“Been to Paris?”
“Yes.”
Then the clown would ask if he had been to various other cities, to which the ringmaster would keep on making the reply “Yes.” Then the clown would glibly ask:
“Ever been to jail?”
Whereupon the ringmaster would pretend to fall into the trap and say “Yes,” at which the crowd roared with laughter. This may seem to be rude humor to you, but the circus crowds in the foreign provinces were composed of rude people of the middle and lower classes, and they thought this kind of horse-play was great fun.
My first appearance as clown is a very vivid recollection. It was in the circus at Oran, in North Africa. I had, in my day, done many hazardous acrobatic feats and it was a daily matter for me to risk my neck in some kind of performance. I could do it, too, without turning a hair. But when I came out in my white face before a great crowd I was nervous. I had a good make-up, however, and the people laughed as soon as they saw me. Laughter has a peculiar effect. If it ripples out as soon as you appear, you may be sure that you are succeeding, because if the people do not think you even look funny, they will not laugh. My nervousness in clowning soon wore off.
As I came to study clowning I found that it was a serious and difficult business. Every step in the making of a clown or the manufacture of his “business” is hard work. To produce laughs you must make a serious effort. You may have noticed that nearly every clown makes a practice of falling down in various absurd and ridiculous ways. Even this business of making a fall requires the most elaborate kind of preparation. It may look very easy to take a tumble in the sawdust, but I assure you it is only done after long practice. Every step of it must be rehearsed. Unless the funny fall is natural, it fails utterly.
The tall, peaked hat was a great aid to the clown in my early days of clowning. I do not know the origin of it, save that it probably descended from the original fool’s cap. I used to come out with seven of these peaked hats piled up on my head. Then I would take them off, throw them up in the air, one by one, and catch them on my head. This always made a great hit. In those days the circus, being small, only had one clown, and he had to do a good deal of work.
To be a successful clown you had also to be a good pantomimist, because all clowning is really based on the pantomime. This enabled the clown to get an engagement on the variety stage during the winter and closed circus season.