Bill Ballantine, the venerable Dean of the Ringling Clown College, was a writer and illustrator by trade. With a literary flourish, he nicknamed the Class of ‘72 “The Young Turks.” His reason for doing so was based on the fact that we were feeling our oats, grew too big for our britches, and generally ignored the tried and true Biblical warning that “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
Several of us First of Mays on the Blue Unit of Ringling that first season felt that we could come up with much better gags than the ones that Mark Anthony, Swede Johnson, Prince Paul, Dougie Ashton, and Otto Griebling assigned us to perform. Levoi Hipps, the boss clown that season, finally threw up his hands in despair at our constant whining and carping about the antiquity and unfunniness of our current buffooneries.
“Alright!” he hollered at us one day after the matinee. “Alright! If’n you think you can come up with a better ring gag than the ones you’re doing, I’ll put it in center ring -- dagnabbit! Go ahead and show us jest how high-larious you all can be!” And he stalked away to replace the worn baby shoes on his stilts with a new pair of white ones.
I rubbed my hands in glee at his challenge. NOW we’d show ‘em! I already had a wonderful gag vaguely planned out in my mind, and began to explain it to Chico, the Little Guy, Roofus T. Goofus, Rubber Neck, and Anchorface -- all of them as eager and anxious as I to show up the veteran clowns, who took so little notice of us that they didn’t even know our names. To them I was either ‘Smutch Finger’ or ‘Greaseball’ -- as in “Hey, Smutch Finger, better get started on blowing up the balloons for come in” or “Hey Greaseball, don’t powder so damn close to my trunk -- take it outside the alley, will ya?”
We’d get this oversized toilet, see, and pretend to be plumbers like the Three Stooges and we’d fall into the darn thing and then at the end it would explode and we’d all run out of the ring with toilet plungers stuck to the top of our heads!
Sounded like a great gag to me. But strangely enough my compatriots had their doubts.
‘What ya gonna build a giant toilet out of?” asked Roofus T. Goofus. “Balsa wood or foam rubber or what? It’s gonna weigh a ton -- the roustabouts won’t wanna carry it in and out of the ring.”
“Kinda poor taste, dontcha think?” queried the Little Guy. “I mean, couldn’t we make it a bathtub instead?”
Chico liked the idea, but he wanted to put in too much ‘spaghetti.’ “Let’s have it shoot water at us and then we’ll put in a toilet paper fight!”
“You can’t make fun of plumbers” said Anchorface, whose old man actually was a plumber. “They got a real powerful union -- they could sue us!”
“Bah!” I retorted to one and all. “We can work out the kinks later. But first let’s build a prototype and get Levoi to let us put it in center ring for the next matinee!”
They all liked that word ‘prototype.’ It sounded scientific and encouraging. So we cobbled together something that looked like a cross between a Sherman tank and a bidet, using odds and ends of foam rubber and plywood, and held together with several miles of duct tape, and informed Mr. Hipps we were ready to make circus history. We didn’t really ever rehearse for it -- we figured our brilliant improvisational skills would provide a risible storyline. And we each had a hardware store red rubber plunger ready to stick on top of our heads for the blow off.
Giving us the stink eye, Levoi granted us permission to go into center ring after the rola bola act and try our luck. The veteran clowns merely shook their heads in tired silence. Damn fool kids -- they’ll probably kill themselves out there . . .
Bandmater Bill Prynne played us on with ‘Wedding of the Winds,’ as Roofus T. Goofus and I lugged our mammoth toilet out into center ring (the roustabouts would have nothing to do with it unless we paid them five bucks a show for the extra work.)
Then, to put it politely, everything went south. The turkey basters inside the toilet, designed to spritz us intermittently, sprang a leak, which not only caused the seams of foam rubber pieces to come unglued, but also ruined the black powder squibs so they didn’t explode at the end of the gag. The circus audience resolutely sat on their hands during our debacle, refusing to release a single titter. Finally, in extremis, we started pummeling each other with our toilet plungers and ran dispiritedly out of center ring backstage to a glowering Charlie Baumann, the Performance Director, who soundly berated us for bringing such deplorable infamy to the proud name of Ringling Brothers.
And did I learn a lesson from this embarrassing fiasco? Actually . . . no. For the rest of my clown career I kept tinkering with new ideas and trying to build original clown props to titillate the audience. Most of what I came up with was pure dreck -- but once in a blue moon I’d hit upon a piece of whimsy that got a rise out of the fickle circus crowd, as well as my fellow jesters. And so clown alley old-timers today will tell you, if you give them half a chance, about the time old Tork built a pyramid of pop cans in center ring; or how he clipped a balloon on the back of Charlie Baumann’s tuxedo coat one day, and the fun that then ensued.
Then again, they’re just as likely to tell you about the time I split my pants during the elephant manage number . . .
