“For it came to pass in those far off days that my Parents decided that my Sister & I were in need of a taste of Good Old Fashioned Entertainment. And so we piled into the family station wagon and off we went to sample the delights of the Bullham Family Circus….”
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LETS TALK ABOUT CLOWNS
Pt Two; A Night at the Circus
It was a dark and stormy night..
Yeah, I know, I know,
but I can’t help the bloody weather can I?
Anyway.. it had been raining and the ground outside the Big Top had been churned into a quagmire of mud and elephant dung, dotted about here and there with apple-sized balls of horse droppings, like currents sprinkled on a pudding.
Most of the stalls had given up and closed down in anticipation of the next downpour. The Donkey-Rides Man had abandoned the donkey for somewhere drier, leaving it tethered to a stake to phlegmatically endure the rain. Only the Fairy-Floss man and a lone Balloon Seller stuck grimly to their posts. Above them the still dripping strings of red, yellow & blue carnival lights made little headway against the evening murk.
Inside the big tent under the wet canvas, a thousand damp humans huddled together, steaming under the thousand watt lights and adding to the general humidity.
The Old-School Lighting-rig gave everything a curiously archaic, pre-war ambience. It was like viewing a scene from the Past in a crystal ball, the events occurring in the ring seeming curiously distant, yet curiously near.
Familiar yet puzzlingly obscure, like watching TV with the sound down. In the ring the performers ran through their ancient rituals; glittery trapeze artists swung above; horses with ostrich feather tiara’s trotted around the ring; a moth-eaten lion cooperated with surly bad grace. But as I watched from the comfortable anonymity of the crowd, clowns lurked around the fringes, waiting to strike..
It happened like this; every child going in got a ticket with a number on it. At some point in the show it became Audience Participation Time and the lucky child whose number was called got to be part of the show and ride one of the ostrich-feather wearing ponies around the ring. If he made it all around the ring they’d get a prize.
Naturally the child would be fitted up with a safety harness such as the trapeze artists might use, attached to a long elasticised rope attached to a guy-wire hidden somewhere high up above. So if the kid took a tumble from the pony the rope would take their weight and they’d dangle safely a few feet above the ground while the clowns came rushing in to unhook them.
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Yeah, they probably wouldn’t let you do that sort of stunt with kids these days what with Health & Safety protocols and third party liability claims and all that nervous shit, but in those days parents took a much more relaxed attitude. You could put a dozen kids in the back of a ute to take them to a football game and no-one would think any the worse of you.
But back at the circus some young lad of around my age was the ‘lucky’ winner (what was I? Ten? Eleven?). A shy child, I was glad it hadn’t been my number called. I had no taste for the limelight at that age and envied not at all the slender young boy coaxed into the ring below.
And as events progressed I became even gladder.
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With much show-biz razza-matazz & fanfare, the young boy was welcomed into the Ring, strapped into his harness and loaded up onto the pony by a sparkly girl & attendant clowns. Then with a 4! 3! 2! 1! the pony took off.
It hadn’t got far when naturally the kid came off, and propelled by the force generated by the cantering horse, he now swung back and forth wildly over the ring like an enormous, out of control pendulum.
Clowns rushed in to catch him as he swung past – but!- they missed him! Eventually one butterfingered Buffoon finally managed to grab the boy by the pants and held on, hoping to break his momentum. Alas, instead the boy’s shorts came off in the clown’s hands while the boy continued on swinging back and forth above our heads, but now he was pants-less and dangling above a laughing crowd in his white Y-Fronts.
Oh the Humiliation! Oh the Shame!
It was a much more modest Age and squirming in the Safety of the Shadows, I could imagine his embarrassment.
And it wouldn’t be just the horror of that night’s jeering, Carrie-like public humiliation either, I realised!
No, no!
For the rest of his blighted life the Joke would be on him.
He would forever be ‘the boy who swung in front of a circus crowd in his underpants‘. His Parents would jokingly pass the anecdote on to family members at Christmas and Christenings, his sisters would tease him about it forever, the other pupils & teachers would find out at school and make his life hell. The Incident might even find its way onto his permanent record when it came time to look for employment, and he’d have to sit in the foyer waiting for his interview and wondering
whether it was HIM that the secretaries were tittering about and whether they KNEW.
In retrospect I realised it was probably the first time I ever felt empathy for another human being.
Well the clowns caught him eventually and got him down and back into his pants, and everyone made a fuss of him, and gave him a prize even though he didn’t ride all the way around the ring to make up for the embarrassment caused by the accident and got the wildly blushing boy to say a few stumbling words when accepting his prize and everyone laughed good-humouredly and his parents didn’t sue because people didn’t do that back then – if your kid fell out of a tree and broke his arm you took him to a doctor to get a cast put on, you didn’t sue the person who planted the tree – and no harm was done and it wasn’t till much later that the chilling thought occurred to me…
Accident?
What if it wasn’t an accident?
What if it was an ancient Carnie routine?
What if those sinister clowns did that routine every-single-performance! What if every night they selected some innocent child with loose-fitting pants to lure into the ring and publicly humiliate. Just to get a cheap laugh!
Oh the Horror!
Till then I had no idea such Evil existed in the world.
It was the end of my Childhood.
John Wayne Gacy; mass murdering clown & staunch Republican
Should we ban the Clown therefore?
Drive them from our midst
as we used to drive away Lepers?
I say “No”. They would still be there,
lurking in the shadows like John Wayne Gacy. At least their garish costume makes them easy to spot in a crowd and appropriate action taken accordingly.
The Truth & Utility of this statement is underlined, I think, by a recent occurrence not so long ago, when a Plague of Killer-Clowns appeared to be on the way to becoming a modern Pop-Cultural Phenomena.
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More craze than cult, and inspired perhaps by too many low budget, straight to video, Eighties Horror Movies, and possibly certain death metal bands, the phenomena became a Thing almost overnight.
For it came to pass that drivers on lonely highways, and obsessive observers of video surveillance, started to report seeing what appeared to be deranged killer-clowns, sometimes dragging bloodied axes, appearing by the side of the deserted roadside
or looming disturbingly at the security camera lens.
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Naturally once reported, copycat clowns soon started popping up like mushrooms in cow-shit after a good storm.
The Media, keen as ever to cash in on a mindless Fad, enthusiastically hyped up every incident, thus encouraging feeble-minded lackwits to do likewise..
But just as it seemed there was going to be an ever increasing plague of clowns, a NEW phenomena started to be reported; People beating the living shit out of fuckwits dressed as killer-clowns lurking in the shadows.
The new craze quickly caught on, and after video footage of about half a dozen such incidents went viral,
there were soon no more demented clowns lurking on the Nation’s midnight roads in hope of terrifying passersby.
Perhaps we all need to confront our Inner Clown.
Part One of this sermon can be reached through the link below
35; LETS TALK ABOUT CLOWNS
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Coming soon!
The New Single!
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The Reverend Hellfire is a practised Performance Poet.
It’s a Calling not a Trade/
so don’t expect to get paid.
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Tags: circus, clowns, humour, John Wayne Gacy, killer clowns, satire
Reverend Hellfire's Sunday Sermon 