An Australian Clown

Monologue written, performed, edited by Charlie Price

Content Warning:

Strong language, homophobia, references some viewers may find offensive

Transcript

An Australian Clown

VOICE: (He speaks with an Australian accent. Little bit of gravel or clag in his voice. Some kind of ambience, distant traffic) Hello there. How are you travelling? I’m quite well, I think. 

I presume you’d like me to tell you a thing or two about myself? So I’ll get right to it. I don’t really have a name, folks call me all sorts of different things. Sometimes I’m Bill, sometimes I’m Fred. Sometimes I’m Geoffrey, sometimes I’m Pete. Sometimes I’m Pogo, sometimes I’m Grimaldi, sometimes I’m John Wayne. Gacy. 

(Imitates John Wayne Gacy. Northern American, Chicagoan accent): Clowns can get away with murder. You can a have pretty girl sitting on your lap and feel her up and she can’t say nothing because you’re a clown. Clows have taken a bad name because…but some of those kids can be little bastards. 

Where I’m living at the moment, on floor two of a shitty Melbourne housing commission, the others call me Vox. Awright, Vox, you fucking wanker? they say. Why don’t you come out with us, Vox, we’re going to the Vic for a few beers? No thank you, I say. No thank you, no thank you. I don’t ignore them, I’m not scared of them. I don’t even hate them. Vox is Latin for Voice. They call me Vox because that’s all I am to them. A voice on the other side of a door. 

I’m gonna play the piano for a bit, if that’s alright. I have a piano in my room.

SFX: Chopin “Revolutionary” Etude.

I’m just joshing. That’s a professional recording of some virtuoso or other. That’s not me. I can’t play the piano. There’s no piano in my room. 

What do I have in my room?

Well, I have a bed, a chair, a desk. A bookcase with no books in it. My clown kit- more on that shortly. And there’s two framed images on the walls, one’s a photograph of Ayres rock, the other’s a painting of the sovereign. Queen Elizabeth’s still the sovereign, right?

What can I do? Can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t write. I can talk. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m thinking out loud, I’m reaching out.    

It’s night. I can see the moon. I think the last tram has gone back to the depot. The tracks go right past my place, the overhead wires run right by my window.

I am a clown. I’m literally a clown. An Auguste clown, not a deadpan, pale clown, not a tramp clown, not a metal clown. 

You can’t see me but I am sitting at my desk, an empty wooden desk, stained with coffee rings and wine splashes, in my clown costume. I am in my clown clothes. My face is painted white, my lips are jet black. I have on a huge red, spherical, shiny nose. Painted on eyebrows, raised, to give me a surprised look- kids and old people and intellectually slow people seem to find that amusing, don’t know why. I have seven hair pieces- or wigs. Green, blue, ginger, black, red, white, and beige. A bowler hat with a fake sunflower in it. I have on a huge polka dot bow tie. Shirt; striped Breton, two tone white and blue. Three quarter length mustard breeches. Yellow stockings. Over-amplified clown shoes.

Some people find the idea of an Australian clown strange, like, I don’t know, an Israeli showjumper or something. 

But a clown should have no nationality, by which I mean nationality is irrelevant to the one clowning. Most clowns are silent, during the act, they should really be gagged, mute. If they must say something it should be in a funny, clown voice. Some clowns get involved with funny sound effects, car horns and whoopee cushions. Some clowns are rude, blow raspberries. Or- if there must be some vocal element to their performance, they can just…make…noises, like this: Produces pained, high moan. 

Clowns hail from clown country. They are not quite of this world. They inhabit a place between this world and another. 

Every clown is a stranger, a loner, an enigma. Even to other clowns.   

People look at me funny when I say I’m a clown. They ask me What do you do and I answer, I’m a clown. They seem not to believe me. 

But I don’t speak to people anymore. I’m never out of my clowning gear, anyway. 

I can talk to myself. While I’m alone in my room. I have a voice. I like to remind myself what it sounds like. It’s like an encounter with an old friend. Probably. I don’t know, I don’t have any friends, new or old, young or old.     

I clown at kids parties and parades and functions. Old people’s homes. I clowned at a funeral once. That was fucking weird. 

Never learned sign twirling. That’s something I refuse to do. It’s too crude a use of the clown. 

Sometimes people ask me what I do even when I’m in my clown clothes, my face-paint on, my wig on. “So, what do you do?” What does it look I do like you fucking idiot, I’m a clown. I don’t say that out loud of course, I only think it. I say it with my eyes and my lips.  

I used to be in a circus. Got the sack for rooting a bearded woman. No coercion was involved. In those days I shed my clown clothes and persona after the show. I don’t do that anymore. I’m in my clown  costume all the time, 24-7. I don’t even shower.

I learned from the best. An Irishman, in a beret, with a deformed face. He taught me slapstick. 

We devised a routine. It was pretty frightening. 

I used to be pretty avant-garde, pretty highbrown. I was Malvolio in Robert Wilson’s Twelfth Night, Sydney Opera House.

I wasn’t Malvolio in Robert Wilson’s Twelfth Night at Sydney Opera House. I’m lying.

Clowns are castrati of a kind. They are denied an adulthood and a childhood, to encounter a clown is to encounter ontological anomaly, to encounter hollowness, to encounter a shiver, a being imprisoned in giggle, a giggle imprisoned in a man. They have never been born and been through puberty, they know neither mortality nor sexuality, they have no secondary sexual characteristics. They are incapable of romance, responsibility, or passion. They are virginal, cockless, stunted, uncorrupted, hellish, feral, corporeal, uncivilised, uncouth, undomesticated, violent, cold, sociopathic, immortal, arrogant, shameless, vacuous, untrustworthy, amoral, histrionic, superficial creatures of the mind’s depravity, performed figments of the collective imagination.

Clowns are for grownups. They come from grownups, they are a form of wet-dream. Bloodstained, zany, and callous. They are only imposed on kids as kind of sick joke.  

The one thing clowns are utterly indifferent towards is human pleasure, any notion of entertainment.

Clowns are Catholic, always. There’s no such thing as a Methodist clown.  

In the image of the clown, one sees Christ crucified. Clowns are nailed up for the sins of the world, clowns are stigmatised and abused and laughed at and martyred in the name of human betterment. For their transgressions, for your iniquities I am bruised. I am endlessly bruised.   

My co-tenants don’t know that they live with a clown. 

Were they to open my door, they would find a clown, sitting alone at his desk, watching the moon through the window.

I’m not working much at the moment.

The last time I was hired was nearly two weeks ago. Kid’s party.

I scared the shit out of the kids, apparently. Brought a pig-skin piñata with me. I rescued a pig from a pig farm and turned her into a pinata, hung it up in a tree.  

The birthday girl’s cunt father told me to get off his property. Said he wouldn’t pay me.

I tickled him, wrestled with him. While we were wrestling on the ground- which the kids loved by the way, should of got paid extra- he got an erection, the pufdah.  

I’ve thought so often of killing that man.     

The bit about the pig pinata’s made up by the way. A leg pull. 

When I was a boy I saw the great Russian clown, Slava, perform a routine for which he was already legendary and for which he has remained legendary. The routine involved a hat on a hatstand and a coat on a coat hanger. These fragments came together and they formed an absence, an absence which no one but a clown could converse with and animate. A void which nobody but a clown is dauntless enough to face. Slava put his right arm in the coat’s left sleeve and just like that the coat became a person, a person wearing a hat. And this person, created by Slava, by his hand, which was him and which clung to him, which tickled and agitated and finally caressed and embraced him, was real. It was real. There really was something in this most blatant of illusions that was real. There was a being there for him to touch, to embrace. A spectre, a pocket with a soul inside it. 

I should have known that friendlessness, that loneliness is the essence of the clown.  

Of course, I always wanted to be a clown. Ever since I was a little boy.

But what did I want exactly? What in clowning did I aspire to, what did I want to make mine and hold in my hand and be identified with so fully? 

Was it the act of clowning? The pathos, the comedy and injury and calamity, the uproariousness of it all…

Was it the image, the paint and the wigs and the clothing? The expression of weird soulless fun and misery on the face?

Was it the manner, the dark, playful self-degradation of clownery?

Maybe it was the clown’s apparent needlessness.

A clown needs nothing. 

Spectators maybe. Applause. (Applause)

But nothing. Nothing really. 

I need nothing.

(Loses Australian accent) I’m not Australian.

(With resignation) I’m not a clown.

I wish I was Australian.

I’ve been to the circus never been in the circus, I’ve never made love to a bearded woman. 

I wish I was a clown.

I wish I was an Australian clown.

Bye.