The Greatest Comedy Movie in the World

It was Chico, Chico Severinni, who kept pushing the idea on Steve Smith and I.

"A good comedy movie will make us rich!" he insisted, as we sat in the Ringling clown alley back in 1972, putting on our makeup and blowing up a dozen red and yellow Qualetex for the balloon chase. The show originally provided clown alley with cheap, thin, Chinese latex balloons, as part of our so-called 'performance budget,' but Mark Anthony, the Producing Clown that season, quickly tired of how often they burst long before we even began the balloon chase out in the audience and so he shelled out the money from his own pocket for the American-made Qualetex brand of balloons. They never burst prematurely, but were the dickens to blow up by mouth. By the end of the season Chico, Smith, and I had embouchures strong enough to play the Star Spangled Banner solo on a tuba.

 But in 1972 Smith and I didn't pay much attention to Chico. We were both secretly plotting to leave the show at the end of the season, to study pantomime in Mexico with our pantomime instructor from the Ringling Clown College -- Sigfrido Aguilar. Smith was looking for a higher art form in which to practice his winsome ideas of comedy, while I just wanted to capture belly laughs in complete silence -- as I had seen Red Skelton do with his broad pantomimes. So we saved up every peso we could and surreptitiously began practicing Spanish with each other.

"Que aburrido es nuestro amigo" Smith said to me, laboriously picking out each word from his Webster's Spanish/English dictionary. 

"Tienes razon!" I replied stoutly, having searched my own Webster for ten minutes before finding a good response. 

Smith and I left the show at the end of the season, the two of us politely turning down new contracts from the circus owner himself -- Irvin Feld. 

I have written of my Mexican pantomime adventures elsewhere; suffice it to say that our sojourn and study were cut short by girlfriend trouble on the part of Smith and persistent Mexican parasites on my part. We were both back with Ringling, as a clown team doing advance publicity, in the spring of 1974. 

And there was Chico, now the Boss Clown, insistent as ever:

"You guys, do you know how much money that movie The Sting made for Redford and Newman? Millions! And it wasn't even that good of a comedy, man. We just gotta write a comedy movie so we can cash in on the gravy boat!"

Despite his skewed metaphor, Smith and I were in a mood to listen now -- we both needed extra money. Smith wanted to get married, and I had sent in my papers to Salt Lake City to be called as a proselyting missionary, at my own expense, for a two year stint.

How hard could it be to write a smash comedy movie?

And so, while the show played Madison Square Garden for ten weeks that spring, Chico, Smith, and I huddled together into the wee hours of the morning, concocting a film script that was to be the greatest comedy movie in the world. Our working title was "Birdbrains."

I acted as scribe, writing the whole thing down longhand on several yellow legal pads, using a blue Bic pen. 

The plot, if you could call it that, concerned three wacky inventors who were determined to bring peace to the world through their inventions. 

Dialogue was not our strong point, admittedly. Although there were a few verbal gems (at least I think of them as brilliant -- since I created most of them.) In one a famous surgeon has a stubborn patient on the operating table who refuses to be stitched up. The surgeon shrugs his shoulders and mutters "Suture self" as he walks away. 

The other bit of dialogue is between two of the inventors, who we never got around to actually naming -- just calling them Inventor One, Inventor Two, and Inventor Three:

One: What did Jack say to the Beanstalk?

Two: I dunno, what?

One: I don't like your altitude.

On the other hand, I still think some of the gags we came up with are Grade A. Chico thought up downhill boots -- when soldiers put them on it was like marching downhill, and so the troops never actually felt like stopping to fight, but just marched away into the distance. I contributed the idea of barbed wire that replaced the sharp spikes with feathers, so warriors trying to get through it would come down with a fit of the giggles instead of getting sliced and diced. Smith came up with an interesting love angle for the three inventors -- three girlfriends who, due to a chemical explosion they were exposed to, turn into pink flamingos at sunset. See, that's why the name of the script is Birdbrains . . . 

Anywho. Our film ends with a tremendous pie fight at the United Nations, after which peace and plenty descend on the planet and the three inventors are made the Supreme Magistrates of the world. And another chemical explosion turns their girlfriends into vampire bats, which chase the three inventors off screen for the blow off.


We managed to finish the script just as the show finished up at Madison Square Garden. Since I had a Remington portable typewriter, I promised Chico and Smith I would type the whole thing up, and then we could send it off to somebody or other in Hollywood and our fortunes would be made . . . 

I put the yellow legal pads into a small footlocker where I kept my growing collection of Pocket Books paperbacks -- and promptly forgot about it for the next forty-five years. 

Last week, as I was repacking my circus journals into a new plastic bin, several brittle yellow legal pad pages fluttered out onto the floor. They were all that was left, apparently, of the old Birdbrains movie script. I have no idea where the rest of the script might be, or how these few scraps survived the ravages of time and neglect.

There were six pages. But I felt they really didn't belong to me, and I didn't want to keep them. They made me tired and sad. I stuffed them in an envelope to mail to Steve Smith, who now helps run the Circus Center in San Francisco. He probably knows where Chico Severinni is -- I don't anymore. 

I still like the idea of feathered barbed wire; the world is sadly more in need of it today than back in 1974.