Jiggles Jiggler didn’t think his
name was at all funny. Nor did he
consider his multi-coloured frizz of hair particularly jocular. His big red tomato nose was, if
anything, unremarkable. And he
would have been surprised if anyone had even noticed his rainbow suit with the
giant shoes.
You see, Jiggles Jiggler lived in
clown city.
Every morning, he climbed aboard
his Model-T special with three small wheels and one large one, gave a squeeze
of the oversized rubber bulb –
honk, honk honey, I’m leaving for work now – and drove the hundred yards or so
to the train station with the usual bangs and orange smoke.
The Purple Puff-Puff was standing
in the station and he climbed aboard the pink and white striped carriage with a
hundred other clowns and settled back in the seat for the forty minute journey
to the office downtown.
Every day he did it and every day
it was the same: carriage full of clowns, all with big red noses and over-sized
shoes. Now and then, another clown
would enter the carriage, sit down – usually on a honking horn – and they’d all
gaze mindlessly out of the window until they arrived at their respective
offices.
It was always like that – had
always been like that – would always be like that - i
f it
hadn’t been for Bert Smith.
On that fateful day, Jiggles
Jiggler had only traveled two or three stations when someone entered the
carriage.
It was the funniest thing they
had ever seen. He was dressed in a
grey suit – absolutely no colours in it at all and it looked as though someone
had actually made it ‘to fit’. You
couldn’t help but smile. And his
hair was black! Black! And … you’d hardly believe it – he had
a normal nose. That was a killer.
A normal nose.
The man sat down and then Jiggles
Jiggler saw something that nearly sent him into hysterics. The man’s shoes! He had never, ever, seen anything like
them before. Ever. They were tiny, so tiny, in fact, that
they were only slightly larger than his feet!
Jiggles Jiggler just couldn’t
stop himself – he had to laugh – big guffaws. Tears ran down his face, carving little channels
through the grease paint and dripping multi-coloured rainbow kaplonks on his
giant bright yellow bow tie. He
felt a little ashamed of himself but he just couldn’t help it, he just had to
laugh. Everything about this man
was so darn funny. Hilarious. Uproarious.
Pretty soon the others were
laughing too. The mundane world of
clowns had suddenly been transformed by this funny little man in a grey suit
and small shoes.
He introduced himself as ‘Bert
Smith’ and the whole carriage broke up in helpless abandon to good,
old-fashioned belly-laughs and curious clowns with painted smiles from the surrounding
carriages looked in to see what the fuss was about. Pretty soon it seemed as though the whole clown express was
laughing fit to bust.
It turned out that his real name
was Cocoa Snuggles and he’d done it for a laugh - to give everyone else a laugh
in fact. And it had. In a world full of red noses and big
shoes, frizzy coloured hair and rainbow suits, Bert Smith had brought a touch
of hilarity into the drab world of clowns.
