Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (10 page)

“The firehouse is a slapstick gag,” Elmo explained. “A ‘slapstick’ is something you hit someone on the rear with and it makes a loud noise. During the Renaissance, the commedia dell’arte troupes used a pig bladder on a stick to make that sound. Today slapstick is just another form of that—a kick in the behind, a slap to the face, a bucket over the head.”

Indeed, once the clowns pick themselves off the ground and start to assault the house the gag moves inexorably toward the one action that always got a laugh: the bucket of water on the head of a clown. Before that, however, most of the clowns end up on the ground at least several more times. Four of us run toward the house and get knocked off our feet by an opening door. One person tries to climb the ladder only to be punched by the lady. And in the most dramatic incident of the act, Arpeggio enters the ring waving a four-foot ax, trips, swings around, and accidentally decapitates a seemingly helpful fireman. After a moment the audience realizes the head is fake and the fireman is only a dummy on top of the dwarf. Still the horror thrills.

“It’s violence,” Elmo explained. “Violence is funny to people if it happens to somebody else. They are not laughing with you, they are laughing
at
you. Let’s say you hate your boss or your teacher, and we have a gag where an authority figure is picked on. People love it. The audience lives vicariously through you. They can step out of their own parameters of good behavior. Why do you think Road Runner is so popular? Or Tom and Jerry? It’s because we like to watch other people getting hit. Clowns are like that. We are living cartoons.”

It was this transition from person to cartoon that was the most interesting and challenging for me. As a teenage actor, I was taught to be realistic; as a mime, I tried to be reflective; but as a clown, I had to learn to be exaggerated, in a sense unreal, beyond gender, beyond human, beyond constraint. Running around the ring in the firehouse gag day after day, week after week, I slowly began to make this transition, but to do it properly I had to get beyond the confines of my own body. The shoes helped in this matter; they were caricaturish and surreal. The costume helped; it was wider and taller than what any conventional person would wear. But the key to feeling less like a human and more like a clown, indeed the key to looking less like a person and more like a cartoon, was the same. In the end, it all came down to the face.

“Take a dab of white with your fingers. More than that, cover the tip until it’s dripping off. Good. Now take another finger. And a third.”

It was a little over two weeks before the season would begin when Elmo came to my apartment in Washington, D.C., to help me design my face. Dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, I sat before a mirror on the ottoman in my living room. Elmo lent me a woman’s knee-high stocking to pull over my head and hold my hair in place.

“So there it is,” I said when my hair had disappeared. “My face unadorned. How would you describe it?”

“It’s a plain face,” he said. “Not many lines. No outstanding features. You would make a great spy.”

I began to apply the clown white, a mix of petroleum jelly, titanium oxide, zinc oxide, and paraffin, which Elmo brought for the day. “Put a dab on your left cheek, then your right,” he said. He was dressed preppy in a white button-down shirt with his natural blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. He looked like a cross between a high school biology teacher and a surfer. “Then move to your forehead, your chin, your nose. Don’t be afraid to put it on thick.” The makeup felt milky and cold against my skin, sort of like a dab of Crisco shortening, or worse, curdled milk. I resisted rubbing it into my pores. “Rub it around quickly,” he said. “Don’t waste any time. There will come a time when you’re late for a show and you don’t want to be too slow. My makeup takes me thirty-five minutes and I hate it. We’re going to design you a twenty-minute face.”

After a while the clown white covered my skin. It made me feel excitedly messy, like spreading finger paint where it didn’t belong, but also slightly constrained, like dunking my head in a vat of Vaseline. Unlike my oval mime face a generation earlier, this face had the white right up to my hairline and underneath my chin. “In the show you’ll have to do your ears, your neck, the insides of your nostrils as well.”

“What about my eyelashes?” I said as I started to work the white into the crevices beneath my eyes.

“You’ll find out,” he said, and indeed I already had.

“Once it’s evenly smeared, take your open hand, the whole hand, and begin to pat out the rough spots. That way you’ll eliminate the streaks. It’s like putting your hand on a soft pat of butter and pulling up a thousand stalagmites. Later, those stalagmites will grab the baby powder and keep your face dry.”

As I proceeded to smear white around my face, Elmo began sketching some of the history of clowning that I would have to know. The first known instance of using humans as comic diversion, he said, was in the Dilemma festival of ancient Crete, in which slaves were offered freedom if they jumped over charging bulls (thus giving rise to the term “on the horns of a dilemma”). Later the ancient Greeks needed performers to get people in the mood for their outdoor festivals. They came up with the
phalla phoria
, men who strapped on giant phalluses and red noses and acted as if they were drunk.
Phalla phoria
were captured and turned into one of a dozen or so stock characters, characters that reappeared centuries later in the commedia dell’arte of the Renaissance. These traveling theatrical troupes, with the comic Harlequina, the young couple in love, and the villainous rival, soon spread throughout Europe. In France, they liked the characters but not the language and moved in the direction of pantomime. In England, they liked the characters but not the scripts and created their own story lines with enduring personalities such as Punch and Judy or Jumping Jack, the modern day Jack-in-the-Box.

The first person to link these characters with the circus, Elmo continued, was Joe Grimaldi, who in the 1760s put on a grotesque costume, chalked up his face, and performed in the English riding shows. It was this mix of styles that John Bill Ricketts copied in the first American circus and that continues to define the circus today: highly skilled performances by acrobats and animals juxtaposed with the humorous and bumbling antics of the clowns. The word “clown” itself, which derives from the Danish word
klunis
, or “clump of earth,” suggests this tension. Clowns were clods. They were the rustics or boobs, the ones who were laughed at when they came into the city or suddenly found themselves in the middle of the ring following an outstanding display of equestrian skill. They also stole the show. In addition to performing their standard routines the clowns often joked with the ringmaster or director. The ringmaster would be prim and formal in his red tie and tails, while the clown would be the foil in his mischievous costume and devilish white face. A century and a half later, it was this traditional type of whiteface style that I was trying to develop.

With the white now covering my face I looked like a piece of unformed clay. I began to move my muscles into various expressions: happy, sad, surprised, goofy. As I did, Elmo looked at the grooves above my eyebrows, searching for their range of movement. After a moment he sprang up from the couch, picked up a Q-tip from the table, and put a dot on my forehead half an inch above my right eyebrow. “You see that dot?” he said. “That’s the point at which your eyebrow moves the highest. That will be the peak of your clown eyebrow.” A good clown face, he explained, is divided into separate regions: eyes, nose, mouth. My eyebrows would begin at that point, then slowly cascade downward, echoing the curve of my eye and focusing attention ever so subtly on my nose and mouth.

We began to look at my cheeks. They were basically flat, though when I smiled a distinctive mound appeared at the height of my cheek-bones. Elmo put a dot just above that mound, then drew a line with a slight curve that ended at the base of my chin. He asked me to repeat it on the other side. I did, a bit wobbly, and he sat back to look. Again I logged through a range of faces. “Too narrow,” he declared. “Pat it out and start over.” I patted out the lines and drew two more that arched more strongly on their way to my chin like a pair of inverted bass clefs.

“Better,” he said. “Now bring the tops in like the lines of a heart.”

“I get it. That way they’ll point to my nose.”

“The nose is going to be the highlight of your face.”

I was starting to get warm. I could feel my skin itching underneath the makeup. I had developed a headache. Suddenly my whole body, my hands, my neck, even parts of my legs, seemed to be covered in white. Clowns, I realized, quickly become aware of the margins: white under the fingernails, white in the nostrils, white behind the ears and inside the lips. Clowning may literally be a white-collar job, but with all the grease in the nostrils it has a distinctly blue-collar smell. Moreover, just as a pizza lingers on the tongue for hours after it’s eaten, so a clown face lingers in the nose, the mouth, and especially the ears for days, even weeks on end. For months after I left the circus I could still feel the makeup lines on my face and feel my character living literally just beneath my skin.

Back in the mirror, we moved to my mouth. With my right pinkie I made a fingerprint on the left hinge of my mouth; with my left pinkie I repeated the step on the right. Then I cleaned the white off my bottom lip.

“Why only the bottom lip?” I asked.

“It preserves the distance between the nose and the mouth,” Elmo said. “Sometime when you’re driving, watch for a picture of Ronald McDonald. It looks like someone threw a tomato at his face, there’s just this big red blob. Remember, simplicity is best. You can always tell a circus clown from a birthday-party clown. Party clowns have those big banana mouths with little hearts and flowers all over their face. It gets too cluttered. It doesn’t read.”

When he talked about the purpose of a face, Elmo kept using words like “read,” as in “How will the face
read
from the back of the tent?”; “catch,” as in “How will that feature
catch
the attention of a child?”; and “sell,” as in “How will you
sell
an emotion during a gag?” A good clown face, he explained, has the ability to expand and contract, like Charlie Chaplin spreading his legs when he gets kicked from behind. Indeed, when we stopped to review the progress of my face it appeared to be quite flexible. The cheeks moved well. The negative space between my eyes and my eyebrows truly seemed to dance. But something was missing. We had two dominant elements that would be black—rounded eye-brows and curved cheeks-but nothing striking to bring the face together. I tried a star on my chin. “Too much like a party clown.” I tried an exclamation point between my eyebrows. “Too busy.” Finally I tried a triangle on my chin. Suddenly the face seemed to vibrate, to move the eye around more quickly, as if jolted by a bolt of electricity. The triangle, so unassuming, provided two elements: contrast to the loopy curves and opposition to the tapering lines. The triangle stayed. We were ready for color. Elmo went back to his story.

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.