Stephen Daytime's Minotaur at Montréal Fringe 2026 reclaims bouffon from the right — an attack on toxic masculinity in form and not just content.
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Stephen Daytime's Minotaur at Montréal Fringe 2026 reclaims bouffon from the right — an attack on toxic masculinity in form and not just content.
O Patro Výš · Montréal Fringe 2026 · Created and performed by Stephen Daytime
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Reviewed by Aubrey Wang
A bouffon is a dark clown. Where the clown makes the audience laugh at the clown, the bouffon makes them laugh with the bouffon, until they realise they are laughing at themselves.
While the genre was re-coined in its modern form by Jacques Lecoq at his Paris school in the 1960s as a specific physical theatre form distinct from ordinary clown, bouffonery has medieval and Roman roots — Rome the Atellan farce, whose stock character Dossennus was a hunchback trickster; Renaissance courts kept bouffons, disfigured and licensed; Triboulet, jester to François I, was the most famous.
Today, the term bouffon remains obscure outside of acting and theatre circles. However, some of the world's most well known comedians were trained in this clowning tradition. The École Philippe Gaulier, a clowning school in Paris, has many famous alums. They include Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, Ali G and Bruno are all bouffon characters), as well as Emma Thompson, Simon McBurney of Complicité, and Roberto Benigni.
While a lot of modern comedy comes from bouffon, it's a rare treat to be able to watch it as a live performance.
Stephen Daytime's Minotaur played at Montréal Fringe 2026, and not by accident. Montréal is a city that takes clowning seriously as an art form.
The annual Montréal Clown Festival, which ran earlier in April, draws visitors and practitioners from around the world.
Minotaur is at once a classical example of the bouffon tradition, and a surprisingly contemporary satire. It takes both the form and content of the digital manosphere (Rollo Tomassi, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life) and weaves it into a set
"Do you go to the gym? I got your leg. How much do you match?" — Stephen Daytime, crowdwork from Minotaur
Daytime's show is delightfully unpretentious. You're in a seedy cabaret theatre, drawn in by cheap tickets, daytime boozing, and Stephen's fringe fame.
Some kid at the back of the audience with a rugged floodtorch has the performer fixed point-blank like a Reuters journalist in the crosshairs of an Apache helicopter. The most expensive budget line item was probably the DIY silicon and paper-maché monstrosity that the performer sweats real sweat into.
Minotaur begins with a gag about numbers. Daytime reverse-worms onto stage miming numbers around his groin, whispering to his jockpiece with utterings of loving nonsense and echolalia, simultaneously making signs of the cross while braying out numbers.
He counts up. Rule one: put gas in your car before you drive it. Rule two: don't let your wife light the barbecue. Then five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. Twelve rules for life.
He interrupts himself: "My name is Jordan Peterson, and I'm a best selling author. And everybody hates me for some reason. Julian."
Julian (also played by Daytime) speaks. "I would never leave you, Jordan."
Julian pushes Peterson to reveal more rules. "Tell them about rule 14, Jordan."
An acting teacher once told me the hardest thing in the world is to make someone laugh while wearing a clown nose — it says, "you're supposed to laugh now," and laughter only happens when it's unsanctioned.
The Jordan Peterson Kermit impression is the clown nose of progressive comedy in 2026. The Jordan Peterson bit has been done to oblivion.
However, Minotaur treated the subject matter in such a novel and virtuosic way that the Peterson bit winds up serving the bouffon, not the other way around.
A Minotaur, in classical mythology, is a creature that is half-beast, half man. Daytime's Minotaur is a monster that has learned to speak only in far-right talking points and Republican-politician gestures. It's a solo show that takes the manosphere's subliminal drives in the utmost good faith, into grotesque hyperbole.
Daytime's Minotaur shapeshifts into the manosphere's figures in splitting-image character studies.
It lampoons especially the beleaguered demagogue Jordan Peterson — the crying uncle, the lobster king. He alchemises Peterson's shame, his numeric-order compulsion, the tearful appeals to the sacred, into an hour-long coherent universe.
"It's like he built an entire house out of attics and cellars and the whole family is misogynistic dads," said a man at the exit, still reeling.
The word monster comes from the Latin monere (to warn, instruct, remind) — and there's certainly something medieval about the idea of showing something monstrous in the pursuit of educating an audience to be its opposite.
But maybe this is why the genre of bouffon is more relevant than ever. The great thing about Minotaur is that it's an attack on toxic masculinity in form and not just content. It doesn't just make fun of what is said — it makes fun of how it's said.
Under the clown paint Stephen Daytime sweats real sweat.
He pop-quizzes rule two — call your mother, no, it's barbecue. Announces rule nine: "If you're afraid of global warming, buy a larger refrigerator."
"Tech Boy, juice me," he says.
The kid pelts him with heavy orange Gatorade bottles that land with a thud. First he fumbles them pathetically, then he catches one with the menacing exactitude of a quarterback, sculls the whole bottle, eats his own fist, then both fists. The room, packed to the exits, goes feral.
When we lost the social ritual of the clown show in the village square, people sought it elsewhere, in rallies, right-wing demagoguery, stormings on the Capitol in viking helmets.
We have voted bouffons into power, many of them wonderful and terrific masters of this art. Trump and Milo are as popular as Sacha Baron Cohen because they're brilliant comedians.
Daytime's Minotaur reclaims bouffon from the right.
Halfway through, Peterson-as-child calls for his father. "Papa? Papa? Papa, where are you?" Papa answers. Trump register, Florida obsession, dismissive of the mother figure who brings yogurt. "This way, Jordan. We're going to Florida. Florida. That's right. Florida. You like Florida."
Papa gets lost. Won't stop for directions. Peterson asks for snacks. Papa snaps: "That's enough. I'm gonna leave you right here. I'm going to Florida by myself, Jordan. That's gonna teach you a lesson."
Smart and serious people walked out of Stephen Daytime's Minotaur and had to be told that it was satire.
The knee-jerk is what we have instead of reading, and we have been trained into it by decades of culture war. The instinct to immediately cancel a work of art because you missed its rhetorical position — which is the same as yours, only from a position of irony — is exhausting and it is the opposite of criticism.
Minotaur puts pressure on this. In the second act, after Papa Trump has abandoned him, Peterson-as-Victorian-orphan asks the audience for Cheetos. An audience member gives him one. And, in the same soft voice, he recites Mary Oliver's Wild Geese:
You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your hands and knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.
The show takes for granted a certain literacy in its audience, and I don't think that this is anything it should apologise for.
If anything, it's a lesson on how to hold apart two things — the object lampooned and the lampooning itself, the outcast and the powerful in the same gesture, the sacred and the profane in the same body.
Nobody goes to clown shows in 2026. A packed room of Montréalais at 6pm on a hot Thursday in June went absolutely feral for this one, and left better at telling a bouffon from a bouffon.
Une bête parfaite.
Minotaur — Part One of PERFECT BEASTS / Bêtes Parfaites: modern Bouffon Clown
Creation & performance Stephen Daytime Devised in collaboration with Jay Dunn Presented with Joshua Kilcoyne (Part Two) Training lineage Philippe Gaulier, Giovanni Fusetti Venue O Patro Výš, 356 Mont-Royal Ave E, Montréal Running time 45 minutes Rating 16+ Content warnings mention of sexual and physical abuse, disordered eating Season 13–21 June 2026, Montreal Fringe
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