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From left: Gaulier college students Alayna Perry, Brian Byrne and Joseph Bucci obtain suggestions on a brief skit involving a pie within the face.
Rebecca Rosman for NPR
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Rebecca Rosman for NPR
ÉTAMPES, France — The person in management tonight is called Carlo Jacucci. You are on the stage. He is the viewers. And there is virtually no likelihood you are going to please him — which, someway, is precisely why you are right here.
“The video games start,” Jacucci, a matter-of-fact Franco-Italian, tells his college students, then faucets a drum between his legs.
The stage lights go shiny. The music begins. A bunch of red-nosed clowns in numerous costumes begins a ritual that has been the heartbeat of this place for greater than 40 years.
Zach Zucker performs in Stamptown on the Fringe pageant in Edinburgh, Scotland, in August final yr. Zucker studied at France’s École Philippe Gaulier and his touring selection present leans into the college’s philosophy.
Jacinta Oaten
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Jacinta Oaten
That is the École Philippe Gaulier, a college named after its founder, a trainer who believed comedy and clowning start not with jokes, however with the pleasure of being ridiculous. Or, as Gaulier calls it, discovering “your fool.”
Medical doctors, clergymen, actors — they arrive from all around the world to check this philosophy within the in any other case sleepy village of Étampes, about an hour’s prepare experience south of Paris. The loudest noises after sunset come from a room filled with English audio system studying to fall on their faces.
A stroke in 2023 compelled Gaulier, now in his early 80s, to retire from instructing full time. However the faculty nonetheless runs on the system he constructed — carried on by the lecturers he skilled — shaping each train, each critique and nervous pupil hoping for amusing.
College students like Brazilian actress Gabriela Flarys. She’s standing on the stage in an oversize frilly orange-and-white flamenco gown, prompting Jacucci to nickname her “orange broccoli.”
Flarys’ act isn’t going effectively. Her stage companions are a person dressed as a Roman warrior and one other as a mariachi with an oversize sombrero. The premise entails a love triangle.
Members of the Stamptown ensemble carry out on the Fringe pageant in Edinburgh, Scotland, in August 2025. The present’s ringmaster is Zach Zucker, an alum of France’s École Philippe Gaulier.
Jacinta Oaten
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Jacinta Oaten
“Welcome everybody to the worst second of the category,” Jacucci says flatly. “We reached it.”
The trio stares again at him. They’re confused. Ashamed.
The worst second has a reputation right here — le flop. It is the half everybody dreads, when you possibly can really feel your pink nostril start to droop because the useless air fills the room. However it’s additionally the place the actual work begins.
Jacucci singles out Flarys. She wants extra emotion. He tells her to get indignant at him. What occurs subsequent feels virtually like an exorcism.
“Carlo!” she shrieks, shouting Jacucci’s first title. “I am pissed off!”
She will get louder. And louder. Till one thing breaks free. Then she calms down.
“Wait,” she tells the group, then picks up a shaving cream pie and throws it on the mariachi’s face.
The room laughs together with her. Even Jacucci seems surprised.
“Me, I’m shocked,” he says. “I did not know you could possibly change.”
Painful but in addition refreshing
Pupil Tufan Nadjafi attire as bullfighter throughout class at École Philippe Gaulier in Étampes, France. Well-known alums of the college embody actors Sacha Baron Cohen, Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter.
Rebecca Rosman for NPR
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Rebecca Rosman for NPR
Instructing is Jacucci’s second act.
A longtime performer, he first got here to Gaulier as a pupil many years in the past. He says he discovered the expertise painful — but in addition refreshing.
“[Gaulier] had no drawback telling me the reality of what he noticed,” he says.
“I felt instantly that it is a work that lets you progress, since you face your limitations.”
Gaulier’s methodology has produced an unlikely record of alumni: together with actors Rachel Weisz and Emma Thompson, each Oscar winners, and Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen.
A brand new era can also be rising.
A decade in the past, Zach Zucker was working for Baron Cohen’s manufacturing firm in Los Angeles when Gaulier got here to city to do a workshop. Zucker signed up.
“And 5 minutes in, I noticed Philippe work his magic, and I simply couldn’t consider what I used to be watching,” Zucker says.
Zucker had skilled in American improv faculties, together with Second Metropolis and Upright Residents Brigade. However this felt completely different. Different locations train you methods to succeed. Gaulier, he says, was instructing individuals methods to fail.
“Everybody’s good at being good,” Zucker says. “However in the event you will be good at being unhealthy, then nothing is unhealthy — and it is truly extra pleasant.”
Zucker finally moved to Étampes, the place he studied beneath Gaulier for 2 years.
At this time he’s the ringmaster of Stamptown, a touring vaudeville present that leans closely into the Gaulier philosophy. His alter ego, Jack Tucker, repeatedly bombs on stage — and folds the failure into part of the act.
It is a schtick that is catching on — the present will air its first Netflix particular later this yr.
Julia Masli signed up for the college a decade in the past after studying there was no audition course of.
“So immediately I signed up and that was principally my solely training,” she says.
In her one-woman present, Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!, Masli invitations the viewers to share their issues, which she then helps resolve in actual time. The present grew to become a breakout hit on the Edinburgh Fringe pageant.
Regardless of her success, Masli admits she spent years struggling to get amusing. Gaulier’s brutal coaching helped her put together for that.
She remembers telling him she was from Estonia.
“He stored saying it is a very grey nation, and there isn’t any one humorous there,” she recollects.
Based in 1980, the École Philippe Gaulier has gained a status for instructing college students methods to fail — and hold going.
Rebecca Rosman for NPR
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Rebecca Rosman for NPR
Masli shortly discovered her trainer would by no means accept something lower than sensible.
The pleasure to be ridiculous
Gaulier was born in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1943. He skilled to be a critical actor, however observed that at any time when he appeared on stage, audiences laughed.
Gaulier went on to check and later work with the mime trainer Jacques Lecoq. In 1980, Gaulier based his personal faculty, which has had stints in Paris, London, and for the previous 15 years, in Étampes.
That does not imply everyone seems to be made for this work.
“This pleasure to be ridiculous … to have a particular humor … it is given to some individuals,” Gaulier advised the BBC in 2015. “However not many.”
Michiko Miyazaki Gaulier, his spouse and former pupil, now runs the college’s day-to-day operations, holding the schedule — and the Gaulier methodology — on observe. She guarantees everybody leaves with one thing.
“Folks come right here to vary,” she says. “Perhaps they do not know what — however they need to change.”
Again inside Jacucci’s classroom, college students are nonetheless determining what that change seems like.
After class, Frank Benson, the Roman warrior, continues to be catching his breath.
“It was powerful as we speak,” says Benson, who got here from Australia to check right here. “Typically you go on the market and it flops actually exhausting, and it isn’t so enjoyable.”
However, he says, he is getting used to it. The frustration passes sooner now.
In one other nook of the room, Flarys, aka orange broccoli, is wiping the sweat off her face.
She has a confession: That is truly her third stint on the faculty. Even with over 15 years of expertise performing, there’s one thing that retains her coming again right here.
What has she discovered?
She says, “Nothing is a mistake in the event you play with it.”
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