Guard the Big Top: Circus Security on National Let's Laugh Day
I worked the backstage corridor at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey for eleven years, and for seven of those I pulled shifts outside the clown dressing area, what the circus world called Clown Alley. From the outside, it looked like any other backstage hallway. A door, some folding chairs, the smell of greasepaint that never quite left the air. From the inside, I was told, it was a city within a city, thirty or forty performers in various stages of transformation, half-in and half-out of their characters, arguing, rehearsing, playing cards in size-nineteen shoes.
My job was to keep unauthorized people out. Their job, apparently, was to make that as difficult as possible.
The gags started small. A whoopee cushion on my chair. A rubber spider in my coffee cup, I will admit, got me good. Then one morning I arrived for my shift to find my entire station wrapped in newspaper. Chair, radio, clipboard, all of it. Neat as a Christmas present. I never found out who did it. I had my suspicions about eight different people, and they all smiled at me with the exact same innocence.
That was the thing about the clowns that nobody outside the circus ever quite understood. The comedy didn't stop when the greasepaint came off. These were men and women who had spent years studying the craft of making people laugh. They didn't switch it off. They couldn't, really. Or maybe they just didn't want to.
I think about him on days like today. National Let's Laugh Day has always struck me as a little bittersweet, a holiday that asks us to celebrate something we've quietly let go of. Ringling Bros. played its last show in 2017. Clown Alley, that strange and sacred backstage republic, closed with it. The new version of the circus that came back in 2024 has no clowns or animals at all. I don't say that as a criticism. Times change, and tastes change with them.
But I keep a photograph on my desk. It's blurry and it shows about six performers crowded into the hallway, all of them in various states of costume, all of them mid-laugh. I'm in the middle of the shot, standing straight, doing my job. Except if you look closely, you can see it: the laughter in my smile.