The Comedian is a short story by Jack Rusher, published here Saturday, February 19, 2005. It is part of Stories.
A small man tries to make a big world laugh.
The comedian had grown an absurd little mustache, dressed himself in tattered rags, applied a half-liter of schmaltz and combed his hair back into an oleaginous halo in an attempt to synthesize a new comedic persona from the raw materials of Chaplin, Keaton and Jean-Gaspard Deburau.
He set himself up on a wooden soapbox in the middle of the public square, a place otherwise reserved for the shame of the pilloried, and began his routine: he jerked and seized and moved in an exaggerated palsy, shaking his arms over his head and shouting, squealing, pushing himself into a frothing, impotent rage. He worried, whenever he would break from the experience long enough to consider his actions, that his performance might be too kitsch to be taken seriously and too serious to be taken for comedy; his time at Vienna’s Kunstakademie had helped him to balance these concerns and appreciate the nature of art as the intersection of artist and spectator.
In a few months, after many careful refinements, the comedian had collected a small but loyal following among the poor and downtrodden of Munich. His greatest discoveries were the need to remain in character on and off stage (his admirers required of him absolute discipline, without which they would lose interest and return to the hofbrau), that no level of histrionic frenzy was too great and that the lumpenproletariat loved him in proportion to the offensiveness of his statements. He continued to polish his act, cultivating his audience with ever-greater fury, ultimately reaching a feigned delirium.
Though he had read Nietzsche, the comedian did not recognize that staring into this abyss and combatting these monsters would transform him into his own character, nor had the Academy taught him that the audience does as much to the artist as he does to them. His comedy was mistaken for drama; his ludicrous statements were held up as eternal truth; he sank into the despair of the misunderstood artist, pushing his act harder and further, beyond the edge of sanity, but they followed him there and pushed him further still.
The comedian’s success was without limit, but his swooning devotees remained ignorant of his true artistic intent. After a successful performance in Paris, he visited Père Lachaise to place flowers on Deburau’s grave and felt himself the loneliest man there, living or dead. He made arrangements for a performance of Brahms’s Cello Sonata in E Minor, the only piece with sufficient tristesse to soothe him.
In an attempt to end his career and return to a quiet life of painting landscapes, he began making statements that violated not only the moral and logical framework of European Humanism, but also the internal logic of his own artistic framework. His efforts were ineffectual, his followers followed even his most nonsensical edicts. When, in a terminal act of burlesque, he fellated the barrel of his otherwise ornamental Luger, he was merely playing his part to the final curtain call: the clown perished to complete his transformation from comedian to tragedian.