The show started as usual. The early gags went as planned, but I sucked up some baby powder during the firehouse gag and went back to my trailer to get something to drink. Minutes before the walk-around I returned to the Alley to pick up my prop. It wasn’t there. I went to the side of the tent where the performers wait to enter. It wasn’t there either. By that time the walk-around had begun. Nellie Ivanov was just returning from her cradle act. She looked at me sympathetically. I felt a tinge of guilt. Earlier she had told me that no matter how many acts she had or how injured she felt she never missed a performance. Here I was missing something as simple as a walk-around.
I headed back to the Alley. As soon as the whistle blew Marty appeared from the tent and raised his hands as if to say, “Where were you?” This struck me as a little odd. During a walk-around there is usually no time to see what the other clowns are doing, much less whether they are even there. Back in the Alley the hounding started. Brian asked me where I left the prop. Marty asked me when I last saw it. Jerry thrust his finger in my face and said I would have to pay him twenty dollars if it didn’t turn up. “It will turn up,” I assured them. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Marty said they had found my gag inside the tent and had hid it to teach me a lesson. I wasn’t exactly sure what the lesson was, since many props were left in the tent. But the lesson, I suspected, had less to do with the prop and more to do with letting me know who was in charge.
“The Alley has a certain way of doing things,” Marty said. “If you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, if you let us down, you’re going to be made aware of it. We have to be able to count on one another. We have to work together.”
It was after I received this little speech that I knew the only way to be accepted into this group was to start speaking up for myself. All pantomime aside, it was time to become a talking clown.
Once the firemen are in the ring the clowns set about trying to put out the blaze. Inside the firehouse, I rapidly strip off my old-man pajama top, slip on black trousers, a red jacket, and a metal fire hat and run out to join the chaos. The first stunt involves a hose. Once in the open I retrieve a coiled-up section of hose from Buck, spin it in the air like a lasso, and toss it toward Arpeggio, who takes the end that slaps him in the face and tries to hook it up to a five-foot-high fire hydrant. Just as he approaches the giant hydrant, however, it moves. Arpeggio takes two steps to the left; the fire hydrant takes two steps to the right. Finally, as an exasperated Arpeggio storms toward the fixture, the hydrant spits out a stream of water, rises up on the shoulders of the dwarf inside, and sprints out of the ring. At this point the clowns have had two run-ins so far—one with the cart, one with the hydrant—and the inanimate objects have won both. The audience could not be more pleased.
“People have a negative image of clowns these days,” Elmo said to me at the beginning of the year. A fifteen-year veteran of the circus, Elmo, a short blond idiot savant of a clown, designed the gags, built the props, then left the performing to us as he traveled one week ahead of the show doing advance publicity. Like the other clowns on the show, he was temperamental and moody; unlike the others, however, he had a clear philosophy of clowning. “Krusty the Klown on The Simpsons, Homey the Clown on In Living Color, even Stephen King’s It are all maniacal and just plain odd. They never do anything funny. If we can do something funny, then we are doing our jobs. Remember, most people come to the circus to see clowns and elephants. If that’s the case, the elephants better be big and the clowns better be funny.”
For clowns, being funny means being silly. The firehouse gag is one of a dozen or so traditional gags that have been around the American circus since early in the twentieth century. (The most famous clown routine of all, the overstuffed clown car, was actually first performed on the Cole Bros. Circus with a specially constructed Studebaker in the 1950s.) The key to the firehouse gag, Elmo explained, is the incompetence of the clowns, who can’t even perform simple tasks that every child in the audience can do. If the clowns can’t ride in their cart, if they can’t even hook up a hose, woe is the woman who stands on the house screaming for the clowns to save her baby.
With the fire hydrant out of the ring and the hose lying on the ground, the clowns decide to use it for some fun. Marty and Rob grab the ends of the hose and the three of us watching from the side come skipping to the center and perform an elaborate jump rope—one, two, three, four—until we get tripped up in midair and go tumbling to the ground like living dominoes. Left holding the rope, the two clowns on the end then go racing in opposite directions until the hose between them recoils like a rubber band and flings them to the ground. With each fall the audience laughs louder. The act is building to its blowoff.
“The firehouse is a slapstick gag,” Elmo explained. “A ‘slapstick’ is something you hit someone on the rear with and it makes a loud noise. During the Renaissance, the commedia dell’arte troupes used a pig bladder on a stick to make that sound. Today slapstick is just another form of that—a kick in the behind, a slap to the face, a bucket over the head.”
Indeed, once the clowns pick themselves off the ground and start to assault the house the gag moves inexorably toward the one action that always got a laugh: the bucket of water on the head of a clown. Before that, however, most of the clowns end up on the ground at least several more times. Four of us run toward the house and get knocked off our feet by an opening door. One person tries to climb the ladder only to be punched by the lady. And in the most dramatic incident of the act, Arpeggio enters the ring waving a four-foot ax, trips, swings around, and accidentally decapitates a seemingly helpful fireman. After a moment the audience realizes the head is fake and the fireman is only a dummy on top of the dwarf. Still the horror thrills.
“It’s violence,” Elmo explained. “Violence is funny to people if it happens to somebody else. They are not laughing with you, they are laughing at you. Let’s say you hate your boss or your teacher, and we have a gag where an authority figure is picked on. People love it. The audience lives vicariously through you. They can step out of their own parameters of good behavior. Why do you think Road Runner is so popular? Or Tom and Jerry? It’s because we like to watch other people getting hit. Clowns are like that. We are living cartoons.”
It was this transition from person to cartoon that was the most interesting and challenging for me. As a teenage actor, I was taught to be realistic; as a mime, I tried to be reflective; but as a clown, I had to learn to be exaggerated, in a sense unreal, beyond gender, beyond human, beyond constraint. Running around the ring in the firehouse gag day after day, week after week, I slowly began to make this transition, but to do it properly I had to get beyond the confines of my own body. The shoes helped in this matter; they were caricaturish and surreal. The costume helped; it was wider and taller than what any conventional person would wear. But the key to feeling less like a human and more like a clown, indeed the key to looking less like a person and more like a cartoon, was the same. In the end, it all came down to the face.
“Take a dab of white with your fingers. More than that, cover the tip until it’s dripping off. Good. Now take another finger. And a third.”
It was a little over two weeks before the season would begin when Elmo came to my apartment in Washington, D.C., to help me design my face. Dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, I sat before a mirror on the ottoman in my living room. Elmo lent me a woman’s knee-high stocking to pull over my head and hold my hair in place.