I was with the Ringling Blue Unit forty-some years ago and we were playing Madison Square Garden in late April, when my clown partner for come in (the warm up before the show starts) decided he wanted to do a solo act with his pet dog, and so left me in the lurch with nothing to do for twenty minutes while the audience was filing in. I tried the old rubber ball balancing on the edge of a parasol routine, but that was a lame gag a hundred years ago. I needed a new gag.
There used to be a Greek place across the street from the Garden that made unrivaled bread pudding and sold a solid block of it for just a dollar. One day I was in there chowing down between shows, watching one of the proprietors stacking cans of black olives into a pyramid in their display window. It struck me that everyone who ever has watched some grocery clerk do that kind of thing secretly wished that the whole stack would collapse just as the last can was put on top. And BINGO, I had my new gag . . .
I went dumpster diving in the Garden, collecting empty pop cans and rinsing them out. It was disgusting how many of ‘em had soggy cigarette butts in them. When I finally had enough empty pop cans in a big canvas sack, I dragged them out at the beginning of come in and went to work in center ring, making a broad can pyramid. It took some trial and error. They couldn’t be stacked straight across, otherwise they always collapsed after about the sixth row up -- so I learned to stack ‘em in a slight curve. I managed to take up the whole 20 minutes of come in patiently and stoically stacking up my cans into a pyramid. No mugging or waving my arms around -- this was a classic running gag, not what we called a one-off (a gag that developed fast and had a violent blow off.) So the audience could watch me for a moment to see what I was doing, and then let their gaze wander to the twenty other clowns demanding their attention, and then occassionally coming back to me to see how my can pyramid was progressing. You could feel the audience suspense growing -- is he going to make it? I zealously guarded my edifice from the other clowns, who would zoom perilously close to it on unicycles or in kiddy cars.
Inevitably, just as the twenty minutes was up and the performance director got ready to blow his whistle to signal the start of the show, I proudly put the last can on top of my aluminum cairn -- while I surreptitiously gave the base a nudge with my clown show. The whole thing came crashing down as the whistle blew, and the audience gave a great audible sigh -- whether of sincere disappointment or “I knew it wouldn’t work” I never figured out. And then would come the biggest laugh I ever got in my professional clown career, and sometimes even a round of applause as I sadly scooped up the cans back into the sack and scrambled out of the way as the Opening parade of horses and elephants bore down on me.
After we left the Garden I kept picking up all the spare aluminum pop cans I could. To increase the size of my Tower of Babel. I was kinda picky, and never used a beer can -- even though I’m sure no one in the audience could ever see what kind of cans I was stacking.
The boss clown told me that the whole thing looked too shabby for Ringling Brothers, and bade me cover each can with bright paint and sequins. I told him where he could put his glamorous idea -- and we left it at that. Back in those golden days Ringling management believed in a sort of benign neglect when it came to clown alley; as long as you showed up relatively sober for work they didn’t much care what you did.
My gag was a hit throughout the Midwest that summer -- and some of the veteran clowns got hot under the collar. I won’t say they were jealous -- they just had trouble wrapping their old school comedy minds around the fact that I was getting the big boffos without resorting to dropping my pants or exploding something. Then in Kansas City my sack of cans disappeared. One evening they were leaning against my clown trunk in clown alley, and the next morning they were gone. Loudly exercising some of the mighty blasphemies that all true circus folk know, I started in dumpster diving again to rebuild my stock. But, alas, I ran into the curious and penny pinching folkways of the Midwest -- the building maintenance crews regarded all discarded cans as their own private property, and some shambling gypsy like me had no business dipping my mitts into their treasure trove. Whenever I managed to squirrel away a fair amount of cans, the overnight coliseum crew would divest me of my booty, and I’d have it all to do over again. When the show reached Denver I threw in the towel. Let the damn hewers of wood and drawers of mops have the damn cans. I could think of something else equally as risible.
But I never did. I ended the season doing come in with a large yellow papier mache banana shoved in my ear, walking around and responding with a hand cupped to my ear as the audience yelled “Hey, you got a banana in your ear!”
Does anyone still remember the original joke, I wonder? It was big in grade schools back in 1976.
