Remembering Elmo Gibb

In 1997 I went back to work for Ringling Brothers on their Blue Unit as a clown. I had just returned from my proselytizing mission in Thailand and had tried going to the University of Minnesota to get a degree in Theater. Their theater department was world-famous, with Frank Whiting running the Show Boat on the Mississippi River each summer -- featuring old fashioned melodramas and vaudeville olios that I thought would be just perfect for my hammy buffoon abilities. Alas, I was wrong -- as usual.

Even though Dr. Whiting was a member of my church, and, in fact, I was his Home Teacher, he cut me no slack during my audition for a part in Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid. Halfway through my reading I sneezed violently because of all the dust in the fore cabin of the Centennial Show Boat; Dr. Whiting immediately ended my audition with a kindly thank you and a gentle nod towards the door to speed me on my way. 

Thinking perhaps I could increase my theatrical skill set by working as a stage manager at one of the little theaters scattered throughout the Minneapolis campus, I took on the task for an experimental piece where the actors sat on black wooden cubes and talked dirty to the audience. It got great reviews in the student newspaper, The Minnesota Daily, but the University administration shut it down after just one performance. Not because of the filthy language, they said, but because the actors smoked onstage during the performance, which violated thousands of Fire Department regulations.

My classes bored me; my books cost a fortune; and my parents, initially so encouraging when I began my college career, started to drop unsubtle hints about paying a little something for my room and board (admittedly, I ate more than the two of them put together.) For all these reasons I decided that college life was not for me and rang up Irvin Feld at the circus home office in Washington D.C. to ask for a clown job. He was only too happy to put me back on the Blue Unit, where the clowns were in a state of muted mutiny against the Performance Director, Charlie Baumann, because he had started demanding kickbacks for not reporting tardiness and other minor offences to the home office. Also their new boss clown was going through a marital crisis and became so distracted and melancholy that he stopped caring about laughter -- always a fatal mistake with a boss clown. 

So when I arrived at clown alley in the middle of the season I found it to be in a sad state. And I'm glad to say that after my arrival I did my best to make things even more chaotic.

I immediately started sparks flying with the inimitable Elmo Gibbs. An Ivy League grad with a puckish sense of humor, Elmo thought my whiteface clown makeup was a Kabuki mask and began analyzing it in excruciating detail -- using terminology I had never heard before, and which I suspect was completely made up. When I told him to please shut up about directing me in a modern version of The Forty-Seven Ronin he took it amiss and began needling me about my religion. His idea of a Socratic dialogue about my faith usually went something like this:

So, Tork, you really think the Book of Mormon is not a Barnumesque imposture stemming from the frontier dialectic?  (He really talked like that, honest to Betsy!)

Will you let me eat my corn dog in peace, for the cat's sake?

Ah, I see you want to construct a straw man so that you can avoid a direct challenge to your weltschmerz concerning the untenable practice of polygamy -- am I right?

You, sir, are an ale-soused apple john. (I could sling the occasional double decker phrase around myself!) I have no intention of debating you on the merits of historical Mormonism. When we play Salt Lake I'll be glad to take you to Temple Square where you can ask the guides all the questions you want. Right now I just wanna eat my lunch before the matinee. 

That's the trouble with all you Mormons -- you brainwash so easily. Will you just answer me this -- Why was Joseph Smith a Freemason but Brigham Young forbade members to have anything to do with Freemasonry? 

Swoosh. (The sound of me leaving clown alley to eat my now-cold corn dog up in the bleachers.)

As a clown, Elmo had a very stiff body. It didn't bend very easily or ever look at ease -- as if he had a . . . well, come to think of it, Prince Paul said he DID have a, um, something stuck up his . . . ah, somewhere or other. Anyway, he waddled like a duck. It was a peculiar walk, but not particularly funny. He liked to think that if he got in your face with the audience that was funny, too. But it scared a number of small children -- him grinning like a madman two inches away from a terrified two-year old. Elmo was cursed by his Ivy League sheepskin -- it kept him from ever asking for help from the veteran clowns, who knew more about building a laugh than Noah knew about building an ark. 

By the end of the season he and I were not on speaking terms, and when I left the show (for good, it turned out) I shed no tears over Elmo Gibbs. I thought he would quickly fade away to become just another has-been. 

But he surprised me by becoming one of the best advance clowns the circus ever had. Not with Ringling, but with smaller shows like Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers. They hired him to do publicity as a clown for the show and by golly he got more ink and airtime than any other clown in circus publicity history, I think. That's because he amped up his confrontational skills, which he had honed on me, until he simply had to show up at a school or a newspaper and immediately something controversial would happen, which garnered the front page of the local paper and the lead story on the six O'clock TV news. He insulted mayors, scorned cute little kids, and blustered so much when being interviewed that in a few years time he was nicknamed 'Hurricane Elmo' by the press. He became a welcome rara avis for the hungry media -- guaranteed good copy. An erudite Don Rickles in baggy pants. 

I don't know if he ever really got belly-laugh funny. I doubt it; but I have to hand it to him -- he kept the concept of the caustic buffoon alive much longer than I ever could, or did.