The Laughing Man

They called him The Laughing Man.

The posters showed him in the middle of a pratfall—one foot in the air, eyes wide with staged surprise, a party hat bent sideways on his head, a grin so stretched it looked carved on. Bright colors. Big letters. The kind of thing that made kids point and laugh before they even stepped inside the tent.

Adults smiled too, but thinner. With a kind of detachment that comes as time goes, remembering the shape of laughter without knowing how to make the sound anymore. They’d watch their children laugh and feel something they couldn’t name. Not jealousy, not exactly. Something quieter. Something like distance.

Behind the curtain, he waited. Always behind the curtain was it that he told himself, "I didn't have a choice.". The velvet was thick with dust and grease and old perfume. A hundred shows had passed through it, but it never forgot the smell of sweat.

His costume clung to him like regret. A patchwork of faded motley, too tight at the joints, too loose at the shoulders. "I did not have a choice," he reminded himself. Someone had once told him the colors were “whimsical.” Now they just looked tired.

His makeup cracked along the creases of his mouth. He had stretched that mouth so many times, in so many shapes of joy, that it had long since ceased to feel like his. The essence of ecstasy, many believed all clowns and fools like him were, but really they were the definite contrary.

He flexed his fingers. Took a breath. Waited for the sound, the drumroll. That signal. That sound that meant he was no longer allowed to be himself; it meant that he was no longer allowed to experience ecstasy, nor sorrow. Rather he was supposed to do nothing else than perform.

He stepped forward into the light.

And the laughter began before he had even moved.

Not the good kind. Not the warm, contagious sort that bubbles up because you’ve seen something delightful. No—this was something else. This was a judgment, disguised as joy.

They laughed at him. Not his jokes. Not his tricks. Not the pratfalls he hadn’t yet attempted. They laughed at his shape, his presence. Laughed because he had entered the ring not as a man, but as something they had all silently agreed was beneath one. People like them did not imagine him as the essence of ecstasy, no, rather themselves as it when faced by the Laughing Man. Because when a man walks into a room with nothing left to defend himself, stripped away of everything that makes a human a logical being, people call it comedy.

He stumbled to the center, like always. Sawdust clung to his boots. His juggling balls—faded red, blue, and green—waited for him on the pedestal. He bent to pick them up. His knees creaked.

He juggled, as he always did. The same tired rhythm. Up, down. Spin, catch. But today, the blue ball slipped. Then the red. Then they all hit the ground and the crowd roared.

He bowed, dipping low, letting his forehead nearly brush the ground, as if the bow might hide his face from himself, from this ridiculous trap he'd fallen into. Then, for no reason he could name, he tried a cartwheel.

He hadn’t done one properly in years.

His arm gave way. He landed hard, ribs first. He thought he heard something crack. Not a bone, but something inside.

They shrieked with laughter.

And still, he got up.

Because that’s what he was trained to do.

Because somewhere, long ago, someone had cracked a whip and said, Get up when you fall. Because there are places in the world where obedience is the only thing a man owns.

When the show ended, he didn’t return to the performers’ tent.

He slipped between the wagons and behind the bleachers, to where the air reeked of spilled beer, piss, and old popcorn. A place where nobody looked. A place where clowns went to disappear.

He sat there a long while, knees to his chest, breathing slow, trying to find a reason to still be breathing. To still make perhaps not the essence of anything, but an essence of something at least. To feel like his audience did. He felt like a dog. A stray. Something meant to be leashed, trained, displayed, and then hidden. Something you kick, then feed, then kick again; and the ones who kick were the rational ones, he thought, not the ones who were kicked.

Somewhere, a child was still laughing. He flinched at the sound. Whether it was a flinch caused by his jealousy and regret, or caused by pity for the child, not knowing what he was doing was ethically wrong. At least to the Laughing Man. Or perhaps because he remembered a time when he’d laughed too: not on stage; not for money. He couldn’t even remember what had made him laugh, exactly. A joke, maybe.

He remembered how he got here.

Years ago, he had wandered into a traveling show, hungry and broke and young. Someone saw something in him, as people generally do. They told him he had a “funny face,” as people generally do. That was the start of it. People think becoming a clown is a choice. It isn't, always.

The circus owner used to come by sometimes after shows.

“You’ve got timing,” he’d say, puffing on a half-dead cigar. “They love you. You bring in crowds. You make 'em forget.”

Forget what? Their pain? Their boredom? Their cruelty? That the Laughing Man never laughs?

He never asked. He just nodded.

He wanted to speak, of course. There were words behind his teeth every night. I’m tired. I’m still trying. I’m still human. But the words stayed where they were, buried under the greasepaint.

He became something else instead.

A wound, dressed in motley and forced to dance.

But most of all, a dog.

Then one night, he stayed sitting behind the curtain.

The drum rolled. The ringmaster barked. The crowd rustled, waiting. But he didn’t move; he stayed buried under his greasepaint.

And slowly, they began to laugh anyway.

At nothing.

At absence.

At the idea of him, even when he wasn’t there.

As if he were funnier not being seen than being seen.

As if they had never been laughing with him, only at what he represented.

Because cruelty doesn’t need a target.

He tore the costume off, the buttons popping. Scrubbed the paint from his skin until the basin ran pink. Threw the juggling balls across the floor. He unlatched the invisible leash from his neck, and for the first time in years, he looked himself in the mirror and saw no one laughing. Just himself.

He left barefoot. Walked off into the dark, past the caravans and trailers and generator hum.

Nobody tried to stop him.

In the morning, the posters were gone.

By nightfall, a new clown had been hired.

The show went on.