Stop Me If You've Heard This One

by Kristen Arnett

People don’t want to hear a punch line; they want to feel like they’ve beaten you to it. Pretend you’re dumber than the audience, at least at first, and suddenly you’ve got them eating from the palm of your hand. The real gag is waiting behind the scenes, tucked neatly inside the fake-out. It’s an actual diamond ring disguised as a gaudy cubic zirconia.

“Do you have a dick?” I stop thrusting and look down at her, finding us suddenly off-script. “A dick?” She licks her lips. Pink lipstick feathers at the corners of her mouth. “Not a real dick. I know you’re a female clown, I’m not dumb. I mean like…a dick dick.”

Soon her husband will do the thing that all husbands do when faced with a crew of screaming children: he will search for his missing wife.

neck. If I can’t MacGyver myself a dick out of thin air, then I need to find a new profession. Clowning is an excuse to make everyday life wildly, luxuriously absurd.

Clowning requires a kind of steeliness that I associate with my coming-out process: the knowledge that there will always be people in life who will hate you for who and what you love.

Freezing to death inevitably makes me think of Leonardo DiCaprio. Nineties Leo was a lesbian icon, I think. So many closeted gay women thought they wanted to be with him before discovering that they actually wanted to be him. Now look at him, refusing to date anyone over the age of twenty-five. Couldn’t be me.

People call it the Pussy Palace because of all the queer people who hang out there and also because of the pink tile work in the home’s solitary bathroom. It’s one of the few truly queer spots in Central Florida, though it’s not called that officially. It’s just ours. We DIY our own places here because if we don’t, we wouldn’t have any.

“Aren’t you ashamed?” “About what?” I reply, because there are millions of things I should be ashamed of; the list is infinite.

and this morning I decide that my feeling of optimism is rooted in the idea that the domestic could be a good thing. A reminder for myself: not everyone parents like my mother.

The house has a dumbwaiter too, but Darcy says she got to use it only once. The first day they’d moved into the place, Darcy had put all her Barbies inside it and pushed the button to send them on an adventure. The dumbwaiter had stopped working halfway down, leaving the Barbies trapped behind the walls. I like to imagine them back there like tiny, beautiful vampires, waiting for the day that some unsuspecting soul unleashes their evil on the world.

I’ve described the costume, not the clown. The costume is purely physical. The clown is a persona that takes years to craft, if not decades. You develop it gradually, through trial and error, and by the time you’re done, the clown is inside you for good.

The clown is my id, greedy and impatient and uncaring of the mess it might make in its quest to get off a good joke. Any asshole off the street can slap on a polka-dot tie and juggle some oranges and claim to be something they’re not. To be a real clown, you must accept that it changes you into something hard and occasionally cruel. Jokes aren’t always sweet. Take, for example, the court jester. A role meant to entertain only the king, the jester finds ways to make his ruler laugh, often at the expense of others—but always at the expense of himself. In order to perfect my art, I must let it swallow me whole. The part that is my authentic self shrinks down so that the clown can grow in its place.

I’d rather pay people I know for their expertise, people who take my art seriously, instead of throwing my money at a corporation that only wants to drive the competition out of business.

The driveway is painted in a variety of multicolored checkered squares (and repainted again every six months, because this is Florida, and the pounding rain and the relentless sun mean that everything colorful and beautiful must inevitably fade), resembling a funny tie.

I can tell by the way Miri yanks the doll from my arms that she’s unhappy. “Cherry Baby, you have to take better care of your friends.” “I know.” “I can’t keep fixing the same mistakes, over and over again.” “I know.” She frowns. “Bitch, don’t get mad at me. You’re ruining things all on your own.”

Her methods might be unusual, but they haven’t steered me wrong yet. And one thing she’s certain of is that all dolls have souls. How we treat them determines how we come back in another life. “I don’t want to come back as something no one loves,” she told me once, and that thought continues to haunt me.

In that moment, I’m the essence of something much bigger, joyful and wholly alive, and when I laugh—as loud as I want—there’s the clown inside, overflowing with glee. I’m my own audience, first and foremost. Shouldn’t all things funny start out with a joke that’s just for me?

I decide she might make good material. Some kind of military clown. Structured body language, medals and regalia, possibly an exaggerated march. People who think they’re in control are always the funniest.

People ask: Why do you want to do it? How do you expect to make a living? What exactly are you looking to get out of this experience? My answers to these questions change on a daily basis. I know that I want to make people laugh. I know that a lot of why I chose this passion project for myself is because I miss my brother so horribly, and I think that I’m trying to re-create myself in his image.

But I’m not trying to monetize my craft; it reeks of capitalism, and that takes all the laughter out of it. Mostly, I just want to feel good in my own body. Clowning allows for that. Not always, but sometimes.

Time is quickly slipping through my gloved fingers. Right now, I am twenty-eight, but soon I’ll be thirty-one, and then I’ll be forty-eight, and after that fifty-six, and on and on, and maybe things will always be this way, until finally, I’ll be seventy-nine and die alone in bed and never have made it onto a comedy tour or even a carnival circuit.

I have a strong urge to hug her, but that’s not something we do. My arms stay pinned to my sides. Sometimes there’s just nothing a person can say to make a situation better. It’s just going to suck, and that’s it. Haven’t we moved through Florida this way all of our lives? Mourning something only as long as it takes to mourn the next loss.

It’s like whiplash. That’s the only way to describe it. Over and over again, violence, and then we’re expected to immediately return to normalcy. But I’m not sure we know what “normalcy” is anymore. Is it normal to be a queer person living in a place with a government that actively tries to harm you? Is it normal to know that you might attend a gay club and be gunned down in the middle of the night? But if you don’t return to “normal,” what kind of life are you living? If there’s no joy, then what’s the point?

Creativity requires an audience. In order to make the art you want to make, you must first learn how to finance it.” “That just sounds like capitalism,” I say, because of course it does. “Like learning to finance something? Come on. What does it have to do with making something beautiful or interesting?”

Suffering is relatable; everyone has it tough. Watching someone else joke about their personal trauma makes our own hardships feel bearable. Jokes give us relief, like aloe smoothed over a truly wicked sunburn. And for the person making the joke, there’s the control factor to consider: if we make fun of our misery first, someone else can’t come along and make it hurt even worse. Our joke, our rules.

First of all, we have to find the root of the ache. No matter how original an act might seem, all jokes inevitably stem from a painful source, the flotsam of our lives lifted from the world around us and collaged together to make something new.

After reading that comic book from cover to cover, I threw on some of my mother’s lime-colored sweats, plopped a ratty yellow Halloween wig on my head, and hid behind a door with a bucket of water. And when my brother got home from school, I dumped the contents of that bucket on his head and yelled “Hey, kids!” just like Binky from the comic strip. It didn’t matter that my mother screamed at me because I got the floor all wet. Because guess what? My brother laughed. And that first laugh, his huge guffaw, the open yodel of his delight, has lived on inside me ever since.

And the fact that it’s for the parks has made me think that my originality, my uniqueness, puts me at the top of the pile. I don’t want them, so surely, they’ll want me, right? That’s how it always works in my head.

Now I get it. These women are all looking for a way to sneak their real dreams inside by donning the gear. They won’t be funny; how could they be? But maybe if they’re good enough at hiding behind the clown mask, they can get the thing they actually want: to be seen for their talent. I can respect that, I guess. It also tells me exactly what I need to do to succeed in the audition. Just be myself.

She’s bumbling and idiotic, a classic fool who’s desperate for your approval. She courts your goodwill because a laugh means you like her, that she’s necessary for this world, that people couldn’t possibly do without her!

Look up! Gaze with delight on a true winged wonder of the world, the yellow-bellied chicken! For the clown, the high wire is a balancing act of great desperation and cowardice. It requires endurance, a willingness to bolt if anyone ever calls her out on her bullshit. Look how she holds tightly to her brother’s death, refuses to let go of the fact that her mommy never loved her enough! The weights of these grievances keep her perched on a tightrope of her own creation, refusing therapy in favor of cracking jokes. Bunko might be afraid of horses, but this clown is afraid of something much dumber. Never before has there been a clown so scared of her own success! The urge to create a thing that will outlast her, remembered long after she’s in the grave, is at odds with fear. What will it cost her to bare herself in ways she never has before?

“Want a nail clipping? You could use it for spellcasting.” She pulls off her disco ball hat, revealing a gray pixie cut. “Or you could have a hair trimming, if you’d like?” “I’m not a witch.” “Are you sure?” She looks me up and down. “You look like a witch.” “Thank you,” I say. I’ve never been told that before, and I feel oddly flattered.

He shakes his head, but he doesn’t correct me like he usually would. “I don’t know why you think that’s so funny, but I guess you’ll have an opportunity to find out what it’s like to have someone disrespect you the same way you’ve disrespected me.” He puts out his hand. “Welcome to the team.”

Darcy has a big personality, but sometimes she’s still just a little kid at heart. Her feelings get bruised so easily. I forget sometimes that she’s not in my head with me. We’re so close that there are times I expect her to read my mind. But she can’t fill every role for me. She’s not my therapist or my sister. She’s just my friend.