The Noses of Clown Alley

Richard Mann had one of the longest noses ever recorded in clown alley.

Of all the appendages on the human face, the nose is the most fixed. It cannot move, like the mouth, or wiggle up and down, like eyebrows, or open and shut, like eyelids -- if you practice hard enough, you can even move your ears more than you can your nose. Yet down through the ages the nose has always assumed the highest importance when it comes to comedy and clowning.

Just think of some of the great comic noses of the past -- the schnozzola of Jimmy Durante; the ripe red rum blossom of W.C. Fields; Bob Hope’s insouciant ski snoot; and the classic thrust of France’s most famous dueler and jester, Cyrano de Bergerac.

Then there are the wonderful noses of clown alley. On the Ringling show I don’t believe anyone ever achieved the length of Richard Mann’s prolonged proboscis. It was done with a combination of latex and nose putty, and extended more than four inches. Lou Jacobs, of course, initially started with a red rubber ball, hollowed out on one side and kept in place with fishing line. Felix Adler had a flashy rhinestone imbedded in his red rubber nose. And various clowns have had noses that lit up like light bulbs or honked when they were pinched. If the latex is thin enough, you can inhale through your clown nose and make it collapse in a manner that children find irresistibly droll.  

When I was a registrant at the Ringling Clown College, each of us was taught how to make a life mask with plaster of Paris so we could mold distinct clown noses should we choose to enhance our own snouts. Since my nose was rather longish to begin with, I stuck to coloring it with just a bit of rouge. But many others, such as Steve Smith, Ron Severinni, and Chris Bricker, carefully crafted their own unique clown nose casts. And Bricker went one step further when he colored his latex model -- he painted it in rainbow stripes.

While beards have been used to comic effect from time to time, it is the moustache, located directly below the nose, that has offered the most prolific comic possibilities -- all the way from Chaplin’s toothbrush tuft to the ferocious upper lip shrubs worn by many of Mack Sennett’s slapstick minions. In clown alley Mark Anthony produced a steady supply of rubber noses with long black mustachios attached -- when the mood struck him, he’d put one on himself for a show or two. He gave me one that featured a hideously bulbous and cratered beak with a tremendously long black mustache attached underneath. It obscured nearly half my face, so I used it when the clowns were dragooned into doing animal walks from the train to the arena for the local media early on load out day. That way I saved myself the bother of putting on my full whiteface makeup before breakfast -- a ghastly prospect for the weak-minded and lackadaisical joey, which I certainly was.

The nose enjoys a special status in human anatomy and history. In Mediterranean countries the size of a man’s nose indicates the potency of his manhood. To this day in China most foreigners are referred to as ‘long-nosed devils.’ You need a green thumb to tend a garden, but you must have a ‘nose for news’ to be a successful reporter. In the novel ‘Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne wrote an entire chapter devoted specifically to noses, which claimed, among other things, that breastfed infants developed stronger, healthier noses -- for obvious reasons. Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a sword fight, and replaced it with one made of gold and silver. A broken heart may last forever, but physicians say a broken nose is the fastest healing part of the human body -- usually fully healed within a single week.

Seeing as how we collectively cherish our noses, the true clown is inevitably drawn to distorting his or her own nose in weird and comical ways. Nose putty, an amalgam of beeswax, chicle, and plasticene, has been used for the past two hundred years to add body and length to a performer’s proboscis. I recall Otto Griebling massaging a lump of the stuff to warm it up before applying it to his own rather modest nose. When the putty began to lose it’s hold, he invariably threw it up to stick on the ceiling of whatever building we were playing. I suppose most of those wads are still up there -- ready to give archeologists in the distant future conniption fits trying to figure out what it is and what it was used for.

In the good old days a rubber nose was held on with spirit glue -- a nasty concoction that smelled bad and didn’t hold very well. Most of the veteran clowns I worked with eschewed it -- using instead Dentu Creme to cement their rubber noses onto their clown faces. I myself began using a red foam rubber ball, split down the middle, as a clown nose when I switched from doing a whiteface to an August back in the 1990’s. They were lightweight and cheap. But, like all clown noses past and present, they pinched the nostrils pretty tight. That is why in most photos of clowns with false noses you’ll notice the mouth is wide open. It’s the only way to get enough air. Which explains that classic ‘gaping’ look that retro clown photos always have.