“The tension between how we present ourselves and how we’re perceived – on stage, online, and everywhere else. What happens when a woman stops performing someone else’s fantasy and starts performing her own?”
When I first started stand-up aged 25 my goal was to get a Netflix special and be the UK Illiza Schlesigner. I still love Illiza, but now, almost seven years on, my career trajectory looks completely different. I have an OnlyFans account. I do something called clowning, which is maybe the least financially viable of all of the performing arts. Twenty-five-year-old me would be asking “sorry, but what the fuck!?”.
What I didn’t account for, was how desperately self-conscious doing stand-up would make me feel. What are the baseline assumptions audiences will make about me when I first come on stage? Am I likeable enough? How do I not come across too threatening? Then one day, I saw comedian Elf Lyons do a set that looked very different to the callbacks and pullback reveal jokes I thought I wanted to master. It was wild and unpredictable and looked a lot like freedom. I said to myself “I want to do whatever the hell she’s doing.” That, it turns out, was clowning.
It’s funny, I feel way less self-conscious making OF content where I literally show everything than I ever did doing stand-up, where the persona was carefully crafted and not really me at all. I decided OnlyFans was the route I wanted to go down after burning through countless day jobs as well as the entirety of my savings from the past decade. The fact that I was at clown school (yes, you read that right) Ecole Philippe Gaulier in France and about to not be able to pay for the last two terms I’d signed up for definitely gave me a shove in the right direction.
While I was at said école de clown, I noticed in the first part of the year, a lot of teaching was being applied to the younger ingenue types in the class. Women who didn’t conform to certain Eurocentric beauty standards had to work a hell of a lot harder for a hell of a lot less stage time. Unfortunately, this is also pretty standard for drama schools in the UK, but it broke my heart that this was also the case in an institution that was known for rejecting convention.
But I’m a fucking persistent bitch, and I also know the Gaulier method is the real deal. All of my favourite performers have been through that place. So, I persisted. And I started an OnlyFans account. In for a penny, in for a pound; I want to be a professional clown, might as well make sure there’s absolutely no way I’m employable in the corporate world or anywhere else ever again.
My show TITCLOWN is a direct reaction to all of the above. Clowning is about letting go of how you’re perceived and focusing on your connection with the audience. Gaulier taught me that. And as is their way, they don’t teach you how to be on stage, that you have to find for yourself.
How I present on stage, much like on my OnlyFans account, is entirely up to me. I did NOT think for a second that people would be interested in my DIY dirty Instagram. I thought to do porn you had to be as skinny as a rake with massive tits and be glammed up(down?) to the vagina. Then I earned £2,000 in my first month. L O fucking L.
On stage I come out wearing a Baywatch-style red bathing suit. At one point I put on a pair of Victoria’s Secret-esque angel wings. I wear high heels. I lay the symbols of femininity on thick because underneath it all I love being feminine, I love being an object of desire. But I don’t love the self-loathing that comes with trying to conform to an unattainable version of femininity.
So, I spend 50 minutes working out how to have fun on stage when you live in a body that is so heavily drenched in gendered ideals and political baggage. Granted, from the outside it does look like I’m just showing my pubes to anyone willing to look at them. It’s backed up by a deeply personal journey, I swear.
Jessica Aszkenasy: TITCLOWN will be performed at 10.20pm in Assembly Roxy (Snug Bar) at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival from 30th July – 24th August (not 13th)
