The Ringling clown alley where I started as a First of May back in 1971 patiently put up with a lot of things. Bad lighting. Dirt. Lack of decent chairs to sit in. Fluctuating temperatures that left us freezing in one town and broiling in the next. Rats in our trunks. Pigeons in the rafters dropping their soft white regards on our heads. The smelly proximity of elephant manure piles. Obnoxious guest clowns. Chiggers. And once, in South Carolina, an arena management that put up signs on all the men’s rooms reading “NO CIRCUS PERSONNEL ALLOWED!” But we did come close to mutiny once -- over balloons.
We were doing a spirited balloon chase that season -- wherein an annoying balloon vendor up in the stands has his balloons stolen by a nimble clown. The vendor gives chase as the first clown passes the balloons to a second clown, and so on -- until the final clown takes a spectacular header with the balloons grasped to his chest, popping them all in a glorious burst of noise. Naturally, this required a new set of balloons for each show. The circus paid for our balloons but we had to blow them up ourselves. Which was considered a task more abhorrent than working on a chain gang. Boss clown LeVoi Hipps knew better than to ask any of the veteran clowns to blow up balloons, so he charged the First of Mays -- all twelve of us -- with the onerous job. Eager to show our worth as part of the alley, we at first took turns inflating the balloons with pride and zeal. That lasted for about one week. Then no one would do it.
LeVoi finally had to get tough. He made blowing up the balloons a punishment for minor infractions such as tardiness or excessive drunkenness (in those more elastic times a tipsy clown was not considered incapacitated, just selfish if he didn’t share his bottle of hootch.) That made the chore even more despised. Looking back, I think the main reason we hated it so much was that the show provided us with the cheapest balloons possible -- made in China of a latex so chintzy it exploded in our faces more often than not. Why we didn’t just all pitch in to buy an inexpensive foot pump to blow them up with a minimum of fuss and bother I don’t know. But then, clowns are not known for their analytical skills or cool, dispassionate reasoning. Things got so bad that at one point we had to drop the balloon chase entirely -- we refused to blow them up at all because inflating them ruined the makeup around our lips. Then Performance Director Charlie Baumann got into the act.
“Get that verdammt balloon chasing back into the show -- schnell! Or I dock your salary -- Verstehst du alle?” he roared at us one afternoon before the matinee. His message was very clear and precise, so we drew straws. Chico drew the short straw. He was stuck with blowing up balloons for the rest of the season. But, being Chico, he managed to get out of the job by the simple expedient of having his marks do it for him. For Chico was a loan shark of sorts. Many of the roustabouts, and some of the new clowns and showgirls, often fell short of funds a day or two before payday on Friday. And Chico was always glad to lend them five or ten dollars to tide them over -- for a considerable vigorish. I had to borrow from him once or twice myself. Those debtors who had trouble paying him completely back on time were offered a merciful reprieve -- if they agreed to blow up the balloons for a week. Sort of like a mafia version of Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence . . .
The connection between clowns and balloons goes back to the inflated pig bladders on a stick of medieval court jesters. Or perhaps even further back -- apparently ancient vendors in Greece and Rome offered inflated sheep intestines to those with a drachma or two burning a hole in their toga. I like to think that the comic playwright Aristophanes couldn’t resist inserting some business with an inflated bladder or intestine into one of his lost Athenian comedies.
British scientist Michael Faraday invented the first latex balloons in 1824. He liked to fill them with helium and let them float away over the Kentish countryside. His balloons had to be powdered inside and out with flour to keep the tacky caoutchouc from sticking together into a flaccid uninflatable sheet.
Modern colored balloons were first introduced at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 -- where patrons could purchase balloon zeppelins, espirals, dollies, mouse heads, and bunny heads. My researches have not yet pinpointed the exact date when pencil balloon sculpting became identified with clowns. Magicians were using them by the late 1940’s in the Midwest. By the time the Tillotson Rubber Company came out with an improved latex pencil balloon in the 1950’s, circus clowns and balloons were already verging from the iconic to the cliche. Today the best quality circus balloons in America are made by Qualatex. In England most clowns use Betallatex brand balloons.
My favorite clown routine with balloons has always been Bigger & Bigger. You can see a masterful version of this old routine in the Laurel & Hardy movie ‘Saps at Sea.’
The symbiosis of clowns and balloons seems to be kaput nowadays. The balloons have floated away to other venues, and clowns have become corrupted archetypes exploited for horror movies and sadly prominent in police blotters . . .
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