While talking, whiteface clowns thrived in the one-ring circuses of the early nineteenth century; when the circus expanded to three rings, they could no longer be heard in all seats of the tent. A new type of clown—more physical, less talky—was needed. It was about that time that American Tom Belig, who was performing a riding routine in Germany, changed clowning forever. According to lore, one day when Belig was late for his act he threw on a baggy costume and wig, rubbed brick dust on his cheeks and soot over his eyes, and went out to do his routine. He was so frazzled he kept falling off the horse and jumping back on. The crowd roared with laughter, calling out the name of the popular comic-book character Der Dumme Auguste, Dumb Gus. This new persona quickly spread and eventually came to dominate clowning in America (nine of the clowns in our Alley were this type—with redder makeup and brightly colored wigs—while only two were whiteface). Forever after, whitefaces would endure as the new straight men, the foils, but their look would have to be sophisticated compared to their more frivolous and bumpkin cousins, the country-comes-to-town “Auguste.”
After bathing my face in baby powder that was stored in a girl’s ankle sock and brushing off the excess with a badger-hair shaving brush, Elmo began to paint the black lines and red nose. Even without looking I could feel the lines changing the dimensions of my face. Unlike the white, which was sloppy and greasy, the black was sharp and crisp, sealing the pores on my face like a fixed expression under wax. The red was equally vibrant and sure, an exclamation point on my lips and nose in contrast to the black clefs on my cheeks.
“So why is the mouth always red?” I asked.
“Tradition,” he said. “Also, you don’t have to touch it up as often.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Well, try not to eat fried chicken.” I laughed. First it was Ronald McDonald, now Colonel Sanders. Was any American icon safe from the wrath of circus clowns? “No, I’m serious,” he said. “We used to have a guy on the Ringling show who loved Kentucky Fried Chicken. He called it K Fry. But you can’t have chicken between shows. Eat your chicken for lunch.”
“What else can’t I eat?” I asked.
“Spaghetti sauce, pizza. Anything with grease that will cut the makeup. Also anything eaten with a fork. You can always tell a clown by the way he slides food off a fork without letting the food or the fork touch his lips. Even when the makeup is off. It’s changed the way I eat forever.”
After he finished painting the color on my face we marched to the bathroom for the final powdering. When I looked at myself in the mirror I was amazed by what I saw. My plain white face had been transformed. Now my cheeks were cradled in snappy black curves. My eyes were lifted with beaming brows. My mouth was as plump as a lobster claw. All together the simple strokes were like lines from a limerick that leapt happily off a blank white page. My immediate reaction was to tilt my head, lift my eyebrows, and stretch my lips into a smile.
“Oh my God,” I said. “I look like a clown.”
Elmo smiled. “But you’re not a clown. You’re just a person in makeup. I’m afraid there’s a big difference. Only a child can decide who is a clown. The key is persona. A persona is what distinguishes a person in makeup from a clown.”
Thus chastened, I closed my eyes and held my breath as Elmo blasted my new face with his powder sock. Even before I could work on my persona, the first step to being a clown, I realized, would be getting used to this onslaught of powder. The second step would be getting used to the onset of mud.
As the end of the gag approaches, the clowns gather themselves together and move one last time to save the lady, who at this point is standing on top of the house wailing and flailing her arms and screaming for the firemen to save her baby. “Don’t worry!” Arpeggio calls. “We’re trained professionals.” “I hope you have insurance,” Rob adds. The audience cannot hear these lines, they are just for our own amusement. “Hurry up,” Henry says, “I have to fart.”
“Firemen, firemen, save my baaaaby…,” Jimmy cries over the microphone.
Our first task is to save the baby. Christopher, who is playing the old lady, holds the blond baby doll above his head and tosses her in one giant arching motion toward the top of the tent. As the audience gasps, the baby comes somersaulting toward the firemen’s net, where the clowns bounce it with a grunt and send it back into the air. Sometimes Henry would catch the baby at this point, at other times it would land on the ground. When this tragedy happened I would run to the side of the baby and give it one last chance at life with a desperate rendition of clown CPR.
All eyes turn back toward the lady. She powders her cheeks, looks down at her house, and bends over in preparation for a final dive to safety. When she is just about to make her leap for life, a bright red fireball of nearly nuclear dimensions comes blasting up from inside the house and nearly consumes her exaggerated rear end. The audience shrieks in delight. Now greatly alarmed, the lady bends over one more time as another burst of flames, this time even brighter, fills the ring with terror and the clowns with fright. The audience cheers again.
“It’s the danger,” Elmo explained. “Look at some of those old Charlie Chaplin movies. He’s walking on a high wire with a monkey on his shoulders that has its hands over his eyes and there’s a banana peel thrown on the wire. People love to watch others challenge death. The fire emphasizes that.”
In truth, the fire itself was hardly dangerous. It came from a substance called lycopodium, a dried Mexican fern processed in New Jersey that American midwives used to put on umbilical cords to dry them after birth. In the container lycopodium is not flammable, but when it is blown into the air and comes into contact with a flame (in our case a lighter) it makes a dramatic fireball that looks real but doesn’t burn. Magicians discovered it, Elmo said, and it was used in The Wizard of Oz. In our gag it received the biggest laugh.
“People don’t expect it,” Elmo said. “Also, it hits the lady on the behind. The tushy is very funny, especially for little kids. Where do they get punished? Where do they get spanked? A behind is a sacred thing for a kid. It’s never shown to others. It’s never touched. Therefore we want to make fun of it.”
After two bursts of fire the lady is desperate. The audience is crying for her to jump. The clowns holding the net begin sprinting toward the house. The lady bends over one last time, when out of nowhere a deafening blast jars everyone in the tent, one last fireball spurts out of the roof, and the lady jumps for her life, hoping against hope to be caught in the net, but only to land miserably in the mud. Just as she lands, a clown appears from the house waving his hands in distress: his pants have caught on fire. This is the ultimate defeat. Not only could the clowns not put out the fire or catch the baby or save the lady but we also managed in our bungled confusion to set ourselves ablaze. Undaunted, we jump to our feet in unison and run out of the ring to the traditional romp “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
4
Outsiders Always Make Mistakes