The Theatre of Honesty — Pasha Majlesi & Behrad Tavallaei on The Art of Clowning

In an age when everyone records but few reveal, The Thoughts of Two Clowns stands as a defiant act of sincerity. Each week, filmmaker Pasha Majlesi and rapper-turned-sales-director Behrad Tavallaei sit before the camera not as hosts or pundits but as two friends thinking out loud—laughing, arguing, confessing, and improvising their way through the comedy of Iranian life.

In the fourth episode of the special “Persian Conversation-Based Videocasts” series on Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, the pair join Hossein to unpack the story behind their unlikely collaboration. What emerges is not simply the making of a popular show but a study in modern friendship, authenticity, and the strange courage it takes to stay real when everything around you demands performance.

From Planet to Playground

Before The Clowns, there was Planet—Majlesi’s visually polished, sci-fi-inflected talk show that helped redefine Persian-language YouTube. With its cinematic intros, live events, and obsessive production design, Planet felt like a Netflix-ready hybrid of documentary and variety show. Yet, behind the lenses and lighting, Majlesi was already craving something looser.

He tells Nasiri that long before Planet, he had experimented with Walkie-Talkie, a humble four-color series of conversations with friends—each episode dedicated to a different theme: film, relationships, dark stories, social life. “It was my third upload ever,” he recalls, “just me sitting with a friend talking about everyday things.” Years later, The Thoughts of Two Clowns would bring that same spirit back, stripped of all pretense.

“Imagine that 26-year-old me,” he laughs. “Now he’s just five years older and doing the same thing—only with better microphones.”

Enter the Second Clown

Behrad Tavallaei’s path to the camera was even less predictable. A poet and rapper who spends his days directing sales at one of Tehran’s leading stone factories, he stumbled into Majlesi’s orbit in 2017, when a mutual friend asked him to lend his tattooed arm for a short horror film. “They didn’t even need my face,” he jokes. “Just the owl on my hand.” That absurd moment sparked a friendship that outlived the failed film and eventually birthed a show.

Their chemistry was immediate and chaotic. They began recording uncut videos together—no script, no editing, just laughter and spontaneous debate. The audience responded with equal enthusiasm. “People could feel it,” Behrad says. “It wasn’t staged. It was just two guys cracking up for real.”

Those improvised clips evolved into a weekly program with a loose structure—part pop-culture recap, part philosophical rant, part therapy session. Viewers loved its rhythm: the collision of Majlesi’s meticulous media brain with Tavallaei’s streetwise humor.

“It’s basically me overthinking everything,” Pasha says, “and him reminding me to chill.”

Humor as Truth-Serum

For all its laughter, The Thoughts of Two Clowns is less comedy than confession. The jokes, often sharp or self-mocking, act as camouflage for vulnerability. Their banter about traffic, music, or relationships frequently slides into reflections on censorship, burnout, and identity.

“The idea of being a clown,” Majlesi explains, “isn’t about foolishness. It’s about honesty. The clown can say what others can’t.”

Tavallaei nods. “People think we’re kidding, but we’re serious about being unserious.”

Their philosophy mirrors the medieval fool who could tell kings the truth without losing his head. In Iran’s crowded media landscape—where creators navigate red lines both political and personal—humor becomes a survival strategy. The show’s title, chosen half-ironically, becomes a manifesto: to embrace imperfection, to speak freely, to laugh at the absurd polish of modern self-presentation.

The Friendship Algorithm

What keeps their dialogue alive is not topic but texture. After eight years of friendship, their conversations flow with the elasticity of two minds that know each other’s rhythms. They tease, contradict, and occasionally infuriate one another, but the friction fuels rather than fractures them.

Majlesi admits that they sometimes argue off-camera just as fiercely as on. “We’ll fight in the car from Tehran to Isfahan,” he says, “and I’ll think, this would make a great episode.” Yet, he’s aware that constant debate can exhaust viewers. “It’s fun for us, but sometimes it brings the vibe down.”

Tavallaei laughs: “One of my friends told me, ‘You argue like logic doesn’t matter—just to win.’ He said watching it gives him flashbacks!”

Still, those disagreements are the show’s emotional engine. The audience senses genuine affection beneath the bickering, and that authenticity—so rare in choreographed talk shows—keeps them watching.

When the Audience Becomes the Mirror

With every episode comes a flood of comments, and with comments comes what both hosts call “the polishing.”

“At first,” Pasha says, “you roll into the scene like this weird-shaped ball. People love your rough edges. They call you bold. Then feedback starts smoothing you out until you’re perfectly round—and completely predictable.”

Tavallaei confesses he never thought public opinion would affect him. “I used to think, ‘I’m chill, comments won’t get to me.’ Now I’m under pressure all the time. Before I started, people said I was funny, I swore creatively, my jokes were edgy. Then once the show launched, they called me misogynist or fake. Same person, different context.”

Majlesi, the veteran of viral storms, knows the cycle well. “It’s not that people change their values,” he says, “they just get used to your surprises. What shocked them yesterday bores them today.”

Both men agree that the only antidote is self-awareness. “You have to stay yourself,” Behrad concludes, “and let the comments polish you—but not erase you.”

The Invisible Director

Even as he claims to reject structure, Majlesi cannot help directing in real time. During heated moments, he’ll suddenly whisper, “Sit down. Don’t say that.” His producer’s instinct—honed through six years of filmmaking—never sleeps. “It’s not censorship,” he says. “It’s self-preservation. When your friend says something risky, you want to protect him from the blowback.”

That invisible direction distinguishes The Clowns from its predecessors. Where Planet choreographed every beat, Clowns thrives on improvisation but still relies on Majlesi’s editorial eye. Only 2 or 3 percent of each recording is cut—mostly technical slips—but the subtle rhythm of pacing, topic shifts, and camera placement still reflects his design.

“I treat each episode like a jam session,” he explains. “You need chaos, but you also need someone keeping time.”

Work Life and Double Lives

Perhaps the most surreal aspect of The Clowns is that half of its duo still leads a corporate life. Tavallaei spends weekdays selling marble and granite for luxury façades, then steps into the studio to talk about rap battles and love troubles.

“It’s weird,” he admits. “One day I’m negotiating contracts worth millions; the next day, someone calls me a clown on YouTube. And sometimes it’s the same client.”

He recounts a scene straight from absurdist theatre: his father at the barber, defending his son’s online language. “The barber told me he had to explain to my dad that swearing on the show is part of the performance. My mom still hates it, even though she’s the reason I swear so much.”

That dual identity—respectable professional by day, digital jester by night—adds a layer of irony that deepens the show’s appeal. It embodies the split many young Iranians feel between public decorum and private candor.

Between Censorship and Self-Control

Majlesi knows firsthand how precarious that candor can be. From Red Line to Planet, he has navigated the evolving boundaries of acceptable speech in Iranian media. “Back then,” he recalls, “I said things I wouldn’t say now—not because I regret them, but because I’ve learned what each word can cost.”

He distinguishes between imposed censorship and internal responsibility. “It’s not about fear; it’s about awareness. When I edit myself, it’s not the government editing me—it’s experience.”

That awareness turns every laugh into a balancing act: humor without harm, honesty without recklessness. It’s a philosophy shared by Tavallaei, who describes his current approach as “filtered spontaneity.” “You still talk freely,” he says, “but you think two seconds faster than your tongue.”

The Clown as Chronicler

Midway through their talk with Nasiri, the conversation turns poetic. What, they wonder, will future generations see when they watch The Thoughts of Two Clowns twenty years from now?

“It’ll be like an audio-visual diary of this decade,” Behrad says. “You’ll see what we cared about—our slang, our jokes, our frustrations.”

Majlesi agrees. “Every episode is a timestamp. Someone in 2045 could look back and say, ‘So this was what young people in Tehran were talking about in 1403.’ That’s kind of beautiful.”

Nasiri calls it “oral history disguised as entertainment.” The pair laugh but accept the point. Beneath the jokes lies documentation—a living record of urban thought, humor, and struggle. In that sense, their show continues a Persian tradition of social storytelling through everyday banter.

Lessons from Planet

When Nasiri asks what Planet taught him, Majlesi answers without hesitation: “That perfection burns you out.”

During Planet’s peak, he and his partner Kambiz invested enormous effort into cinematic intros, multiple cameras, and elaborate sets. “We’d spend double what we earned just to rent a car for eleven seconds of footage,” he laughs. “It was madness—but we were obsessed.”

The obsession paid off in prestige but not peace. After 80 episodes and countless sleepless nights, he realized the emotional cost. “We built the highest-quality visual podcast of its time,” he says, “and nearly killed ourselves doing it.”

That exhaustion pushed him toward minimalism. “Now it’s just two chairs and honesty,” he says. “The production got smaller, but the truth got bigger.”

When Grief Goes On Air

One of the episode’s most poignant moments arises when Nasiri mentions a recent recording in which Majlesi appeared subdued after losing a friend in an accident. Many viewers had commented, urging him to open up more.

“I didn’t want to,” he admits softly. “I felt talking about it would turn pain into content.”

Tavallaei had urged him otherwise: “I told him grief is part of life. If we hide it, we’re lying to the audience.”

The final compromise was subtle honesty—acknowledging the loss without dramatizing it. The episode became a quiet lesson in emotional boundaries: how to be authentic without exploitation, human without spectacle.

The Listening Habit

Podcasting, they both insist, has changed them not only as speakers but as listeners.

“I used to interrupt all the time,” Pasha says. “I’d jump in before someone finished. Now I’ve learned to wait—even if I forget my thought by the end.”

Behrad nods. “For me it’s patience. I used to think every conversation had to be big—now I can talk for an hour about one lyric or one traffic jam and still enjoy it.”

Their evolution mirrors the essence of dialogue itself: transformation through attention. Each week they learn to hold space—for each other, for their audience, and for the shifting mood of a society learning to talk again.

Between Public and Private

Exposure has its price. Tavallaei admits receiving unnerving DMs: people describing his car, his street, his windows. “At first it’s flattering,” he says, “then it’s creepy.”

Yet both hosts accept visibility as part of the pact. “If you want intimacy with your audience,” Majlesi says, “you have to risk transparency.” The challenge is drawing a line before transparency becomes vulnerability.

They discuss the paradox of modern creators: building parasocial relationships while struggling to preserve real ones. “Our viewers think they know us,” Pasha notes, “and in some ways they do—but only the version that fits inside a screen.”

The Philosophy of Clowning

Perhaps the show’s deepest insight lies in its embrace of the word clown.

“We chose it before anyone could use it against us,” Majlesi smiles. “In Persian culture, being called a clown can be an insult. We turned it into armor.”

For them, clowning is not ridicule but radical transparency. It means refusing the posture of expertise, celebrating contradiction, and letting laughter puncture ego. “We’re not teachers,” Behrad says. “We’re just two guys trying to figure life out in public.”

When a critic mocked them online—“You’re clowns!”—they replied, “Exactly.” The insult became a declaration of method: to speak truth through play, to confront seriousness with sincerity.

Growth as Visible Progress

As the show evolves, so does its craft. The early episodes were filmed in modest apartments; the new ones feature improved lighting and refined sound. Yet Majlesi insists that progress is not only technical.

“Every ten episodes, something changes—our setup, our thinking, even our friendship,” he says. “The audience sees that growth and feels part of it.”

That transparency—the willingness to show process rather than perfection—has become a cornerstone of their appeal. Each episode feels like watching creativity learn itself in real time.

The Craft of Companionship

Nasiri observes that their strongest tool isn’t editing or humor but companionship. They spend time together beyond the studio—dinners, hangouts, late-night calls. “If you want real chemistry,” Pasha tells aspiring creators, “you have to share life, not just screen time.”

He compares forced partnerships to first-time interviews. “When you sit with someone for the first time, the stiffness shows. But if you’ve already laughed, argued, and eaten together, the energy flows naturally.”

In their case, eight years of shared chaos provides endless fuel. “Our friendship is the format,” Behrad concludes.

Between Job and Joy

Despite their contrasting lifestyles—Pasha the full-time creator, Behrad the part-time performer—they share one belief: the work must stay joyful.

“When it feels like obligation,” Pasha warns, “the audience will feel it too.” He recalls how Planet sometimes became mechanical: “We’d record because it was Thursday, not because we wanted to talk. That’s death for conversation.”

For now, both still look forward to recording day. “I see it as therapy,” Behrad says. “It resets me after a week of chaos.”

Beyond Format

When asked whether The Thoughts of Two Clowns is a podcast, videocast, or something else entirely, they shrug. “Call it whatever you want,” Pasha laughs. “If you can listen without watching, it’s a podcast; if you want to see our faces, it’s a videocast. For us, it’s just a conversation that happens to be recorded.”

Nasiri connects their approach to global precedents—shows like My Favorite Murder, where humor and tragedy coexist. “You’ve created your own sub-genre,” he tells them, “conversation as companionship.”

They grin at the description, unsure whether it’s praise or prophecy.

The Art of Staying Human

Beneath the laughter, The Thoughts of Two Clowns is ultimately a study in humanity—the delicate balance between exposure and empathy, performance and presence.

Majlesi sees it as a weekly reminder that imperfection is more interesting than image. “You can fake lighting,” he says, “but you can’t fake connection.”

Tavallaei frames it differently: “It’s like writing poetry with conversation. You throw words out, he throws them back, and somewhere in between, you find truth.”

That exchange—the tossing of thoughts like juggling balls—is the essence of their craft. They are clowns not because they wear masks but because they dare to take them off.

Epilogue: A Mirror in Motion

Watching The Thoughts of Two Clowns feels like watching a mirror learn to move. Each episode reflects both hosts and audience, distorting and refining in equal measure. Sometimes the reflection is flattering, sometimes cruel—but always real.

In a digital culture addicted to filters and final cuts, Majlesi and Tavallaei’s unscripted honesty becomes radical. Their show reminds us that conversation, when rooted in friendship and humor, is still one of the purest creative acts.

They may call themselves clowns, but what they practice is closer to philosophy: a weekly rehearsal for being human. And in the noisy circus of modern media, that might just be the bravest performance of all.