It is definitely irritating when a clown disrupts your work with his audience pandering, no doubt. But villainous? I don’t know. A fool is just doing what a fool does best. We don’t berate the sun for its villainy when it beats down on us in the dead of summer. We can resent it, sure, complain – but it doesn’t make the sun a villain. It just makes it a particularly sunny sun.
With clowns and an audience, it’s the same. You can resent them, complain but rather than calling them names, it seems to me that it becomes necessary to build some structures to defend against excess clowning, in the same way we build shelter to protect us from the excess sun.
The Hamlet Project 