I wrote this a few days in advance so I’d have something to post on Christmas this year. Unfortunately, I forgot to mention Christmas in the story. Yay, I’m accidentally discriminating against Santa!

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EINSTEIN THE CLOWN

(a serious physics research project)

Written by James “Kibo” Parry

(Copyright © 2011 James “Kibo” Parry, all rights reserved, you little bastards)

As his colleagues had predicted, Einstein ran away from Princeton to join the circus. They put him in the sideshow, because of his hair.

“But I want to be a clown,” he told The Human Diaper. But The Human Diaper couldn’t hear him because he was too busy powdering himself.

“But I want to be a clown,” he told Crumbly Man. But Crumbly Man was busy trying to regrow the body parts he had pulled off and thrown at the audience last night.

“But I want to be a clown,” he told Deformed Potsie. Deformed Potsie sort of smiled, and pointed Einstein towards the clowns’ bungalow.

Einstein went into the Clown Boss’s outer office. “Do you have an appointment?” asked his Clown Secretary, who was sorting file folders according to the wacky Clown Alphabet. Einstein said “No,” so she sent him in, because of Clown Logic.

“The first thing yer gonna need,” said the Clown Boss as he chewed his unexploded cigar, “is a unique makeup design and a unique clown name. All clowns have to have their special uniqueness registered with the Clown Bureau. It’s the law.”

Einstein was so shocked he nearly fell off his chair into one of the many cream pies lying on the floor. “The Clown Bureau? Where’s that?”

“Well, like the equally important United Nations, the Clown Bureau has two headquarterses. One’s in Geneva. That’s in Switzerland, ya know (funniest place on Earth.) And the big headquarters is down the street from here. Ya can get there onna number 7 bus.”

“Which bus is number 7? Oh, wait, it’s the one that says ‘Clown Bureau and Main Street’, isn’t it? The one with all the crushed tiny cars jammed under its fenders?”

The Clown Boss nodded, and then shot Einstein with a gun that popped out a wacky banner that read “Yes, that is the correct bus route!” in Comic Sans. Einstein thanked him and left.

*     *     *     *

The Clown Bureau’s headquarters were in an old church that had been de-consecrated and then wackied. All the stained glass windows had been replaced with stained underpants windows, with the sunlight streaming between the polka dots. Inside, there was a long line of clowns waiting to see the Clown Registrar. Einstein took a number from a helpful clown who dispensed them from his mouth.

When they called his number, Einstein went up to the Clown Registrar and spoke to her through the little hole in the bulletproof glass window. “So, you want to be a clown?” she said, while simultaneously yawning in several parts of her body.

“Yes, my real name’s Einstein, but I’d like to register my special funny clown name. ‘Einstein The Clown’!”

She yawned again. “Sorry, that name’s taken.”

Einstein remembered that all good clown names end in ‘o’. “‘Einsteino The Clown’?”

“I’m really slightly sorry, but that name’s taken too.”

“Hmm. I know, nobody else can possibly be using my Xbox Live username... Register me as ‘xXx ITZ E1NST1EN SNYPA 42o 69 XxXx’, please!”

“Nope. Taken.”

“Well, as all the funny names end in ‘o’, what do you have available ending in ‘o’?”

She scratched her big hair and flipped through her giant Rolodex of clowns. “You can be ‘Dizeezo The Clown’... or ‘Unfunnio The Clown’... or ‘Molesto The Clown’. With the last one you wouldn’t be doing kids’ parties, because you’d have to time-share that name with the other Molesto The Clown, and he goes to every party.”

“Those names all suck! Just give me the best available name that doesn’t end in ‘o’.”

“Right. Congratulations and welcome to the profession, Molester The Clown! Now press your face against the glass of this Xerox machine and we’ll register your scary clown makeup.”

“But I’m not wearing any!” said Einstein.

She was nice enough to scribble all over his face with her lipstick before slamming his head into the Xerox machine and pushing the button that fired the deadly Xerox lasers into his eyeballs. She then gave him his Certificate of Weird-Lookingness and his wallet-size Official License To Be Funny. He had to sign them both with a ballpoint pen attached to a chain, but it wouldn’t quite reach. Fortunately, the other end of the chain was attached to a fat clown’s butt, so Einstein asked him to back up a step, and then proudly signed both documents in his best Molester The Clown handwriting. It was cursive!

*     *     *     *

For the next performance (one of eight hundred the circus would give that year) the Clown Boss assigned Einstein not to the center ring, but to a special ring underneath the bleachers, where the only people who could see him were toddlers who had gotten their heads caught between the slats. It was his job to make them stop crying so that their pain wouldn’t distract their parents from seeing the real acts. But first, he had to perfect his craft.

At rehearsal (one of nine hundred the clowns did before each performance) the Clown Boss told Einstein how to be funny. “First, ya go down this crazy slide into the machine that makes Weetabix. When you come out the other side, be sure to flop around a lot so the audience can see that every bone in yer body’s broken. Pause for laughs if necessary. Then, two assistant clowns will stuff ya into this glass tube, which then gets heated white-hot. Then Jeff Koons The Clown will tie it into a balloon dog sculpture and put it in some museum a thousand miles away. Then ya can take yer bow.”

It sounded simple enough!

At the performance, everything started out fine, but when Einstein got halfway down the slide, he got stuck. “EMERGENCY!” yelled the ringmaster, “MOLESTER IS STUCK! WE HAVE A STUCK MOLESTER UNDER THE BLEACHERS! RESCUE CREWS, LOOK FOR THE UNFUNNY MOLESTER SURROUNDED BY CRYING CHILDREN!”

A clown fire truck roared up, and clown firemen used the clown Jaws Of Life (really just needle-nose pliers) to pull him off the slide. Then they threw him into the Weetabix machine, and everybody cheered.

The machine ground Einstein into sawdust and then compressed it into inedible lava rocks shaped like panty liners. It was the greatest product placement Weetabix had ever paid for, a true tribute to the actual qualities of that alleged food. The machine dumped Einstein’s mangled body on the ground and he proceeded to flop around in accordance with his training.

Unfortunately, some bad kid had tossed his gum on the ground, and Einstein rolled in it! “Eww, gum!” he wailed, and then the two assistant clowns jammed him into the narrow glass tube. It was trundled into a nearby blast furnace until it glowed hotter than the core of the Sun. Jeff Koons began to twist Einstein.

Jeff Koons twisted a little too ferociously, and Einstein popped!

And that’s how Einstein got his first laugh.

*     *     *     *

A decade later, Einstein was released from the hospital. He had suffered grievous injuries in order to make one small slow child laugh, but such is the life of a clown. He would have been out of the hospital a year earlier, but the nurse kept mixing up his chart with Molesto The Clown’s, leading to many unnecessary chemotherapy doses. “Oops,” said the nurse.

Einstein’s hair had fallen out from the chemo, and when it finally grew back, it was an odd shade of green. And his face was terribly scarred from where the lipstick had been burnt into it, giving him white skin with a lopsided Glasgow smile. He decided to get revenge on the bad hospital by blowing it up, but the Joker did that first. “Hey! You’re stealing my act!” yelled Einstein as his wheelchair lost a wheel and the Joker got away. But there was nothing he could do about it -- the Joker had already registered Einstein’s appearance at the Clown Bureau. Einstein was now an unauthorized portrayal of another, funnier, clown!

He was

EINSTEIN: UNAUTHORIZED CLOWN

“What a bad idea for a TV series,” said a TV network executive who happened to be standing nearby. The show went on the air the next day, replacing “Community”.

In each episode, Einstein travelled the world fighting crime and learning to love, with his sidekicks, sassy black something and comic relief something and teenage something. Eighty-three episodes were filmed, but the show was cancelled during the first commercial break, so the remaining episodes were burned. The network executive explained, “We heard it increases DVD sales if you can put lost episodes on them, so now all we have to do is find those episodes we burned the only copies of, and then we’ll be rich.” Things didn’t work out that way.

Depressed, Einstein went to the circus to ask for his old job back. But they’d already replaced him with a computer. “Damn you!” bellowed Einstein as he attempted to smash Clowntron-2000 with a foam rubber hammer. But Clowntron-2000 was too smart for him, and sprayed him with digital seltzer until he went away.

Obviously he couldn’t go back to Princeton looking as he did, so he took the only job that was available, and wound up in the circus sideshow. “Step right up!” yelled the barker, “And see the disgusting people! The Human Diaper, who can poop in himself! The Crumbly Man, who was never really alive! Deformed Potsie, the hideous wad with the golden voice! And Albert Einstein Man, the physicist who thought he was smart enough to be a clown! See them all for five cents, or see all but Einstein for ten!”

That year, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for being the world’s least favorite clown. On the medal they spelled his name wrong, and he had to spend the rest of his life explaining that he was not a cow, even though he was wearing a medal that said ‘MOOLESTER’.

THE END