Beclowned

Guest column by Bob the Clown

I am ABD from Ringling Brothers Clown College. All my professional life I’ve been a working clown. I have never wanted for work in my field. Missing a degree does not hinder my professional viability, but in tight decisions I may have missed out on some jobs to a clown with a degree. But I had to drop out, finances being what they were. The Clown College closed before I could finish my last year. Then the Feld Organisation shut down the Ringling Circus. Now, I mostly work parties and corporate events. I stick to the basics so no fancy names. I’m Bob the Clown, that’s it. You want to see me fall on my ass; I fall on my ass.

My grievance which I’ve nursed since I could think and feel is not a thing or objective in the world. It’s more a flaw I was born with. I didn’t become a hateful creature because I suffered mistreatment in childhood. My parents fed and clothed me and did their best to nudge me in the direction of a sensible trade. The hate was there from the beginning, an itch inside, where the skin begins, where it meets the world outside.

Though they did not like — past tense: they died in a train accident — the shabby carnival midway that surrounds most circuses, they made a good show, seeing and enjoying my act when the Circus came to a town near them. But I saw the disappointment in their eyes. I became a joke at family gatherings, so I stopped going. You’ll find that most of us who make our money making people laugh are cold, miserable creatures.

This hate does not consume me, as the cliche would have it, but it’s is always there, like a bad smell; somewhere impossible to reach something foul died. It’s beyond my reach. It never abates. Many times the thought passes through my head, but I have never killed or attempted to kill anyone. I never tortured or murdered pets, a worrying sign and predictive. Many times on the road in random towns for one night only, I stayed in my room, or visited the lounge. I once forgot I was wearing my work trousers and couldn’t be arsed to change or put on my civilian shoes. The police roughed me up, but there were no formal charges. I will confess I enjoy a drink in places where no one knows my name.

Clowns, I have found, are no more evil than the average citizen. I practiced my craft for years and got out of the habit of friendship and observing birthdays. The many ways to wear a nose, tripping over your feet, losing your balance on a bicycle, these look like something anyone can do. But if you’ve ever seen a bad clown, then you know what I mean. It’s an indignity that becomes depravity the more the insult is repeated. It’s a crime against nature that cannot be forgotten or forgiven.

I was a very good clown, well-regarded in professional circles, and not just by fellow clowns, but lion tamers, magicians, and acrobats, men and women. I never had an affair of any sort with any of my fellow-performers. I should say at the top that I am a cis-clown, my pronouns are “this guy” and “who do you think you’re talking to?” I’m the embodiment of professionalism.

In my act I honoured the classicism of the great clowns. I performed bits from the lineage of those showmen of old who evoke an autumnal melancholy, like Emmet Kelly who conjured the presence of death; death shadowed the most famous of his gags, and one that I perform without pretence of originality, but in the spirit of respect, an homage to the inevitable passage of Time, as though unafraid of the sand running through the hourglass. It closes the night. It brings the night and its darkness into the room.

But I am spooked. I hear voices. I see ghosts, I think. I remember not words exactly, but a thought that forms from nothing, comes from nowhere, ‘We don’t experience death, it happens without us.’ I don’t worry about where we go. I like to travel. I’ll go anywhere and have, but people....? I hate them. That’s my grievance; they don’t care whether I live or die. If we just go dark and disappear, well, that sounds like a well-earned rest. I’ve earned it, fearing people as I have, their casual and impish cruelty. So the lights go off, and there’s nothing more sounds fine to me, but no one’s asking.

But it’s on with the show under the Big Tent.

Kelly’s gag closed the night, and so does mine. A gag in show business terms ... a piece of business ... it’s what entertainers do to make you laugh, or cry. In Kelly’s gag it does both.

It goes like this: house dark, a spotlight the only illumination, I appear, holding a broom, I start sweeping the light and eradicating it with each stroke of my broom, but the light moves, as if to outwit and thwart me in the performance of my job as janitor, sweeping up the last bit of light before we all go home. A mean job, meant for the dim and half-witted, but then I prove that I’m more wily than most, and sneak up behind the light and scrub it out. Each stroke is a sweeping breeze from a black hole, consuming the light. Then the darkness. When the lights come up, the houselights, I welcome my colleagues, the elephants, their trainers, the beautiful horses and their elegant riders in fantastic garments meant to stretch reason into the wonderland of fantasy.

Some nights those tears are real. I don’t go in much for shows that make jokes of clowns or present clowns as homicidal butchers. But that moment in “Quick Change” when they ask Bill Murray, “what kind of clown are you?” And he answers, “The crying-on-the-inside kind” I let a wan smile punctuate the impenetrable blackness of my mood, mitigate and dilute for just that instant the unstinting hatred for humanity. In that moment, that flicker, time hesitates, my hatred stints.

You see, I stayed with clowning as long as I did because in that moment, when they stop laughing at my pratfalls and potentially fatal accidents, when I outwit the light, and sweep it out of existence, the audience remains silent because they know I can conjure magic that could obliterate them, that I am of that number of anonymous demons that peer at them from the darkness, the recesses of their bedrooms.

Each brushstroke erases Light, erases more light, removes more of their world, each stroke more of the known world disappears. Maybe I do wield such a power. Maybe I can spread such darkness that wherever I go the real world diminishes feet at a time, eaten by hatred of their stupidity, their contempt for my rawness, this suffering. Then it’s not funny anymore. But I remember, I’m playing a janitor, I’m a circus clown...but all that stupidity, all that cruelty, and suffering...but I do my job. I make them see a janitor, just a janitor, just one more clown.

Emmet Kelly didn’t need a degree. He knew that the hatred of the crowds for the mis-formed and the hungry in rags with their hands out. He knew that the lost ones are his true family. He sees in the well-fed faces of his large audiences, many with degrees, laugh at him because they know he’s not the broken scrap of human rubbish his clown persona portrays. But if he were, and it happens, if he had to sleep rough and beg for food, he knows they will walk past without seeing him. They will let him die.

But tonight they pay, to see him. And if I had my way with my broom, I would keep sweeping until the smiles left their faces, the night deepens in them until it’s an insoluble puzzle, and they beg for mercy, but they get none tonight, We paint the night black so God will not see our sins.

What utter rubbish. Besides, today is my last day as a professional clown. I think my CV reads “entertainment professional” rather than “clown” or “figure of fun.” Yes, I lied on my resume.

And I got the job. Starting next week I’ll begin a three-year contract as Head of Production for World Wide Pictures. I run everything. Everything runs through me.

And yes, I lied on my resume. But in this town no one reads resumes. This town runs on relationships. The Big Boss, Heinrich Thunder, a German industrialist who invented the phrase “information Uber-Autobahn” went to a performance of one of my shows and after that never missed a show whenever we pitched up in Frankfurt. He always cried, huge wracking sobs, and he held me, both his meaty arms wrapped around my head, and clasping me to his belly, he would sob that I understand that I am gifted with the Sight, that I See with the evil in this world. He marvels that I can be a clown. somehow persist.

Our worlds never crossed in business, but never say that Chance does not run the universe, because when the papers were full of stories about his industrial conglomerate using slave labour in the Congo and camp inmates as labour during the Second World War, he took enough stick to make him take a desperate gamble. He bought World Wide Pictures and me with it. He diversified, and the Horst Wessel song that Heinrich used to sing at corporate retreats became a jovial cover of “Amadeus” by Falco.

(Falco, “Rock Me, Amadeus,” Rare Vinyl Records)

I thrive in the Alpine air of Berchtesgarten. And now, as he says, there will be lots of sweeping to do, under the rug.

And my movies? They will be full of hate. The beautiful will be punished for exceeding the masses in good fortune. Super heroes with their superpowers will spend two hours on the screen wasting away from venereal diseases passed on to them by their fathers who were brothel keepers during the years when Capitalism ruled with a combination of guns and Ponzi schemes. “And whores,” Heinrich always reminds me. And he would know. He’s an excellent capitalist.

Perhaps I’m making all this up. But it’s dark here. Something is out there. It’s made its way into this house.