“You’re just an annoying clown, dressed up as a sex toy.”
Over the past ten years, we’ve seen the rise of
a new kind of movie star— one who’s just as comfortable
being the butt of the joke as he is making you look at his butt.
Actors like Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Channing Tatum,
Ryan Reynolds, and, most recently, Kumail Nanjiani,
have combined comic timing with time in the gym,
making them capable of killer punchlines and punching killers.
“Metaphors are gonna go over his head.”
“Nothing goes over my head.
My reflexes are too fast, I would catch it.”
These are the buff clowns, combining the best of both
action and comedy as they climb to the top of the
Hollywood totem pole.
So who is this new Hollywood hero?
Unsurprisingly, a buff clown must be buff.
And not just cute-guy- at-the-gym buff.
These are the kinds of guys who post Instagram photos of
themselves lifting giant tires with 46 inspiring hashtags.
Those muscles aren’t just for show, either.
“I'm a very strong puncher.”
The buff clown fights the bad guy, saves the girl,
and all the other important tasks that Hollywood has taught us to
expect from dudes who look like they might go
super Saiyan at any moment.
“It’s a long story, but basically, I’m a bit of a hero.”
While the buff clown’s body puts him squarely in a long line
of Hollywood hunks, what comes out of his mouth
doesn’t quite match up.
Sometimes, he’s stupid.
“Kevin, hi, can you answer the phone, please?”
“I can't. It's in the fish tank.”
“No, the one on the desk that's ringing.
That one.”
“Oh, that one?”
“Yeah.”
“What's this place called again?”
Other times, he’s a coward.
“A moment ago, I most definitely shit my pants.”
And sometimes, he’s just supremely awkward.
Even when he’s a cocky, wise-cracking badass like
the old 80s action heroes, it’s usually setting him up
to look like an idiot a moment later.
“Ooh, Jason Bourne ain’t got shit on me.”
The buff clown has become one of today’s masculine ideals
that seems to dominate blockbuster movies—
but he’s often used to skewer stereotypes of toxic masculinity
and ridiculous egotism.
He can also play against expectations of masculinity.
That might mean caring about grooming or other
traditionally female priorities.
“What is your skin care regimen because you look
like a young Shirley Temple.”
It could include flirting with a sexual openness that was once
verboten for a leading man.
"Whose balls did I have to fondle to get my very own movie?
I can't tell you, but it does rhyme with ‘Polverine.’”
Other times, it means being willing to show weakness—
“Why aren't you wearing one of Rocket's Aero-Rigs?”
“I have sensitive nipples.”
just as some actors who play the buff clown have been
powerfully open in the media about their own vulnerabilities.
“You work so hard and then somebody’s saying that,
‘Well, you’re just not good enough,’ and I fell
into a deep depression.”
Here’s our take on the relatively new phenomenon
of the buff clown—and how understanding the rise of this
archetype reveals how American attitudes have changed
over the past three decades.
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The classic movie heartthrob is cool, brawny, and
dashingly handsome.
The classic movie clown is, well, none of those.
“We all thought that Adrian’s body was just much, much
better than yours.”
It’s hard to imagine Charlie Chaplin telling
Ingrid Bergman that they’ll always have Paris or
Steve Martin punching Nazis to save Marion Ravenwood.
As Hollywood embraced action movies, writers realized
that cracking wise could make its heroes seem badass.
“Stick around.”
But while these characters could spout a catchphrase,
it would be a stretch to call them funny.
There were a few exceptions.
Keanu Reeves could jump from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
"All we are is dust in the wind, dude."
to Point Break; still, he kept his action and his comedy
in different movies.
Arnold Schwarzenegger managed a string of
successful comedies, such as Twins and Kindergarten Cop
and his masterpiece, Jingle All the Way.
“Who told you you could eat my cookies?”
But considering that he also became a two-term governor,
perhaps the regular rules simply don’t apply to him.
When other leading men tried to follow Schwarzenegger,
it led to disasters like Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot,
the Sylvester Stallone bomb that Roger Ebert called
“moronic beyond comprehension.”
“Mom, what are you doing here?”
“I came to back you up.”
“Get inside.”
The lesson was clear: unless you were Mr. Olympia
or “The One,” audiences wanted to admire their leading men’s
perfection, not giggle at their foibles.
At least until a sitcom actor became the biggest movie star
in the world.
“What's a nine-letter word for ‘incredible?’”
“Oh, that's easy: ‘Will Smith.’”
Will Smith rocketed to fame as the lead in
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where he often made himself
the butt of the joke.
“Listen carefully, Will. And I know you can hear me
with ears that big.”
But less than two months after the series finale,
Will Smith opened the movie that became the biggest
box office hit of the year and cemented him as a movie star.
“Welcome to Earth.”
In Independence Day, Smith is a classic action hero,
punching aliens and saving the world.
But while he has the toughness, cool, and sex appeal of
previous action heroes, he also has something
they don’t: he's funny.
“Y’all take care all right, nothing but love for ya,
nothing but love for ya.”
Smith dials up the traditional action hero confidence
until it becomes comical, making the audience laugh at
his character even as we root for him.
“This was supposed to be my weekend off, but no,
you’ve got me out here, draggin' your heavy ass
through the burning desert.”
Making Captain Hiller funny not only served Smith’s
natural skills, it also served a more complex social purpose:
it helped audiences root for a black lead.
After all, action heroes like Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis,
and Mel Gibson were all white icons.
Audiences had rarely been asked to idolize a black action hero,
and making the character silly punctured his perfection just enough
to make Americans comfortable.
“Them big ol’ dumbo ears.”
“Look at your dumb chicken legs. Ba-caw.”
This combination of badass and hilarious worked so well
for Will Smith that he quickly capitalized on it with a string of
action comedy box office hits like Men in Black and Wild Wild West.
“It just be rainin' black people in New York!”
By the time he starred in the massive hit Bad Boys II,
Smith was cracking jokes and cracking jaws with muscles
that looked like he could bench press Adam Sandler and
Jim Carrey at the same time.
“Oh, that one puckered up my butt-hole!”
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While Will Smith created the model for the buff clown,
it would take another massive movie star to make it the norm.
“If
you smell what The Rock is cooking!”
In the early 2000s, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was a
massively successful wrestler looking to establish himself
as a movie star, but he faced a dilemma.
“Hollywood, they didn’t know what the hell to do with me.
I mean, I was this half-black, half-Samoan, 6-foot-4,
275-pound pro wrestler.”
With so few antecedents, The Rock consciously modeled
his approach on Will Smith, saying, “I want Will Smith’s career but…
I want to do it bigger and better.”
The Rock’s first leading role as the Scorpion King, in a prequel
to The Mummy Returns, has all the hallmarks of a Will Smith character:
a wise-cracking badass who sometimes ends up the subject of
mockery but still saves the world and gets the girl.
“Ow!”
The Rock established his tough guy cred with films like Walking Tall and
The Rundown, but he also undercut it with comedy—such as his role in
Be Cool, playing a flamboyant bodyguard and aspiring actor.
“I'm just trying to be strong for my squad.
And I'm trying to make it right. You wanna make it right?
Then when you go to nationals… bring it!
Scene.”
As his star grew, The Rock made sure to mix in comedy roles,
often mocking his own image as a masculine icon.
Like with Will Smith, his comedic gifts made him more accessible
and less intimidating to white audiences, paving the way for him
to become a four-quadrant star, ripped but goofy,
masculine yet sensitive.
“Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.”
While the mold of the silly action hero was pioneered by
men of color, in part to placate the conscious or unconscious bias
of white audiences, it became such an extraordinary moneymaker
that it was only a matter of time before white actors capitalized
on this trend.
The first actor to realize that punchlines went down easier
when licked off a six pack was Ryan Reynolds,
who rose to fame with comedies like Van Wilder and
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, before bulking up for Blade: Trinity.
“The fat lady should be singing, right about now!
Heh, this is awkward.”
But Reynolds struggled to find the right balance in movies like
X-Men: Origins and Green Lantern before finally getting it right
in Deadpool.
“A fourth wall break inside a fourth wall break,
that’s like sixteen walls!”
In the meantime, another funny guy was mastering this formula.
"That is the coolest sentence I’ve ever heard somebody talk."
Chris Pratt broke through as the lovable idiot, Andy Dwyer, on
the NBC comedy Parks and Rec.
“I didn’t actually sell my last car; I just forgot where I parked it.
When they say 2% milk, I don’t know what the other 98% is.”
The character was first introduced as kind of a loser, mooching off his
girlfriend, Anne, but as the show progressed, Andy became a more
likable, bigger part of the show— as well as, simply, bigger.
When creator Michael Schur told Pratt that he’d be happy if the actor
gained 30 to 40 pounds, Pratt took it as a challenge,
once eating 12 entire racks of ribs while filming a scene.
As Pratt’s weight grew, the show turned his physique into a gag.
“I’m going to die. I’m so tired.
Everything hurts. Running is impossible.”
But when Pratt began to seek out film roles,
he started to slim down and bulk up, turning himself into
a massive mound of muscles to star in Marvel’s
Guardians of the Galaxy.
By grafting muscles onto his comic talents, Pratt became the face,
and pectorals, of two of the top franchises in the world
(in addition to becoming the voice of a third).
“You can pick up their scent, can’t you?
Track their footprints?”
“I was with the Navy, not the Navajo.”
Other “everyman” comedy stars followed this trajectory, with
The Office’s John Krasinki halving his body fat percentage in 2015
to play a Navy Seal, and even the 45-year-old Paul Rudd
pulling off a six pack to play Ant Man.
“I had to work out like crazy and eat a lot of fish.”
Meanwhile, already muscular actors noticed the trend as well.
Zac Efron and Channing Tatum both embraced the role of hilarious meathead.
“My balls say we need to go over there and check it out.”
“Your balls said that?” “Yes, they did.”
“‘Cause my balls say, ‘Let’s just take it easy right here.
Just chill.”
“Why the f[BLEEP] do your balls sound like three-year-old girls?”
Former wrestlers like John Cena and Dave Bautista showed off
a wide range of comedy chops.
And even Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth, turned out to
have a surprising skill for comedy— first in 2016’s remake of Ghostbusters
and then in Taika Waititi’s superhero comedy Thor: Ragnarok.
“This is my crown, the source of my power.”
“Oh, that’s a crown? I thought it was a big eyebrow.”
In one of the most talked about transformations, Kumail Nanjiani
morphed himself from the skinny nerd of Silicon Valley
“I’m much more handsome than you are.”
“No, my face is completely symmetrical.”
into a bonafide Instagram thirst trap.
For many, Nanjiani felt like the last domino—the world was
so hungry for buff clowns, you never knew when your favorite
comedian might swear off carbs, hire a personal trainer, and
reappear a year later with shoulders the size of hams.
Given that the ranks of buff clown movie stars are swelling faster
than Kumail Nanjiani’s biceps, we can’t help asking why?
After 50 years of nonstop buffets of badassery,
why did Hollywood suddenly decide we needed a side of silly?
“No one likes a show off.”
“Unless what they're showing off is dope as f[BLEEP].”
The secret to why the buff clown has taken over the circus lies
in its original purpose, making heroes less intimidating
and more accessible.
While humor originally served as an antidote to audience discomfort
with black masculinity, it seems to work just as well with
all masculinity.
And as society at large has begun to grapple more with
the dangers of toxic masculinity, we’ve begun to reject the
stoic masculinity of traditional action stars
and look for something friendlier.
"Together."
"Together.”
“You're a good friend, Fridge."
Being willing to be the butt of the joke lets the audience know
that the star is game for anything and rejects old ideas
encapsulated by Margaret Atwood’s famous quote,
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them.
Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
“It's not wise at all to make fun of me like that.
It brings out the worst in me.”
The rejection of old-school masculinity extends beyond
just humor, as the buff clown is much more willing to show
sensitivity and mutual support.
“You go out there, you do your job, and you take ‘em down…
Manis and pedis at the mall, later on today.”
This willingness to push past expectations even extends to
flirting with queerness, such as The Rock and Zac Efron’s kiss
in Baywatch
“It was an awesome kiss and one off the bucket list for me.”
or Ryan Reynolds in pretty much every movie.
“You a top or a bottom? Doesn’t matter.
Prison’s gonna decide for us.”
Ignoring old taboos becomes a reassurance to the audience
that these modern muscle men are nothing like the old version
that caused so much trouble.
While the rise of the buff clown reveals our discomforts,
it also reveals masculinity’s continued power.
After all, the buff clown retains all the physical trappings of manliness.
They may talk the talk of pushing against masculinity, but it’s
only after they’ve walked the walk on the elliptical for three hours.
At times, it can seem like the buff clown is the male equivalent
of a supermodel posing for Vanity Fair flaunting her armpit hair.
It challenges gendered restrictions, but only in the context of someone
who is clearly traditionally attractive and able-bodied.
Even the flirtation with queerness stays only flirtation.
None of the actors who fit into the buff clown archetype
have ever been linked to a male or nonbinary romantic partner,
and most are happily married to women who are as traditionally
attractive as they are.
“I want to thank my wife, who is everything to me.”
While the buff clown turns out to not be that different from
the hero archetypes it replaced, it also has an additional downside:
being funny, and a good actor, and maintaining
the body of a Greek god demands a ton of work.
“The secret is you can’t do it in a month.”
“Thank you. I like that, though.”
“It takes eight months, and, or a year, or a lifetime.”
The old mold of what made a man—effortless cool,
physical dominance, emotional aloofness, and
the ability to occasionally crack wise to remind everyone else
that you’re better—was always an impossible standard.
But rather than replacing it with something more reasonable,
we’ve created a new standard that is even less realistic—
all the muscles and none of the hang-ups.
And with the buff clown muscling in on all the roles,
there is very little room for anyone else.
Kumail Nanjiani has said of his transformation,
“I needed to change how people saw me, so I could have the type of opportunities
I was excited about…Now I get opportunities to play a normal guy.
I was not seen as a normal guy before this.”
“You know what my nickname was when I was a kid?”
“What?” “Pakistani Denzel.”
“You look nothing like him.
Denzel Washington has a beautiful smile.
You look ridiculous.”
The fact that we’ve made getting jacked a necessity
for looking “normal” reveals just how impossible
and even dangerous a standard we’re setting.
Buff celebrities have teams of a dozen trainers, nutritionists, a
nd caterers, and they still nearly die of thirst
to achieve the effect.
“When you’re dehydrating for three days, you get to the point
on the last day where you can smell water.”
That level of obsession can also cause body dysmorphia.
Even after his big Instagram reveal, Nanjiani has admitted that he
struggles with the obsession; quote: “I know exactly
what I weigh every day, and if I could change something,
I would love to not have to think about that.”
“People are like, ‘Do you feel good about yourself?’
I’m like, ‘No.
This is the most miserable I’ve been in my life.
I’ve never felt worse about myself.’”
“Really?”
And since the buff clown has become the standard of beauty in film,
it’s inevitable that he becomes a source of comparison
for actually normal guys.
The buff clown archetype hasn’t changed as much
about the Hollywood hero as it might first appear.
Blockbusters still glamorize macho muscles at the expense of
complex characters.
“What are you, Aquaman? ‘Cause I’m really confused.”
They contribute to an unattainably muscular body ideal that can
even be dangerous in a time when male eating disorders
are rising fast.
Still, while it might not fix everything,
the buff clown has opened things up—enabling a
more diverse understanding of what makes a hero,
sending the message that “real men” are supportive and sensitive,
“I’m a pretty tough guy.”
“You’re tough?
The man who cries through every cold?”
and paving the way for action movies that are funny,
sentimental, and free to be themselves.
“I like your plan except it sucks, so let me do the plan and that way,
it might be really good."
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