She Keeps ‘Em Laughing

When she’s at home in Santa Ana, Sherron Newberg lives a rather quiet life.

“I cook and do housework which I don’t like. I’m like a normal person,” said the mother of two sons. “I’m just very average.”

Oh, sure.

At home maybe. Other times, you might find her in a red-velvet-lined coffin ready to pop out as a vampiress, as she calls herself, or clown or one of the other colorful characters she has created for her moonlighting gigs. Newberg, who is manager of the House of Humor in Costa Mesa, said she most often works as her alter ego--Mollie Malone, the clown.

Once, she said, she stepped from the coffin dressed as a nun as a character for a “living history” party for a woman celebrating her 40th birthday.

“It was sort of an over-the-hill party, and it was a blast.”

The hourlong gig earned her $100, she said.

Most of the time Newberg is busy making people happy.

“There are so many sad people in the world,” she said.

“Actually,” she said about her work, “I’m an actress who does her acting in my clowning.” Newberg said she studied drama but that she did not care for the stage or for many of the people involved in acting: “Too many of them were plastic, not real.”

One of her most memorable performances, she said, was presenting the living history of an elderly woman who was dying of throat cancer, using information supplied by the woman’s children. “It was really touching,” she said.

And then there are the characters who are House of Humor customers.

“We had a millionaire who bought up all our rubber roaches that were really lifelike,” she said. “He liked to shock people by putting them in their salad.”

And there was the psychiatrist “who sent some of his patients in here to buy humorous stuff to make them happy.”

Early on, her goal in life was to be a dancer, but “I went to beauty school, got married and my career went downhill from there,” she said. Her husband is Rich Williams, 39, a drug store manager.

She has been involved in clowning for 20 years. Fifteen years ago, though, she got a job with a costume shop “and a lot of clowns that came in told told me about all the neat experiences they were having, and I got caught up in it.”

One of her first jobs was at an Irish pub that had hired her for its grand opening. “It was called Malone,” she said, “so I decided to take the clown name of Mollie Malone,” she said.

Now her goal is to become a famous “or at least a well-known” clown. “That may take me all my life, but I am going for it.”

Although she does not teach formal classes in clowning, Newberg often will take novice clowns on assignments to help them learn the craft.

“I don’t charge them anything,” said Newberg, who has never had a clown lesson herself.

“I learned from experience and from books I bought or checked out from the library,” she said. “Maybe I’m just trying to make it easier for them.”