Big Shoes to Fill:
Clown College Tryouts

By Amy Fusselman

Clowns thrill me. I like talking to them. I have a feeling that someday one of them is going to tell me something very important about my life. I don't know why I think this, and it hasn't happened yet, but I still think it.

It's become a hobby of mine, trying to talk to clowns. They're not always easy to get to. I thought I'd have access to Chris Farley after I had the good luck to sit next to his manager's sister at a dinner party, but his gatekeepers still won't let me through. However, I have talked to other people: a woman who can make an electric razor play a guitar; a man who embroiders tiny paintings out of the colored thread from tube socks; a 6'5", 350-pound man who takes photos of himself throwing his friends in the air; and Pee Wee Herman's former assistant.

I've learned a lot from each of them, but I'm still not satisfied. I keep finding new clowns, and chasing after them. To interest me, a clown has to set off my internal clown detector, which means that when I hear about what he or she does, my ears start ringing and my mouth goes dry and I get very impatient.

The clowns I have talked to so far have not been the iconic, makeup-wearing ones. In the past, I would have said that that's because they haven't set off my detector. But now I realize they haven't set off my detector– not because they're not clowns--but because I've been a clown snob: I've thought that if a clown has to be the one to tell me something very important about my life, I want it to be a smart, good-looking, arty kind of clown. Not Bozo.

So, when I was reading the paper recently and saw an ad for the Manhattan-area tryouts for Ringling Brothers Clown College, I turned the page at first, because my clown detector did not go off. But then I turned the page back, wondering why. Why would my clown detector not go off when faced with a big, fat advertisement for an international clown college? And then I heard my voice in my head say, if you like clowns so much, go meet a regular clown, for god's sake.
So I picked up the phone and called the 800 number listed on the ad and started pumping the receptionist for information about what, exactly, a person learns at Ringling Brothers Clown College:

"Does Ringling have something that they sort of specialize in teaching? Like, are they known for mime or juggling or something?"

"Yes, they teach American style clowning."

"What's that?"

"Well, it's different between cultures, you know. What makes an audience in France laugh isn't the same as what makes an American audience laugh."

"What makes a French audience laugh?" The receptionist sighed. The person I had to speak to, he told me, was Dick Monday, Director of Ringling Brothers Clown College, who would be supervising the Manhattan area Clown College tryouts this weekend. I wasn't as excited as when my clown detector goes off, but I was interested, at least. I opened my datebook and scrawled Monday! across the Saturday square.

*****

The tryouts took place at noon at a dance studio in Times Square. When I arrived at 11:30, about 35 aspiring clowns--mostly white males in their twenties--were sprawled on the floor in drab sweatpants, stretching out. There were maybe ten women, a few of whom were black. There were no black, male aspiring clowns.

I stood awkwardly against one of the three non-mirrored walls with a few other people who seemed to be there for no good reason. The room was getting warm; aspiring clowns were peeling off their shirts and chatting. Against the opposite wall, three harried-looking women squatted over a scattering of head shots like they were tending a fire.

A lot was on the line for aspiring clowns today. Acceptance into Ringling Brothers' Clown College, a two-month intensive program in Venice, Florida, is a potentially huge step out of the birthday-party circuit. About a third of every Clown College graduating class is asked by Ringling to join the company, which means traveling around the world, performing in front of thousands, and getting paid.

Suddenly the room hushed. A thin man with glowing skin appeared in front of the wall of mirrors and said, "Hello, my name is Dick Monday" in a way that was not funny.

Dick Monday got down to business. He instructed the aspiring clowns to form a line and then, one at a time, walk to the center of the room, introduce themselves, and tell him why they wanted to be a Ringling Brothers clown.

I held my breath. I could not believe I was going to get to witness this: this was exactly the kind of deep, dark secret I was hoping to find out about aspiring clowns, but I thought I was going to have to work really hard to get it. I looked around to see if anyone had figured out that I didn't belong here. I reminded myself not to do anything that would betray my status as a voyeur.

After some shuffling and tittering, the aspiring clowns managed to form a line. The first in line, a breathless, mop-headed teen in a Motorhead T-shirt, came forward. He paused dramatically, took a breath, and shouted, "Hi, I'm Doug and I'm a senior in high school! And I want to be a clown because when you're a clown you can do whatever you want to!"

Oh my god, I thought, I'm in love. The other aspiring clowns clapped for Doug as he scurried back to the wall, blushing deeply. A chubby young man in a New York Mets cap leapt forward to take his turn. "Hi, I'm Bob and I'm a restaurant manager...but I shouldn't be! I'm gonna try out for Clown College until the day I die or until I get in!"

I wanted to cheer but I didn't want to call attention to myself, so I stood on my toes instead.

.A guy who was--sixteen? or forty?--with a shaved head, full beard and a rubber trout hanging from his neck, reluctantly walked to the center of the studio. He looked at the floor and mumbled: "Hi, I'm Rick. My calculus teacher saw a poster for Clown College and told me about it, so here I am."

Rick, in all honesty, had the strained, exaggerated meekness of a person who might start shooting us all momentarily. The aspiring clowns clapped politely.
Next came a sixtyish black woman--by far the oldest aspiring clown there. Her cheeks were shiny where she had smeared them with red lipstick--her version of a clown's red dotted-cheeks, I realized. She wore black stretch pants, a black tee shirt and pink ballet slippers. She smiled wanly and said: "Hi, I'm Londa and I work for Housing, and in a few months I'll be retiring. And I want a new career!"

The aspiring clowns applauded wildly for Londa, whooping and whistling, before having their enthusiasm checked by the next aspiring clown, a classically handsome Brit. He projected: "Hello, I'm Jake and I graduated from the Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts. The reason I'm here is that I kept auditioning for 'Hamlet' and they kept giving me gravedigger part."

The aspiring clowns clapped weakly, seemingly rattled by Jake's pedigree. I wondered if it was a given that every audition in New York City has its token offbeat, Ivy League, George Plimpton-type.

The booming voice of a stout woman in cat eye glasses jolted me out of my thoughts: "Hi, I'm Celia and I work as a programmer for my church! I've been a party clown for six months! And I'm here because I believe God is calling me to clowning! I eat clowns, sleep clowns, I even dream clowns. I see clowns everywhere!”

I recognized Celia's face from an advertisement for a play currently off-off Broadway and wondered if she was putting on an act or not. And then I thought that perhaps every aspiring clown I had just seen--every one who I had believed was telling me their absolute, god's honest truth--was actually acting. This thought disturbed me greatly, even though I realized how childlike it was. But it gave me a glimpse into why I have talked to real people clowns rather than circus ones. Because real people clowns do absurd things in their lives, period. They're not putting on an act. But circus clowns are. And even though they might believe wholeheartedly in their craft, the bottom line is, they are performers. They might be telling a truth, but they can't be relied upon to tell their truth.

As I fretted over this realization, the final aspiring clown in line ambled to the center of the studio. He was a skinny kid, maybe eighteen, with a Grateful Dead T-shirt and long, stringy hair tied in a ponytail that reached to his butt. He coughed, then raised a skinny fist and yelled weakly: "Hi, I'm Greg and I'm from Maine and it took nine hours to get here! And I'm here because I have to get out of Maine!"
*****

Next, Dick led the group through some breathing and stretching exercises, then several inner-clown-revealing labors such as: "Act like a lizard; now act like a creature that's half-human/half-lizard; now act like a human with one lizard trait."
One exercise that was particularly interesting to watch was the one where Dick instructed the clowns to "imagine all the people in the room are strangers and you're in a bad neighborhood." The aspiring clowns walked quickly around each other, avoiding eye contact. Then Dick said, "Now imagine one person is a bad person, and you as a group are going to decide who it is." Slowly, the aspiring clowns formed pairs, then quartets, until a group formed and circled menacingly around the only person who hadn't found a partner: it was Londa, the soon-to-be-retiree who had previously inspired so much applause.

Finally, Dick announced that there would be a break. I made a beeline for him. "Mr. Monday?''

He smiled and lifted his eyebrows so high that they merged into his hairline.
I introduced myself and started asking questions. I started with the one that the Ringling receptionist wouldn't answer, about what constitutes American-style clowning.

Dick seemed peeved by the question. "Ringling Brothers does not specialize in teaching American style clowning," he said, eyebrows avalanching. "We teach all types of clowning." In fact, he said, one of the college's faculty members is Yuri Belov, the former Director of Clowning for the Moscow State Circus.

He explained that Russian clowning is much more structured than American clowning. A Russian clown's notion of improvisation, he said, is the spontaneous addition of a facial tic, whereas an American clown will improvise whole setups between "beats"--i.e., laughs. A five minute routine should have about 30 beats, "if you can get them all," Dick said.

I tried to find out something about the kind of clown Dick was, and was surprised to learn that the only makeup he uses while clowning is a little white on his lower lip, and some lines around his eyes and eyebrows to make them pop.

"You're not a clown with an expression painted on your face?" I asked.

"If a clown's expression is painted on his face, he's a bad clown," Dick said. The idea behind makeup, he explained, is to make the face transparent, to make all the expressions as visible as possible. That can't happen if one expression is painted on.

I still couldn't believe he worked for Ringling and he wasn't a Bozo. "What about the nose? Do you wear the nose?"

"I wear the nose. You need to give people something to read."

I looked at Dick's nose, trying to see what I would read there now. There was a prominent V-shaped scar running across the bridge. I wanted to touch it.

He caught me staring and took a step backwards. "I have a long nose" he said, "a very human nose. By distorting it, and rounding it off, you immediately let the audience know 'I'm a clown.'"

I asked him what he wears while clowning.

"A 1940s-style brown suit," he replied.

What is this purist doing here? I thought, still in clown-snob mode. But I didn't want to betray my bias, so I asked: "Why do you think Ringling Brothers is not held in such high esteem as a company like Cirque du Soleil?"

Dick looked taken aback. "Well, you have to understand that what we're doing here is arena clowning. This is for thousands of people. Cirque du Soleil is very intimate and they have clowns who've spent ten, twenty, thirty years on their craft."

"So why do clowns have such a bad reputation? What about the whole 'evil clown' thing?"

"Hmmm. Well, because of the grotesque nature of clowning, clowns are an easy target. But it's about people's experiences, too. I'd say one out of every five people I meet has had a bad clown experience."

"Really. Why?"

"Well, it usually happens with kids under three. There's no distance. And it's the parents. The parents see a clown and what do they do? They thrust the kid in the clown's face and say 'Look! See the clown?' And the kid's like, ‘Aaaah!’ It can be scarring. The public also isn't very well educated about clowns because of all the commercialization of them."

"Like Ronald McDonald?"

"Yes. You think a clown is makeup and wigs and big shoes. But some of the greatest clowns of our time have been people like Dick Van Dyke and Danny Kaye, but we don't think of them as clowns."

I paused. "What is it that clowns do?"

Dick touched his finger to his lower lip. "Clowns give love and get love back," he said. "And people in an audience with a clown can be very vulnerable because of that."

"So that's where some of the fear comes in," I said, feeling no fear, thinking I love you.

He looked into my eyes and smiled. "Yes," he said.

***

Amy Fusselman is the only Crimewave contributor who has appeared on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 100 most creative people, a fact which makes us even more proud to know her and have her as a friend and contributor. Her zine Bunnyrabbit (published until 1998) was one of our favorites. Now she has a web site, Surgery of Modern Warfare. Her amazing first book, The Pharmacist's Mate just came out in paperback.

Back to Crimewave Articles