The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future As

A Clown

What's that? You want to be a clown? The circus kind or... Oh--the kids' party kind. Yeah, I know a little bit about that. My ex-wife's lawyer thought it was relevant that the guy I hired for our son's birthday had just been released from... nevermind--let me tell you what's ahead.

First of all, there's really not one particular place to get trained for all this--despite the "Clown College" you heard about on The Simpsons, the best way to go about learning it is to work as gofer and general slave for someone already doing it successfully. You'll need a catchy name--looking at you I'd guess Roly Poly might fit--and try to avoid overdoing the whole hair/makeup thing. What most people doing the clown schtick don't realize is that most kids are terrified of clowns.

Once you've learned to pull off the basic balloon animals and a few simple card tricks, you're ready to leave your mentor and start your act. You'll need a prop tricycle, a lot of annoying noisemakers, and the basic clown suit. You'll buy a crap van that spews blue smoke and you'll get one of those sad magnetic business signs to stick on the side--too bad there won't be enough real metal left on your van to stick it on properly.

You figure out that the only way you'll break into the cutthroat world of party clowning is to undercut your competition. You charge about 2/3 of what your previous boss did, but that just gets you the really cheap, unpleasant customers who deduct that one piece of cake you ate from your pay. You aren't really getting enough money to survive on, so plan B saves you. You carefully orchestrate a variety of rumours about the main competition in town--your whisper campaign hints of drug use, child abuse and more. You couple this with some radio ads--you clean out your savings to pay for them--emphasizing your identity as the "safe" entertainer for children.

Eventually all birthdays, bar mitzvahs and kindergarten graduations begin to look the same. There's always one or two kids who try to pull off your fake nose, and you see more kids vomit from overindulging on party food than you can count.

You get married--fortunately your wife will have a real job; unfortunately she will resent your pathetic income once the novelty of being "Mrs. Poly" wears off. You'll struggle to find clown work during the winter, and be forced into a variety of unsatisfying, low-paying jobs--all you're suited for due to your lack of a real education.

You'll come home beat and your wife will berate you for not being a more involved parent. "You go make everyone else's kids laugh--try it with your own" she'll scream. Of course, your children have long since seen and heard everything you have to offer, and by the time they're 12, you're simply a source of extreme embarassment that only raiding their mother's prescription bottles can alleviate.

By the time you're 45, you'll have to go back to school to learn some sort of useful skill that might earn you a few dollars above minimum wage. Of course, since you wasted half your life trying the futile clown business, you'll then have to work until you're 75 before you can ever hope to retire.

Hey--you know any good jokes?

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