Fund Your Utopia Without Me.™

17 August 2013

Clowning Around









A former clown reflects on the Obama circus’s creeping Stalinoidism.



By Happy Jack Feder


I’m surprised, in the efforts to lynch the Obama Clown and brainwash other cowboys with sensitivity training, that the Obama regime and cronies have failed to recount one of my favorite Stalin stories from long ago. 

After a hard day’s work, Uncle Joe blessed a Moscow circus with his presence. The clowns performed a bit that contained (what Stalin perceived as) political commentary obliquely critical of him. Yet the audience roared with delight at the funny clowns!

True to form, Stalin had his armed guards line up the clowns in center ring and execute them, on the spot. 

Then, as a clever follow-up on Stalin’s part, he had the guards turn their guns on the audience and slaughter dozens. Call it a curtain call: it was curtains for all.

Oh, the dangers of mocking Great Leaders. 

As a young man I was for several carefree years a professional clown and juggler. I also wrote two books of clown and mime performance routines which, in the tiny genre of professional clown literature, are what pass as standards (or so I like to think). I’ve given a lot of intellectual effort to un-intellectual humor.

My experience informs me that nothing brings a bigger laugh than cartoon violence inflicted on the performer. Many a roar of guffaws I elicited by SMACKING! the floor with a prat fall, BANGING! my noggin with a hammer, CRASHING! off a chair onto my kiester, SHOOTING! my face with a hunting rifle (filled with water, and sundry other self-inflicted assaults, KABOOM! smoking my exploding cigar. HA HA HA! Universal and timeless humor. 

The audiences, mostly kids age 5 to 10 (the older ones were too cool, the younger ones ran away from me in screaming horror) loved the gags. Adults too.

Were my stunts code words to the audience to commit violence? It’s true that many a seven-year-old boy felt free to throw a fork or pizza slice at me, and on occasion land a hefty punch in the crown jewels, but for the most part, the response was a cathartic laughter. And often, I was touched by the little child who’d hug my leg and say “I love you, Mr. Clown!” 

I can also tell you that, except for liberal activist politically correct clowns (who in truth are nothing more than Alinsky-ites subverting an establishment art form for propaganda purposes), your basic, hard-working, underpaid clown uses the same jokes and gags on the newly inaugurated president as he did on the retiring president. Yes, even I simply transformed a few Jimmy gags onto Ronnie.

You can bet your bottom dollar that if the nefarious Missouri clown had come across an equally cartoonish mask of George W., he would have performed the same bit with the bulls as he did with the Obama mask. And Republicans would have laughed! Or if they booed, it would have been a laughing, good-natured sort of booing.

Vaclav Havel (if my memory is correct) wrote on how the inability of a powerful leader to laugh at himself was both the sure sign of decadence, corruption, and incapacity, as well as a sign that he was on his way out, if only in the eye of the public. 

When a President and his ilk can’t laugh along with a  timeless, harmless, sure-fire gag about Himself, Joe Public smells a fish — and there’s to be a clown who will pull a rubber fish out of an Obama look-a-like’s pants. HA! HA! HA!




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