The Peter Pitofsky Gag

Long years ago, when I still had a passport to Cloud Cuckoo Land, I was hired to clown at Disneyland. The one in Anaheim.

The pay was good, and so for once I was able to send a plenteous amount back to the wife & kiddies; a source of pride for me and some satisfaction to the little woman, who usually had to make do with the sad leavings of a mud show clown's salary.

My roommate while there was the one and only Peter Pitofsky. A comic nonpareil who is a combination of Harpo Marx, Buster Keaton, Rasputin, and Scheherazade.

There were thirty clowns that season at Disneyland, and the cry echoed far and wide in clown alley that "No one can work with Peter Pitofsky -- he's too crazy!" And true it was, this master merrymaker improvised almost every performance he gave. One never knew if he would spend twenty minutes silently and heroically tangled up in a microphone cord or  do a dead-on riff on Sylvester Stallone. His genius was untrammeled by any consideration of the Fourth Wall or gravity or the dimensions of space and time. And so no one wanted to work with him -- it was, all claimed, like trying to perform with a tornado.

Ever ready to challenge the status quo, I took up the gauntlet and told Peter we could work up a peachy keen carpenter gag. He was touched by my desire to embrace his wild and wanton ways, and we scheduled a run-through at the Disney rehearsal hall for 7 p.m. that night, after the day's funny business was done.

He never showed up. But that was part and parcel of his genius; time has no meaning for him. Since we roomed together, he could not escape my repeated attempts to chain him down to an appointment. Finally, after numerous futile attempts to get him to commit to something diurnal, I simply got the props together one evening and we rehearsed in our living room. The clatter and thumps caused consternation throughout the building; the landlord was about to call in the SWAT team, when we at last finished and went to bed -- having birthed the Mother of all Carpenter Gags in just under 35 minutes.

To attempt a description of this two-by-four and hammers epic is futile. I mapped out the basic premise; we would bring in some boards and some tools, fumble with a pair of saw horses, and end by losing our pants and pelting each other with white goo. The rest was up to Peter.

We premiered at the Main Street Pavilion on a Sunday, when several of the regular clown acts were off at church or nursing hangovers.

We were a succes d'estime. All the clowns working that day ditched their regular assignments to view our maiden voyage into madness. They laughed immoderately throughout. But the regular customers, a cosmopolitan mob of tourists gathered from Tokyo, Oslo, Burbank, and Soweto, sat on their hands.

I can't really blame them, either. After the first smack of a board Peter was holding sent me tumbling, things, to say the least, got out of hand. For reasons that no one can explain, least of all Peter himself, my partner pulled out an iron and attempted to iron not only the boards, but the tools, the saw horses, and my workman's blouse. It was not plugged in, thank goodness, but the audience didn't know that, and my indignant howls of pain when Peter slid the iron over me were met by puzzled and concerned silence from the civilians. The professionals, as I say, were rolling around like tumbleweeds.

And so it went. Peter did a break dance routine, scattering mallets and chisels about (luckily all made of foam rubber). He spotted a likely looking blonde in the audience and abandoned me to my fate to play footsie with her.
 In a word, he was being Peter.
 I managed to pull him back onstage for the blow off, but that, too, was nothing like we had planned it. Or I had planned it, I should say. By now Peter had forgotten I existed, being egged on by the roars of the other professional clowns to new heights of anarchy. Instead of dropping his pants, he began eating the white goo -- which was made of glycerin and shaving soap. Bowing to the inevitable, I started eating it with him. I managed two mouthfuls before rushing from the stage to gag up bubbles, but Peter manfully stuck it out for another quart or two, then did a back flip, and went back to the blonde in the audience before I managed to totter out and drag him away -- to the raucous accolades of our peers, but only dumbfounded silence from the regular crowd.

We were not allowed to do the gag again. Which was fine with me. There are times even today when I still detect a soupcon of Old Spice shaving soap after enjoying a good meal.

Since those halcyon days Peter has gone on to travel the world with his solo menagerie of insanity. The last I heard from him, he was on the beach at Waikiki in something called CabaRAE. Reading some of his reviews from that venue, it is easy to see that the critics are as thoroughly intrigued and baffled by him as was that crowd at Disneyland; plaudits rain down on him, but in rather ambiguous terms. But then, all genius is an enigma to us mere mortals.