balloons, or delicately toppling a toy penguin from a cigar box tower into a toy bucket of water.
Cohen has been with the Medical Clown Project since 2018, but he has clowned the world over for 40 years, performing 2,000 times and in over 30 countries. Based in San Francisco since 1979, he’s traveled to war zones and refugee camps as a member of Clowns Without Borders.
As Mr. Yoohoo, he has worked with homeless children in Capetown, South Africa, and with displaced Guatemalan refugees in Chiapas, Mexico. He first went to Croatia in 1994 with the French Clowns Without Borders to perform for Bosnian refugees and other internally displaced people. They did eight shows in Zagreb and Srebrenica, “bringing laughter into places where it was most needed,” and he was hooked.
In 1993, he moved into an artists’ live-work space, Developing Environments, in the Mission. It’s affordable, giving him the freedom to live as an artist. He was performing internationally, and that work enabled him to finance humanitarian projects.
A sense of humor is our sixth sense. “That falls on the intuitive side, the sense to open up a heart.
Mr. Yoohoo
An unlikely clown
Asked how his upbringing connects to his profession, he replied, “well, let’s say a life in theatre was not in the cards.” Raised in Los Angeles, one of three sons of an aerospace engineer and a homemaker, he never studied acting or music or dance.
When his father’s job took the family to Europe for eight years, Cohen became fluent in French and was drafted to perform in “Fiddler On the Roof.” But then it was back to California and the University of California, Davis, where he studied agricultural economics and business.
His older brother taught him to juggle, and he practiced a bit in college. He moved to San Francisco in 1979, holding down odd jobs and continuing to juggle until 1981, when he picked up and went to Europe, to visit places and friends he’d known as a teen. In the alpine tourist town of Annecy in France, his friends pushed him to do a show on the street. He wasn’t very good, he recalls, but he caught the performing bug.
He attended the annual European juggling festival in London, then visited a friend in Madrid, who encouraged him to perform on the streets there, and gave him three words in Spanish: ESO DIGO YO! (THAT’S WHAT I SAY!) That became his response when people egged him on, “Eso digo yo!” and, he says, “I got a lot of laughs. “
He came home briefly, but by 1983 he was headed to Montreal to practice his show in French. He thought of himself at the time as an amuseur publique (public entertainer). It was in Montreal that he was launched: An impresario who was directing two large festival circuits in Canada caught his act on the street, and later hired him for the following summer.
For once, he had a stable income and he met and performed with European clowns. Soon he joined them in Europe where, he says, “They have a culture of street performances, and no lack of places to play.”
He wintered in San Francisco, still home base, and Mexico.
He didn’t classify or label himself.
Goal: To be funny
He recalls, “My goal was to be funny, the whole goal of ‘clown’ is to create a sense of no walls, of unity, of ‘we are in this moment together,’ you and the audience, and it’s delicious and never going to happen again.”
Through the 1980’s he developed his craft, taking workshops in pantomime in Guanajuato, Mexico, with Sigfrido Aguilar, then studying with a great Canadian clown, Richard Pochinko. He studied theatre movement in Paris with Monika Pangneux (“She unknotted me”) and learned about The Neutral Mask with Philippe Gaultier. In 1993, he got a fellowship to study Butoh in Japan with Kazumo Ono Sensei.
In 1995, he established the American branch of Payasos sin Fronteras (Clowns without Borders).
But humor doesn’t always travel across borders. On his first trip to a refugee camp, in the town of Agua Bendita, Mexico, none of the kids laughed,
“Going there was quite a challenge, I didn’t have their context, these kids had never seen juggling, nor television or a movie, and I couldn’t get them laughing at all.”
The memory brings a rueful smile,
“The five juggling balls were too slippery,” he recalled. “I couldn’t get the balls going, and what was funny was the slapstick when I got frustrated. I banged my fists against the wall, only to (mock) hurt my hands and that is when they started chuckling at my frustration and mock anger, that is what they found funny.” The slapstick actions released the laughter.
He performed internationally through 2001, and gradually transitioned to teaching workshops in clown and theater schools worldwide, as well as universities, elementary schools and Zen and spiritual retreat centers. Since 1984, off and on, he has taught at Camp Winnarainbow in Mendocino, established by his friend Wavy Gravy and his wife Jahanara.
During lockdown he created an online workshop, a “Levity Pause.” Once a week, he Zoomed with 10 to 20 fellow performers, to de-stress and connect.
But with the pandemic officially over, Mr. Yoohoo is on the move again. This September he traveled to The Netherlands and Austria to teach two workshops, “Clown and Zen,” and “Heiliger Bimbam,” a German saying best translated as “Holy Moly!” November finds Cohen in Ireland to offer two workshops on Japan’s “ButohClown’.
Cohen likes to quote his dear friend, the famous Italian comedia del arte clown Leris Colombaioni, who told him that, if after two days, “the audience has forgotten your show, then you are wasting your time, because you are not touching them, not touching their hearts.”
He sees a sense of humor as our sixth sense. “That falls on the intuitive side, the sense to open up a heart.”
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Makes me smile just reading about the antics of Mr. Yoohoo and makes me glad that the cracks in our world having this San Franciscan coming to visit.
I always love Naomi’s writing!
Wonderful,
Congratulations on a great career.
h.