The Hats of Clown Alley

A clown without a hat is like a bird without a beak; practically useless.

A hatter never instructed us at the Ringling Clown College, but it might have been a nice academic touch. Can you picture Laurel and Hardy without their bowler hats? Or Chico Marx without his pointy hat? Or Harold Lloyd without his straw boater? And those towering, garish stovepipe hats that W.C.Fields sported were sight gags in and of themselves!

No, hats play a vital part in maintaining a clown character, as well as being one of the most versatile props a comedian can posses.

I never cared for those miniature top hats or peaked hats that whiteface clowns attached to the top of their bald wig. Too cutesy for me. And you couldn’t do anything with it, because it didn’t come off. As useful as an air horn to a cat burglar.

The pointy hat is a good, all-around headpiece for active circus clowns. Made properly, they have a fine balance so you can juggle with them. Here’s how they are made in clown alley:

Take a used men’s felt hat. Cut off the hatband. Dye it whatever outlandish color you wish. Soak the hat in sugar water for stiffening (one part sugar to two parts water) for about an hour. Remove from the sugar water and immediately pull the crown of the hat over a football until it forms a point. Let it dry a few hours. Voila! A pointy hat is born. When it gets dirty and starts losing its shape, you can wash it and resoak it in sugar water, then pull it over a football again to make it look practically brand new.

But for my money the bowler hat is the top performer when it comes to comedy. It looks funny; it sits securely on the head even during the most frantic chase; it’s sturdy; and it lends itself perfectly to a myriad of mixed up possibilities. To see bowler hats put through their paces by master clowns, just watch the beginning of Laurel & Hardy’s silent two-reeler ‘Bacon Grabbers.’   

A bowler hat makes a satisfying “thunk!” when you hit another clown over the head with the brim, and it won’t cause a concussion. And it’s the perfect head piece for the old hello/goodbye routine. One clown meets another and politely raises his hat to him, while the other clown just as politely holds out his hand in fellowship. Seeing their mistake, they switch tactics; the first clown putting his hat back on and extending his hand, while the second clown puts down his hand and lifts his hat in greeting. It can go back and forth like this ad infinitum.

You can balance the brim of a bowler hat on your nose, then let it fall gracefully in place onto your noggin; this never fails to delight the kiddies, and even the grownups think it must take years of practice. It took me all of ten minutes to master, and I’m a Grade A klutz.

Costume shops stock rather cheap and flabby bowler hats. Most of the professional clowns I worked with bought their bowlers from expensive haberdasheries in New York or Chicago. They were silk lined and stiff as the British upper lip. Consequently, they were not to be messed with in the slapstick rough and tumble of the circus. Dougie Ashton, the Australian clown, bought his directly from a department store in Brisbane and had them shipped out to him. His elegant black derby was a startling contrast to the rest of his outfit, which consisted of a purple jacket patched like an old fashioned inner tube, a collarless shirt, a necktie that appeared to have gone through a paper shredder, baggy pinstriped pants, and a pair of Army boots that dated back to the Boer War.

It took him three months to get a new hat whenever he ordered one, so he was particularly finicky about it.

“Which one of you bahsterds got baby powder on me hat?” he’d roar in vexation if he found a few grains of talcum on it. Since we all used baby powder to set our greasepaint by applying it in great billowing clouds each day, that was rather a moot question.

The other standard headgear in clown alley was the top hat. A universal symbol of dignity and elegance, it never failed to raise a laugh when perched on the head of a zany. Swede Johnson always wore one, when he was not playing a Keystone Kop. In fact Swede went all the way, also wearing an elegant cutaway tailcoat and black dress trousers with a black stripe down the side. He offset this with white nurse’s shoes. With his stark white face, he looked like a small town undertaker during the McKinley administration. One of his favorite walk around gags, which Irvin Feld hated and kept trying to get him to drop, was to simply walk around the arena dolefully carrying a large suitcase on which was stenciled SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATOR. I don’t know why Swede thought this was funny, but he did. Audiences pretty much scratched their heads over it. When I asked him one day what was supposed to be so hilarious about it, he told me graciously “Aw, go to hell, you pinhead!”  

Steve Smith, who we nicknamed ‘The Little Fellow’ in recognition of his resemblance to Chaplin’s ‘The Little Tramp,’ wore a crushed top hat, much like Harpo Marx. It had originally been an opera hat, one of those contraptions that is flat and then pops up like spring snakes in a peanut brittle can. But the springs broke so that it was only half open. It gave Smith’s clown character a rakish winsomeness.

For my headgear I initially chose a cotton twill bucket hat, because I could buy them at any five and dime for fifty cents. I always bought two; one my size and one a size larger. That way I could put the bigger hat over the smaller one and whenever I greeted someone in the audience I lifted the bigger one, leaving the smaller one on my head. It always got a laugh. I used to throw one into the audience and then have the audience members throw it back at me, to see if I could catch it on my head. This was a good stretch gag, or accordion gag, when Baumann would whistle out the clowns during a wardrobe malfunction or some other glitch that prevented the next act from going on. The gag had to be flexible, timewise, since we never knew how long we would be needed as a diversion -- anywhere from twenty seconds to twenty minutes. Most of the time I would get my hat back, no problem. But occasionally some wisenheimer would think it funny to keep it. Or someone would throw it smack into a pile of unsavory sweepings. Either way, I just went out the next day and bought another one.

Later in the season I read about the Chapeau Act in a magic catalogue and sent away for one. The Chapeau Act was a Vaudeville staple before moving pictures arrived. It’s a thick black pancake of velvet, with a hole in the middle. With various twists and turns the chapeau can be turned into a turban, a Napoleon hat, a tricorn, a nun’s wimple, a pirate hat, and various other kinds of hats. It came with an instruction booklet, and soon I was “amazing my friends and family” by suddenly becoming a gun-toting cowboy with the flick of my chapeau. It was a very effective routine, and I thought I could add chapeaugraphy to my act, like the musical saw I was also learning to play -- but the inside rim of the chapeau rubbed my clown white completely off at my forehead; so every time I used it I had to run back to clown alley and repair the damage before appearing again. That was too inconvenient, so I regretfully put the chapeau away in my clown trunk for a future day when I would do comedy without makeup -- maybe as a stand up comic or as a movie character actor.

Out of curiousity I just went online to see if they still make them today. They do! The Abbott’s Magic Company sells ‘em for thirty bucks. (And NO I don’t get anything for mentioning their company.) I just might invest in one -- it might come in handy if and when my Social Security checks stop coming and I have to go back to street performing to make a living!