Claun
2022 · 16m · México
Directed by Luis Gerardo LoGar
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
A famous stand-up comedian debates whether or not to tell a polemic joke he has just written. His whole night changes when he realises that he has lost the ability to hear laughter.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A comedian who loses the ability to hear laughter is such a gloriously perverse inversion—the whole apparatus of stand-up comedy implodes from the inside. Most scouts would see dark comedy and move on; this one actually *is* subversive, turning the performer's crisis into something genuinely unsettling and absurd.
LoGar situates this within a lineage of meta-theatrical work that interrogates performance itself, the editing likely carrying the weight of that internal collapse with precision. It's the kind of formally aware premise that demands careful construction to avoid becoming merely clever.
The entire film hinges on a single sensory absence—that choice to sever the comedian from laughter—and how the direction and sound design make that void palpable rather than just conceptual; it's a micro-budget constraint turned into the film's singular, devastating tool.