The clown wore a red, bulbous nose, a multicolored jumpsuit and a frizzy orange wig that stuck out from his head like a ’70s Afro. Forty-two little girls wearing candy-colored party dresses squealed and giggled as the clown attempted to twist a red balloon, but he couldn’t keep their attention. They began to squeal louder. The balloon popped. One of them grabbed at his nose while others tugged on his baggy pant legs and then they began chasing him around the room, laughing hysterically. I was one of them until my mom pulled me out of the mob. “We’re going home,” she said.
I never dressed as a clown for Halloween, and looking back, it’s possible that birthday party is the reason why. When I was young, clowns weren’t cool and they weren’t funny. The Bozo show’s Grand Prize Game was not something the kids discussed at my elementary school and the two times the circus came to town, my teacher handed out free tickets and urged us to go. They have more than a dozen clowns, she told us. The tent was still half-empty every night.
Clowning, it seemed, was one of the dead arts. In some parallel universe clowns, magicians, vaudevillians and opera singers were creating the most amazing tableau vivants for sold-out crowds, but in America, clowns were scoring low on the laugh-o-meter. The pie-in-the-face and the bullhorn-in-the-ear acts weren’t pulling in the audiences like they used to, and kids preferred having their birthday parties at the mall or the game room of the local pizza joint than in their own living rooms with a white-faced, balloon-twisting stranger. As for adults, more sophisticated humor was readily available and they weren’t in need of a mindless, humorous escape from life’s harsh realities – their therapists had taught them to face their problems head on. The fear factor, of course, had plenty of clout in the clown’s demise. Thanks to Hollywood’s doing, clowns were more famous for being alcoholics, money-grubbing child-haters, and serial killers. And who would invite a serial killer into their home for their child’s birthday party? It just seemed like no one wanted to send the clowns in anymore.
“Bozo’s Circus is…” off the air
For sixteen years, Midwesterners knew Joey D’Auria on a first name basis. Except, they didn’t call him Joey – they called him Bozo. At 7 a.m. youngsters (and often their parents) would switch on WGN while they were getting ready for school and spend an hour with the prototypical clown. After a few seasons with Joey playing the role that actor Bob Bell had originated in 1960, the show was moved to the graveyard time slot on Sunday mornings. Requests to be a member of the studio audience still poured in, but audience members at home stopped tuning in. And on July 14, after 40 years, the longest running in-house children’s television show aired its final episode.
Joey calls “Bozo’s Circus” a victim of cable television. Funny, then, that he’s waiting for the cable guy to come when I call him at home one early afternoon. When the show debuted in 1960, he tells me, there were only three television channels in Chicago and the noon time slot offered kids a choice of a soap opera, a gameshow, or clever slapstick clown program. With very little competition, Bozo became the lunchtime staple. Then PBS and eventually Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel started vying for Bozo viewers’ attention. When the show was switched to Sundays, Joey knew the end was near.
“I mean, let’s face it,” Joey says. “If the show was going to succeed, then it should have put on in an early morning time slot or an after school time slot, but it wasn’t. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that the management at the station thought it was time to fade the show out. Funny is funny. In a dream world and if WGN had thrown money at us so we could have better scripts, better production value, a better time slot, better promotion, I think the show would be as popular today as it ever had been.”
But WGN didn’t. Clowns were out of vogue. Power Rangers and SpongeBob SquarePants were more interesting, so Bozo had to find himself a new gig.
Joey lives in Northern California now and he’s pursuing (continuing, he corrects me) his career as a serious actor. This fall he performed in front of a live audience (a much older live audience than he’s used to) in Anton Chekhov’s “The Proposal.” Joey has left clowning behind him. Of course, for Joey to say he’s left clowning behind him means he had to think of himself as a clown at one point in time. But when I ask him how he got into clowning, he doesn’t let me finish the sentence before he declares, “I’ve never been a clown. Never did it.” Sure, Bozo was a clown – he had the red nose, the white makeup, the red fright wig and the big floppy shoes – but Joey was an actor. An actor who never went to clown college, never learned to juggle, never walked on stilts. To call himself a clown, he says, would be disrespectful to the people who have trained to be clowns.
The Greatest Show on Earth?
“Come on, Adam!” A 5-year-old tugs at his younger brother’s coat sleeve outside of the United Center. “We’re going to see the circus now. It’s the best thing in the whole world!” The two boys follow their parents inside and disappear into the sea of elementary schoolers and adults who are all there to see the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus. (The United Center hasn’t seen such crowds since U2 rocked the place in October.) I make my way into the arena and find my seat next to a family of four. The two children, a boy and a girl, are sitting at the edge of their seats and every few moments they look over at their parents and flash the most eager grins. Their excitement is contagious; I can hardly wait for the show to start.
About half an hour in, the girl seems to have lost all of her interest. She climbs onto her dad’s lap and lays her head down on his chest. She says she’s bored and asks if he’ll take her to the bathroom. They sneak out between acts when the clowns have center ring, and when they come back, it’s the boy’s turn to go. He misses star-clown Bello Nock’s imaginary crossbow act with a lucky audience member that has most of the crowd laughing and clapping. Bello is good, but he’s not your typical clown. Dressed in a black tuxedo with tails, he looks more like the ringmaster than the head clown. He doesn’t have a red nose or a white face and he’s not wearing a wig – of course, his hair does protrude about seven inches from his head and is an alarming shade of orange, but it’s all natural, or so he claims. With his daredevil stunts and clever slapstick acts, he keeps the audience’s attention. When he’s teetering on the top of a six-story, five-inch-wide pole, the audience members hold their breath. When he’s upstaged by his four-ton sidekick, Bo the elephant, the people laugh. When he waves, the crowd waves back. Bello never falls down, he never gets a pie in the face and he never rides a miniature tricycle. But his comic timing, exaggerated gestures, and, yes, balloons, prove that he’s and is a clown, nonetheless.
On my way out, I see a little girl in the corner of the hallway who looks as if she’s crying. Her dad is on his knees talking to her; he appears to be wiping tears from her cheeks. But when she turns around, I discover my observation is completely inaccurate. She flashes the most incredible smile and laughs as she touches the plastic, red nose her dad helped her put on. She’s a clown now, too.
Yama, anyone?
There is discrimination among clowns. Just as stage actors scoff at movie actors, and movie actors scoff at television actors, circus clowns scoff at birthday clowns and birthday clowns scoff at Shriner clowns. (The Shriners, really, have no one they can scoff at.) Birthday clowns may claim those Cirque du Soleil-type clowns to be a little too ambitious, a little too high falutin’. (“Would you really call them clowns?”) They seem to be more into showing off the talents they learned at some prestigious, audition-only clowning arts school than they are into making people laugh. Circus clowns and “professionally trained
clowns” may say those birthday clowns are a little too predictable, a little too boring. (“I would never do a birthday.”). But they don’t give them too much thought; they are just yama clowns.
Yama clowns? I ask one of the clowns in Chicago’s Midnight Circus to explain.
“All I’ve heard is, ‘Ya, I’m a clown … Ya-I’m-a-clown … Yama Clown. Ya I’m a clown ya I’m a clown! Yama Yama Yama Clown!'” George Fuller does jazz hands and offers a ridiculously oversized smile. Ya-I’m-a-Clown is equivalent to saying: “Hey, anybody can be a clown! It’s not hard!” Fuller’s fellow company members in the Midnight Circus laugh at the presentation of his word choice. They all know the term and they’ve all used the term. The four professionally trained clowns in Midnight Circus’s 14-member cast don’t do birthday parties or parades. A gig at FAO Schwarz as the world’s tallest elf is a possibility, but that’s only when the money gets tight.
If you ask company member Douglas Grew what he does for a living, he’ll give you an endearing, lopsided smirk and say, “I’m a clown.” Not a yama clown. A clown. After all, he studied commedia dell’arte in Italy and at the Ringling Brothers Clown College in Sarasota. He toured with Ringling, taught clowning at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and joined the Midnight Circus company three years ago. When he tells people that he’s a clown, though, he doesn’t get the most positive reactions. They automatically think birthday; they think Bozo.
“Most people have never stopped to think about clowning being a serious profession,” Douglas tells me. “It is a profession. We train. There’s more to it than Ronald McDonald. Interestingly enough, I know the first Ronald McDonald. Great guy. I’m not going to say his name, but he’s got the golden arches tattooed on his butt. You know, he did feel bad, I think, about sort of selling out.”
I did it my way
“When I was on Ringling, we always said ‘I’m going to leave this three-ring, write my own clown show and do it.’ And we’d always sit around and bitch and moan on the long train rides. ‘Oh, three rings? Forget this. You go out there and they only give you two minutes and they blow the whistle and turn the lights out and you have to jump around the elephant crap and ahhh! I’m an artist! I’m going to do my own show!”
After two years on the road as a Ringling clown, seven years teaching at the clown college and three years directing Circus Smirkus, Jeff Jenkins did start his own show – the Midnight Circus. Four years ago he and his wife Julie Greenberg, an actress and acrobat, decided they’d combine their talents and see what would happen “When Theater and Circus Collide.” Suitably enough, that was also the name for their first show. They called friends all over the country – ex-Ringling clowns, stage actors, acrobats from Circus Smirkus – and begged them to run off and, well, join the circus.
Jeff and I are sipping ginger ales in his sunshine-yellow living room after a Thursday night Midnight Circus rehearsal. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Andy Clyde and Bill Beven stare down at us from a vintage poster on the wall. “Les Pionniers de Rire,” the inscription reads: “The Pioneers of Laughter.” When Jeff gets up to let his two dogs outside, I stare at the poster. I had never thought of those men as clowns. Before I saw the Midnight Circus company rehearse that evening, I was leery about calling them clowns, too. The reviews of past shows in the Tribune and the Reader made them sound more like acrobats and actors.
In the beginning, Jeff tells me, they didn’t know how they should market the show. ” In our press kits we didn’t say ‘Come see the clown show!’ Because people wouldn’t,” he admits. “We had to trick them. And afterwards, they were like ‘That was like a clown show. He had a big nose.'” But it’s not really a clown show by American standards. Take one part Ringling, two parts Cirque du Soleil, a dash of Broadway and a pinch of Marcel Marceau, and you’ve got the Midnight Circus.
Jeff and crew are pushing the envelope by offering audiences something different than the floppy-shoed clown and the one-ring circus. And with this out there – and the new and improved Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus with its daredevil clown and the always astounding Cirque du Soleil with its sophisticated clown humor – who needs the basic birthday clown? I ask Jeff honestly: “Do you think the birthday clown has been replaced?”
“No,” he says. “There’s always going to be a market for that. Always gonna be a market for that.”
“Why?” I ask him.
He pauses and shrugs his shoulders: “Kids have birthday parties.”
Twisting the Night Away
Bob Hirsch has been invited to more birthday parties than I could ever dream of attending. But I’ve probably come home with more party favors – Hirsch always has to give his away. As a part-time party clown, he spends his weekends in strangers’ living rooms or backyards, entertaining children with magic tricks, interactive dance and balloon art.
It’s a Saturday in November and Bob has spent the morning blowing up dozens of yellow and brown balloons for a Harry Potter-themed party the next day. Brooms, he tells me, are the most logical choice for a party favor. Since there will be 50 children, he figures he might as well get a head start and make as many brooms as he can today, so that way he’ll have more time to do magic tricks tomorrow. Bob informs me that he takes his clowning very seriously. He doesn’t need to inform me – I can tell.
The clowning business isn’t all juggling balls and oversized shoes. It’s a cutthroat industry where agents try to beat each other out by lowering their prices or offering special “one-time only” deals. One Chicago company even calls people who’ve recently booked a party with someone else and sneakily offers them a better deal. “But they send out a really crappy clown,” says Bob, obviously bothered by this. “That’s where the industry gets its disservice. They’re sending somebody out who’s not trained. They know how to make a dog, they know how to make a flower, they know how to make a bear. But that’s it. I don’t even keep track of how much stuff I make.”
Bob put on his first red nose and started twisting balloons six years ago after a friend told him it was a good way to make a little extra cash. He had dabbled in magic as a kid and was labeled the good-hearted jokester by his family and friends, so becoming a clown was not an unnatural next step. He started working for a company that provided him with a suit and props and he ordered how-to videos on balloon making and magic. He attended clowning seminars in the area and joined a clown club, and before long, he was having custom clown suits made.
But he emphasizes that clowning is not his life. (“Again, this is not my full-time job,” he reminds me periodically throughout our conversation.) He works 50 hours a week as the security investigator for Loyola University Medical Center and is also a full-time dad and husband. The clowning is just something extra. Bob never wanted to run off and join the circus. He didn’t dream of going to clown college or starring in his own clown show. He didn’t even see the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus while it was in town, even though a clown was headlining. Bob has never taken his kids to the Midnight Circus in Chicago and the only Cirque du Soleil he’s seen has been on TV. And what he saw didn’t appeal to him too much. “It’s more performing arts than clowning,” he says, very matter of factly. When he left the entertainment company he was working for, the agents told him “you’ll never make it.” But Bob doesn’t want to make it. He just wants to have a good time, make some kids laugh and get a few extra bucks doing it.
“My favorite part is seeing the awe in a child’s face.” Bob smiles. (Bob smiles a lot.) “Like you just pulled off the easiest magic trick in the world and they’re like ‘ohhhhh, ahhhh.’ I mean, for me, that’s the best. When you did something that was really good and the kids are just dumbfounded. A lot of people just ask me to just do a magic show and I say ‘Sur
e, but for the same price you can get balloons and each kid can go home with something.'”
As Bob explains to me how much he enjoys doing balloon art, he walks to the other end of the room, digs through a duffel bag on the floor in front of the widow and pulls out four balloons and two small, rubber bouncy balls. He sits back down at the table and proceeds to blow up two of the balloons. As he’s talking to me, he’s twisting the balloons together so they look like a strand of DNA. He could do all this with his eyes closed. For Bob, twisting balloons is like tying his shoes – he just knows how. Next he somehow manages to insert a bouncy ball into each balloon without the balloons popping. “Wow!” I say. I don’t understand why the balloons don’t pop. I say wow again. I even squeal.
“Do I get to keep this?” I ask, as I turn the balloons upside down to watch the bouncy balls race inside their rubber tunnels.
“Yeah,” he laughs at me, just like I’m a 5-year-old. “That’s why I made it.” nyou
