I saw a delightful article about clowns the other day. I have always been fascinated by their long traditions and was charmed to learn that one of these is that no two clowns wear the same makeup.
It seems that at the start of his (or her) career, each clown designs a look that he (or she) thinks will do them for the rest of his (or her) life. They then paint it on an egg and send it to a registry which keeps them for comparison purposes.
I call that a lovely tradition. Of course, I don’t know how they police the “one clown one face” rule. For example, say that a performer who generally appears as “Bezzo” is getting ready for his evening’s work when he finds that the last stub of lip black has fallen into his jug of industrial strength sherry, dissolving it immediately.
He panics. His nerveless fingers grope for the stick of red which he usually uses to put a couple of fairly subtle accents over his eyes. There is just enough red to give him a frowny mouth and, being a whiteface clown, cover his ears.
“That’ll have to do.” he thinks.
What he doesn’t know is that he is infringing the ancient rights of Zarlo the Magnificent who retired a century and a half ago.
Worse, there is a member of the Clown Police in the audience that night.
What happens from there? Bezzo will be backstage with his makeup off, mingling with his comrades before the Clown Police could ever get there. Without his makeup on, how will they know who he is? It would be a case of the miscreant being undetectable unless he is wearing his disguise. How ironic or something.
My other concern about the registry is what if you make a mistake of some sort with your original egg? If you send the wrong one in by accident, are you doomed to play out your career as Corkorico in just a plain white face with the words “South Australian Egg Board” printed in a circle of purple letters on your cheek?
I don’t suppose it matters all that much really. Clowning is not for the fainthearted. I remember seeing a childrens’ series made here in Australia about a young boy who yearned to be a clown. In an incredible twist, the French bloke who peeled the spuds at the local fish and chip shop, the one with the terrible limp, was a former clown who had trained in the a great European academy. It seems that he had injured his leg in some sort of dangerous stunt that he pulled in the course of saving a golden haired child from falling into the lion’s cage or something.
Anyway, the young boy (who, just between us was a rather melancholy lad) trained hard and eventually mastered such hilarious skills as juggling and wearing a wig.
I think he got into a grand European clown school and there were similarly happy endings for most of the other characters. What was noticeable however was the almost complete lack of any sort of laughs in the clowning itself. There was plenty of prancing around with an umbrella and some juggling, but nothing actually funny.
It makes me think of other portrayals of the clown in popular culture. There was “Circus Boy” who seemed to get about on an elephant and lived in the circus. The clowns with whom he interacted seemed to downplay the long term alcoholism and concentrate more on a sort of avuncular wisdom. Of course, if they were so wise, one was driven to ask oneself, what were they doing prancing around in a fright wig and heavy makeup in order to put a little bread on the table?
I suppose I am drawn more to the maudlin and tedious clownish stylings of the late, great Jerry Lewis.
Allow me to indulge myself. In “3 Ring Circus” or something, Jerry (along with Dean Martin) is working in a circus, mainly manning those sideshows with maximum hilarious potential for going messily wrong. Jerry falls foul of the traditional drunken, angry clown Puffo who is, for some reason, sacked. On that basis Jerry steps in as “Jericho” the clown and is an instant hit.
The poignant height of his career is when, performing for a group of handicapped children, Jericho realises that his antics have failed to touch one little girl (conveniently seated in the front row). He goes over to her and speaks to her in what I think is a breach of one of the fundamental rules of clowing. He says something along the lines of
“Come on honey. I know you don’t think I’m funny, but won’t you laugh for me?”
Now I have seen lame begging for laughs at many levels of comedy but that must be the worst. When it predictably fails, Jericho starts to weep, which strikes the child as the funniest thing she has seen in a ‘coon’s age and she laughs up a storm.
I mean to say. Funny or maudlin? I leave the decision to you. Actually, no I don’t. It is maudlin and appalling.
I now turn to “Patch Adams” by Robin Williams. I may have told this story before and if so I bet the readerscow to show the forbearance for which it is justly famed.
I was once flying from Adelaide to Perth (I think it was, anyway, one of the domestic flights that is long enough to show a film). I saw that the film was “Patch Adams” and so folded my headset up and was about to put it away, when the fellow next to me asked if I had already seen the film. I told him I had not. He said that he guaranteed a lot of laughs and strongly recommended that I watch it.
On that basis I took my headphones out again and sat through the film. It wasn’t to my taste but whenever I took a surreptitious sideways glance my companion was looking at me eagerly and smiling. The film finally ended and I took off the headphones.
“Well, what did you think?” he asked.
“I would have to say I didn’t think it was particularly good” I said, a trifle embarrassed.
“Nah, it was shithouse, wasn’t it?” he said. “Still, I thought that if I had to watch it on the way over, there is no reason you shouldn’t on the way back.”
So there you go. Laughs aplenty, but all for him.
The reason that this is relevant is that the title character is a doctor whose heart belongs to clowning and who combines his medical skills with his weakness for purple hair and outlandish makeup.
Terrible and maudlin. Again.
The strange connexion that I seek to make here is that tedious, maudlin clown lover Lewis had planned to make a movie called “The Day the Clown Cried”. It covered the unlikely sounding story of a fellow who tried to cheer up the final few moments of the children in a concentration camp by doing clown stuff for them (I shudder to think what).
I think that the film was started but never completed. I don’t know why, but I am sure my old travelling companion would have been able to come up with a reason.
In a stunning twist, maudlin, tedious clown lover Robin Williams tried to do a remake of this dire sounding film a few years ago.
Why? Why oh why?
Even when they are trying to be funny they are not and most sensible children find them menacing and frightening. Can’t clowns just be banned? Do I have to do this myself?
