When did the booing start? He was never exactly sure. He had put on some of the most spectacular shows of the era. He had filled the big top over and over and over again. He had at least four masterworks to his name. And so, when his career ended so abruptly, he was as surprised as anyone. How did it happen?
“Boris” became the most famous clown of his time. And yet, when he started out, he would open his act as if from the public seats. He was not one of the people, of course; but he liked to sit among them, awaiting his moment. He would then clamber through the crowd to a plangent arrangement of the national anthem – a pale-faced jester, candy-floss hair, feigning to fall over, carrying buckets of confetti and his little plastic flags. By entering the ring in this way – and with great clatter and furore – he would subvert the expected order and contrive confusion in the expectation of the audience. For a moment, he appeared to come from the same place as the public and therefore to be their envoy among the other performers – whom he would proceed to lampoon and ridicule. At this he was always very successful.
His breakthrough show, “Mayor”, opened in 2008 and ran for eight exhilarating years. He was already highly accomplished at a kind of low moment-to-moment physical comedy and he would seek to engage the public with sudden calamities, tumblings, losing of directions. He would, for example, strand himself on the high wire and simply dangle there with his flags – oddly pointless, ever-present, grinning. Or he would pretend to juggle plates but instead allow each one to crash to the floor – sorry, not sorry. (At the famous clown-school that he attended; he had perfected an early routine in which he smashed up restaurants.) He would pickpocket a wallet from the crowd. Then he would affect to fall in love with someone and – when, inevitably, she resisted his overtures – he would pretend to bribe her with the wallet he had stolen.
