This is The Red Bastard, and he is generally found at Fringe festivals in the UK and North America. Eric Davis describes his character as a “dangerous, seductive, comedy monster.”
Here is a good sample of his show, and you should note how he explicitly says he needs to do something interesting every 10 seconds. That’s great advice for creating an engaging character. When you enter a stage looking like he does, you had better keep the energy up. The audience is probably afraid to look away.
The Red Bastard is a great example of bouffon. From wikipedia:
Bouffon (eng. originally from french: “farceur”, “comique”, jester”) is a modern french theater term that was re-coined in the early 1960s by Jacques Lecoq at his L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris to describe a specific style of performance work that has a main focus in the art of mockery.
Vaudevillian and author Trav S.D. has this to say about the Red Bastard:
I would describe Red Bastard as a devilish improvisational clown, who resembles a cross between Lewis Carroll’s pedantic Red Queen and one of the Fruit o’ the Loom guys. To be accurate, the Bastard is not a clown but a Bouffon, a sort of anti-clown whose job may or may not be to amuse, but also to provoke and unsettle.
I have another post that will tell you more about bouffon. READ IT HERE!
Here is an interview with him about his show.
And if you can’t get enough, here is a video teaser for one of his shows.
2 thoughts on “The Red Bastard”