Every one of them has a story. They are, after all, a human life. Someone somewhere must love them. Someone somewhere must care for them. There is a reason how they found themselves in such poor circumstances. Everyone has come across them on our streets. They’re there hail, rain or shine with their little cups looking for them to be filled with the shrapnel from your pockets. Before you think this is turning into a plea on behalf of the Simon Community or that I’m begging you to buy a copy of The Big Issue, or that I have found God, fear not. For I am pleading with you not to give your hard earned cash to these degenerates. The degenerates I speak of are members of the street entertaining community.
Questions have to be asked. At what point in their lives did they wake up and say to themselves “You know what? I’m going to paint myself silver and stand still on a box in Grafton Street all day every day. Who knows? Maybe a bird will land on me. That will be the highlight of my week that. I’m going for it. Martha! Where’s that spray paint?”
Credit where credit is due, they must’ve put in some serious hours of training. But where? And most importantly, why?
Did they do a course down in the local community school of a Tuesday night? Week one: Pretend to be stuck in a glass box. Week Two: Stand still for a very long time and then suddenly move because people really do think you are a statue and you’ll frighten the shit out of them, but you, the consummate artist that you are, will be the only one to get the joke ‘lovey’. Week Three: The awarding of certification where nobody actually comes up to collect their award because either a) they’re stood perfectly still pretending to be a statue or b)the course director is doing the presentation through the medium of mime and no one knows what’s going on and it descends into chaos. Silent chaos. And hopefully a fight.
Their very near cousins on the food chain at least have the decency to perform their zany brand of ‘humour’ under a tarpaulin. Why people continue to buy into the deeply flawed travelling roadshow that is the circus is beyond me. There are two types of circus. And they’re both crap.
You have your run-of-the-mill big top with a few animals looking well pissed off and a few clowns. And you have one usually prefixed with the words French, where a load of blokes piss about on motorbikes whilst scantily clad ladies stand around moving their arms. Oh, it’s an illusion alright. The illusion being you’ve paid money to be entertained and that the entertainment simply doesn’t happen. The greatest swindle known to man.
It’s like the black economy. The public buy counterfeit DVD’s thus providing paramilitary groups with funds to buy guns. The public hire clowns for kid’s parties, thus providing these egomaniacs with a living. Over my dead body will a clown every cross my doorstep.
Even Cannon And Ball knew the game was up. They realised that they weren’t funny and thankfully retired. Clowns? Nah, they’re delusional, probably coked up let’s be honest, all the while refusing to believe that their day in the sun has long since passed.
The only way a clown would get a laugh out of me is if the bucket of glitter they were about to ‘hilariously’ throw over their clowning pal had been replaced with hydrochloric acid. Now that I’d pay to see.
