He Isn’t Just Clowning, He’s Easing Depression

Last Spring, Sy Elliott went to a wedding. He didn’t go as Mr. Snuff. Not this time.

He didn’t need an alter ego to enjoy himself because the bride was Exhibit A in Elliott’s campaign to convince the world that there is within each of us a clown clamoring to come out. And releasing that clown makes it possible to sweep away--at least for a short time--the cares and tensions and health problems that plague us daily.

The bride was known in clown lexicon as Kidney Bean. When Elliott met her, she was an attractive 22-year-old dialysis patient who had to be hooked up to the machine three times a week. She was also deeply depressed.

In her search for ways to lift her depression, she noticed an ad for Elliott’s “Clown College,” then holding forth at the Orange Recreation Center. She looked in on the class and for a whole evening was transported out of her own problems. So she went back and learned and became Kidney Bean, the clown. And she came out of a lifelong shell of shyness so buoyantly that soon after finishing Elliott’s class, she met the man who would become her husband.

“Now,” Elliott says happily, “when she isn’t hooked up, she’s entertaining. And she isn’t depressed anymore.”

If that sounds simplistic, Elliott doesn’t care. He believes implicitly in the healing properties of clowns.

“The clown,” Elliott says, “is the person within you. You have to find that person, research him. Clowning isn’t acting. A good clown has to be a real person or kids, especially, will see right through him. People will accept a clown doing and saying things a normal person can’t. If I see someone on the street I admire, I can go up to that person and say, ‘You’re beautiful.’ The clown can give compliments without embarrassment. Clowning can truly become a new language in the art of communicating.”

That’s a lot easier for Mr. Snuff than it is for Elliott, who may well be the living embodiment of the theme of Pagliacci--the sad and melancholy clown. Elliott’s life has been something less than a barrel of laughs. He was born in Brooklyn to parents who split up when he was a small child. His father--whom he knew only fleetingly--was never there for him.

And Elliott had dyslexia at a time when that learning disability was neither known nor understood. Since he was unable to read properly, he was regarded by his mother and a tyrannical grandmother who lived in his household as lazy and indigent. He grew up with that picture of himself.

As soon as he could, he tried to enlist in the Marine Corps but was rejected because he was colorblind. Finally, he was accepted by the Air Force. There, he learned to be an expert photographer. When he got out of the military, he set up his own studio. When that succeeded, he went into various other businesses, “working 22 hours a day” to compensate for all those years of failure. He had returned to photography, working on several network TV shows, “when I burned out and had a breakdown at 32.”

He gave his businesses to his employees and traveled through Israel and Europe for several years as a free-lance photographer before settling down in London as the marketing director of a successful ad agency.

A few years later, he met and married an Englishwoman who worked in the agency. According to Elliott, she was having family problems that made her want to leave England, and he finally gave in to the pressure, quit his job and returned to the United States--where things very quickly started to turn sour.

Elliott and his family settled in Orange County, and he found himself working at jobs “for which I was overaged and overqualified.” So he did a market study that got him into the fire extinguisher business so successfully that he started a franchise promotion--just as interest rates zoomed. No one would invest, and Elliott was overextended and lost everything.

About the same time his marriage was breaking up. And he had a heart attack.

That’s when Elliott met the clowns. Fresh out of the hospital, faced with living alone, he saw the clowns in a shopping center and was entranced, forgetting his own problems for a few moments. When they finished their act, Elliott told them how much they had cheered him, and they invited him to visit their clown club. He did, “and I felt very naked. But I went on to their clown school anyway, mostly because it was something to do. I still felt naked, but people kept telling me I was terrific.

“I didn’t think I was, but when I finished the school, I did a lot of research into clowning. What especially fascinated me was discovering that there were no trade secrets written down. Only the basics. So for a long time, I didn’t go beyond them. I stuck to what I knew.”

That’s when he took on the persona of Mr. Snuff, which, Elliott says carefully, means “short and ugly and fat and funny.”

He also says there are three types of clowns. The Whiteface Clown is the aristocrat of clowning because he has high entertainment skills, such as juggling and magic, and everything he does is impeccably correct. The Auguste Clown is the klutz “who screws up everything he does.” And the Character Clown slips into the role of an identifiable character. An alter ego. Elliott’s alter ego is Mr. Snuff--even though his first serious commercial effort turned out to be close to the klutz.

“I did lots of parties; the first one I did alone was a corporate picnic at Lion Country Safari,” he says. “I lost my clowning virginity there. I loused up everything I did and came out of there with my sense of professionalism shot. I couldn’t even get the balloons to work. And while I was dressing and feeling devastated, the guy in charge of the affair found me and told me I was the funniest clown they ever had. So that night I learned not to be afraid to just go out and do it. Even if you do it wrong, it can be good. That night I learned the virtue of doing tricks badly.”

From all his research and a growing body of experience, Elliott became convinced that he could teach clowning--and sold the idea to recreation departments in half a dozen county communities. He calls his class “Mr. Snuff’s Clown College,” and he offered it through various city parks and community services departments and schools. His students were not so much people who fantasized being circus clowns as people who wanted to get outside themselves and the frequent despair of daily lives. Elliott understands that.

Early in his teaching, a group of professional clowns--led by a well-known performer billed as “Spanky”--played Orange County and dropped in on his class “to get their laugh for the evening.” Instead, they were impressed enough with Elliott’s teaching to take him aside afterward and offer to share with him the kind of information that doesn’t appear in books, that is passed down from father to son among professional clowns. Elliott accepted eagerly.

“They showed me what was missing in my routines,” he says, “how to set my makeup properly, how to create a real clown character. After that, I could watch a circus and see what was really happening with the clowns. And they didn’t charge me a thing. They helped me as a favor because they thought I was good.”

He was good enough to reach out with his clowning into areas previously unexplored. Working through Navy Operation Outreach, for example, he taught a class in clowning on the battleship New Jersey. “They had big problems with alcoholism, especially when they went into foreign ports. The sailors couldn’t communicate, so they just got drunk, got laid--and got into trouble. Learning the art of clowning gave them a language that was universal, and they loved it. I always wished I could follow through on that experience, but it was a one-shot thing. The Navy has no funding for this.”

There were successes with his clown class students too. One was a 72-year-old woman with a severe lung disease whom Elliott touched deeply in the hospital. She asked to attend his class and did. “Now,” Elliott says, “she’s entertaining in hospitals. That’s magic.”

Another was a 30-year-old mentally retarded man who loved to play with the children in his neighborhood. But the parents were chary of him and kept their children away--until he became a clown. Then he was sought out as a playmate.

The student Elliott remembers most vividly was a 6-year-old Philip Marshall, who was suffering from a malignant brain tumor. Elliott met the boy’s parents at church and invited them to bring Philip to his class.

“When I saw him the first time,” Elliott says, “I looked up at God and said, ‘How can this happen. No child should ever have to deal with something like this.’ He had lost his hair, and his face was splotchy from the treatments he was receiving. But when you feel this anguish at seeing him, he knows and it creates pain within you and then within him, and he doesn’t want to see people. But beneath clown makeup, none of that showed.”

By coincidence, a local cable TV station was covering the clown class that night and recorded Philip’s transformation. He put on his clown makeup and--his parents told Elliott--expressed real joy and happiness for the first time in many months. After that, he did shows for doctors and kids in the hospital, and he once told Elliott: “It hurts when they see me, but it’s OK when they come to see the clown.”

Today, Philip’s disease is in remission and he’s going to school. And he’s still talking about the clown.

Elliott has other success stories of clown therapy, enough of them that slowly a dream began to form. It was still taking shape when Elliott had a second heart attack early last year. He has worked only sporadically since, struggling with health problems and living mostly off the proceeds from his part of the sale of his family home. “I can’t get on with my own children,” he says sadly, “except my youngest son, a beautiful kid who visits me and we clown around together.”

At the age of 58, Elliott wants to find Mr. Snuff permanently again and put him to regular work in socially significant places. That’s his dream.

“Clowning,” he says earnestly, “can provide a breakthrough in therapy for certain types of problems we have little or no answer for right now. Clowns can offer remarkable opportunities for the mentally retarded to be useful and feel good about themselves, can work with juvenile gangs, with alcoholics, with drug addicts.

“A kid who loses his childhood in drugs has never matured. The clown lets him be a child again and restores a whole portion of his life. I’d like to take clowning to military bases, to the mentally retarded, to kids vegetating in hospital--to all sorts of places where other people don’t want to go. People who feel useless today can be taught through clowning to go into hospices and hospitals to enrich the lives of others--and themselves.

“I have the skills and the time to teach them, now. I just don’t have the resources. But I can’t give up the dream. Not yet. I still believe I can go out of this world, and people will know I was here, that I’ve done something of importance--started something that gives real healing in places where healing has never reached before.”