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Philippe Gaulier is a French master clown, pedagogue, and professor of theatre. He is the founder of École Philippe Gaulier, a French theatre school in Étampes, outside Paris. He studied under Jacques Lecoq in the mid-1960s and was an instructor at L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in the late 1970s. As well as performing as a clown, he is also a playwright and director. He has published The Tormentor (Le Gégèneur), a book discussing his thoughts on the theatre and containing exercises designed to develop an actor's skill.
Gaulier is known for performing both clown and bouffon comic genres and is thought by some to be the world's leading authority on the "Bouffon", a comic genre he holds as a sort of inverted clown, where a balance is struck between grotesqueness and charm.