Lessons in How to Clown Around

Sy Elliott never really wanted to run away and join a circus. He just wanted to put some fun in his life. So, in January, the 55-year-old Irvine resident quit his job as president of a home protection service and became a teacher--of clowns.

Since then, dozens of students, ages 10 and up, have graduated from his course, called “Mr. Snuff’s Clown College,” offered through various city parks and community services departments in Orange County and local schools. Today he is finishing a course at Santa Ana College, and the next five-week class will be held Tuesdays starting April 16 at Los Alisos Intermediate School in Mission Viejo. The class, which runs from 7 to 9:30 p.m., costs $45.

Elliott is a former clown student who has performed at Lion Country Safari, corporate picnics and hospitals. He teaches what he has learned through experience and research--the makeup for the hobo clown, the Auguste (klutzy) clown and the white-face clown (the straight man), the antics and the balloon tricks. The course culminates with a “graduation,” in which students are presented to the community or their friends in costume and makeup.

Like Elliott, most of his students don’t want to join the circus. “Most of them are thinking of working in the community, getting involved with charity work, children or friends. A lot are schoolteachers and nurses,” he said.

Some, he said, are patients themselves, or recovering alcoholics who use the training as therapy. One graduate, a dialysis patient who gave herself the clown name of “Kidney Bean,” plans to visit dialysis units in costume to entertain children, he said. “She knows how lonely and frustrating it can be.”

Clowning serves two purposes, said Elliott.

“It is a way of communicating, but it also gives the clowns permission to come out and play in a way that’s acceptable to the community at large.” When Elliott as Elliott walks into a roomful of strangers, for example, he describes himself as a “short, squat little businessman with a beard who feels a little uncomfortable.”

But as a clown , he can “say hello to anybody, greet them and be friends.”