LONDON — A clown on a unicycle, with a Bozo-orange wig and a beep-beep red nose, rolled down the center aisle of Holy Trinity Church just before a reading from the Gospel of Matthew.
In pews on both sides sat scores of giggling men and women wearing huge bow ties, lime green and pink wigs, poofy checkered pants, floppy shoes and, of course, big red noses.
“As soon as you put your nose on, you are a different person,” said David Vaughan, 59, an office administrator-turned-clown in a powder blue Keystone Kops outfit who sat in the front row for the annual Anglican service celebrating clowns and their art.
The Sunday service paid homage to Joseph Grimaldi, a Briton who died in 1837 and is widely considered the father of modern clowning. But since the service began in 1946, it has become something more elemental — colorful and fun as a gumball machine, a celebration of the human need to laugh and of the people devoted to nurturing that need.
“For the times when we have failed to see the joke, and lost our sense of humor and perspective,” a priest prayed at the altar as the congregation, including a clown with a live giant white bunny on a leash, spilled onto the streets.
“Lord have mercy,” responded the clowns in full “slap,” as they call their costumes.
The kaleidoscopic light of the afternoon sun poured through a stained-glass window, dedicated to Grimaldi, featuring a huge smiling clown.
Clown Roly, wearing his clerical collar under a red and black plaid outfit, carried a pink feather duster, which he used like a conductor’s wand as the organist played hymns and, naturally, “Send in the Clowns.”
“All my clowning has some Christian story or punch line — it’s my way of being a priest,” said Clown Roly, whose real name is Roly Bain. An ordained Anglican priest, Bain heads a group called the Holy Fools, which practices clowning as a way of spreading religious faith.
Many of the clowns said they were religious or, at least, spiritual people who use their art to fight pain with laughter. Many volunteer in hospitals, hospices and other places where people can perhaps use a chuckle.
“Clowning is about life — it’s laughter and tears,” said Bain, who has smacked bishops in the face with custard pies. He said many clowns have been through their own hardships. Grimaldi himself lost his wife in childbirth.
“You have to be acquainted with grief to be a good clown — you have to know the highs and lows,” Bain said.
Vaughan, who calls himself “Conk the Clown,” said he has been a full-time clown for a decade, a career that began while he was depressed after a failed marriage. Faced with seeing his children only on weekends, Vaughan said, he dreaded going home alone. He slapped on the paint and red nose and began providing a service with a smile.
“I did it to hide my true feelings,” said Vaughan, whose serious tone contrasted with the bright red smile painted beneath his old-fashioned British police hat. “You can’t be upset. You forget your worries and you put on a happy face.”
Albert Alter, a clown from Portland, Ore., who attended the service, said clowns delight in “bringing down the high and lifting up the lowly.” Alter, wearing a porkpie hat and red bow tie, explained that he used to be a chemical engineer.
On Sunday in East London the clowns mixed the unabashedly goofball — honking silly horns and wearing hats adorned with such things as yellow ducks — with solemn remembrances of clowns who had died in the past year, including French mime Marcel Marceau and “The Unknown Clown.”
Surrounded by the church’s old whitewashed walls and statues of Jesus, they listened to a Gospel reading about the paralyzing effects of worry: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?”
But nothing stayed serious too long. The clowns even parodied all the sit-stand-kneel rituals of the Anglican church service, popping up and down every few seconds like bread in a toaster gone haywire, to the hysterical delight of the packed church.
When the service ended, a parade of clowns filed out past a plaque with the “A prayer for Clowns,” which asks God’s blessing for men and women in slap “who make the world spin merrily on its way/and somehow add more beauty to each day.”
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