(Lindholm) Welcome back to Vermont Edition. I’m Jane Lindholm.
The circus is known for being welcoming to all kinds of people. And in terms of gender equality, the circus was often far ahead of U.S. culture at large. Women performed alongside men, some of them even ran their own circuses way back in the 1800s.
But clowning remains a male-dominated field. Lots of male clowns dress as women. Barry Lubin became famous for his character "Grandma the Clown." But wipe off the white make up, take off the big nose and shoes, and most of the clowns making people laugh between acrobatic and animal acts are men.
That’s not the case this summer at Circus Smirkus, Vermont’s touring youth circus.
(Clown) "I take the bait and then I give it to her and then she gives it back…"
(Lindholm) Earlier this summer in Greensboro, the Circus Smirkus clowns practiced a gag where two characters are bested by a Sasquatch for their upcoming Big Top Tour.
(Lindholm) As the group crafted the scene for maximum laughs, a careful observer might have noticed that this clown troupe looks a little different than most. Nearly half of the performers are girls. At eighteen years old, Frances Tiffin is one of the senior clowns in "Clown Alley" this year, Circus Smirkus’s group of clowns.
(Tiffin) "There are not very many girl clowns. And there is a kind of, not discrimination but…if you tell a circus person that you’re a clown they’ll go "oh, girl clown, cool." And I’m like, yes, there haven’t been a lot of girl clowns but I don’t see the relevance in why that’s important to me being funny. I don’t want to be the "girl clown" because funny is funny."
(Lindholm) Tiffin began her circus career three years ago, thinking she would be an aerialist. But a shoulder injury brought her back down to earth, and led her into clown alley. Tiffin says initially she didn’t think she was funny, but now clowning around is her life.
(Tiffin) "Clown will never leave me. I never want to find myself without it. I’ve found myself through clown."
(Lindholm) Circus Smirkus creative director and clown coach Jesse Dryden says that’s a tall order for most young women just starting out.
(Dryden) "If you’re an adolescent and awkward is already present, and when you’re working with girl clowns there’s already a stigma of what a girl should be and there’s all this social pressure of how girls should behave. So you’re already on an uphill climb. So it’s a very fun and interesting challenge to be able to coach that."
(Lindholm) Joy Powers started out with Circus Smirkus and this past year she’s been on tour with Ringling Brothers.
(Powers) "As a clown, as a young female clown, you have to like, really step outside what normal teenage girls are being. You can’t always be the pretty, sophisticated girl. You have to…It’s just a kind of different way of looking at things: laughing at failure instead of being scared of it."
(Lindholm) But it’s not just overcoming internal fear that can be a hurdle for girl clowns, as they’re typically called. Rob Mermin says though gender equality is a hallmark of circus culture, that doesn’t seem to extend to clowning.
(Mermin) "General society, when they think of circus and circus clowns automatically think it’s a male thing. And that’s a hard stereotype for women clowns to break, putting on the big make up and big shoes and odd costumes and big broad gestures. It’s not a stereotypical feminine image that Americans have when they think of clowning."
(Lindholm) Peggy Williams was the first woman to graduate from Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, which trained well over a thousand clowns in its 30 year history.
(Williams) "My role models really were men who played the characters of women."
(Lindholm) When Ringling Brothers hired her in 1970, Williams soon discovered just how rare female clowns were-there was nowhere for her to change costumes during the performances. Clown Alley was off limits because the male clowns changed there. But the ladies’ wardrobe was off limits to clowns:
(Williams) "Very good reason. Lots of sequins, lots of sequins, and shiny materials in the ladies costumes. And the baby powder you use to set your make up after you put on your grease paint, you powder with baby powder. And that powder, if it flakes on the sequins and the stones and the mirrors, scratches it or dulls it over time. So there was no clowns aloud in ladies wardrobe. But I was a lady! And I needed to put on my wardrobe. So they actually made a private little dressing room adjacent to ladies wardrobe so I could be near it but not in it."
(Lindholm) Williams spent ten years as a clown with Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus, which she still works for. By and large she was accepted by the other clowns, but there was one gag she had to fight to be a part of: the infamous clown car sketch.
(Williams) "Well, when you’re inside that physical car, you’re pretty close to each other because there’s about 15 people in a Nissan. And some of the older clowns that were used to an all male clown alley, ‘course they were gentlemen. Some of them were a little uncomfortable with maybe a girl sitting so close to them in this confined space. So it took me three years before I was able to do more than stand outside the clown car in the routine!"
(Lindholm) Janet Davis is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who has studied the history of American circus. She says discomfort with female clowns extends beyond the confines of the clown car.
(Davis) "The fact that it’s been harder for women to break into the ranks of the world of clowning may reflect more about the world around us rather than the world within the circus. Because circuses absolutely have been places where you see a tremendous degree of equality. I do find it really striking that women clowns are still few and far between."
(Lindholm) Once, before a performance, Peggy Williams was approached by an audience member at Madison Square Garden.
(Williams) "She was there with her granddaughter and she was kind of decked out in furs and jewels and all that. And she said, ‘are you going to the circus?’ And I said, yeah, actually, I work in the circus.’ And she said, ‘well what do you do?’ And I said, when I get my make up on I’m a clown.’ And she said, ‘oh, girls can’t be funny.’ It was something that was learned in her generation that clowns aren’t girls."
(Lindholm) Professor Janet Davis says that kind of perception lingers.
(Davis) "I was just looking around on the internet the other day about clowns and one of the threads that came up was ‘what’s the proper term for a female clown?’ And there was talk of clownette, girl clown, lady clown, this real uncomfortable category that is so ironic in a sense because the whole field of clowning is really dependent upon its ability to play and subvert categories. And so to even have that name clown be so fraught in a way I think tells us a lot."
(Lindholm) On a recent sweltering July day in Massachusetts, no one was thinking about fraught categories or what to call the clowns, who appeared before them dressed as a troupe of boy scouts and girl scouts.
(Circus performers) "I smirko scout…so as not to scare the creatures of this forest…so as not to scare the creatures of this forest…promise to turn off my cell phone."
(Lindholm) Small children with hands stuffed into big boxes of popcorn sat on their knees around the single ring of the Circus Smirkus big top, eyes wide as saucers. Their parents fanned themselves in the stands…all of them waiting for the big moment!
(Circus Performer) "Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!"
(Clapping)
(Lindholm) Aerialists twirled on ropes above the big top-some of them not much older than the tiny audience members below them. Unicyclists jumped from trampoline to trampoline. And the clowns smiled and waved to the crowd, bringing them along on the magical story the circus had set out to tell.
Eighteen-year-old Frances Tiffin and seventeen-year-old Zoe Ruth Sisson Silverblatt drew laughs from the audience as the scene they had rehearsed way back in June came to life, complete with gags and pratfalls.
(Silverblatt) "I’m proud of the fact that I can get slapped in the face and fall on my back. It’s exhilarating, I think. It’s empowering."
(Lindholm) So whether it’s slapstick gags or delicate miming, these girls are keeping up with the boys, and rearranging society’s ideas of what makes a clown.