If Alex DeLarge and Marcel Marceau had a baby — and let's just leave the image of that tawdry union right here, shall we? — it would look a lot like 20 Penny Circus.
"Carl has eyeliner he paints on like eyelashes underneath his eyes — we got that from A Clockwork Orange. That was where the original idea came from," Tyler Sutter says with, he cautions, one large difference: unlike Mr. DeLarge in the Kubrick classic, who revels in rape and larger physical cruelty, 20 Penny Circus takes a different tack.
"It's masochism, not violence," Sutter says. During the performance, he makes Carl Skenes jump on broken glass, then has him put his face in the glass while a girl from the audience stands on his face.
Welcome to 20 Penny Circus. This is not your father's clown show, resembling more of what perhaps our grandfathers and great-grandfathers would have seen: vaudeville mixed with mimes. Except, of course, Skenes and Sutter speak and, by his own admission, Sutter beats the tar out of Skenes… mostly. Mix in some hard music and magic and, well, these are clowns I can get behind.
I am vehemently not a clown person, y'all. It's not a result of Pennywise or John Wayne Gacy or even the most recent spree of idiocy lingering at the edges of wooded areas and making threatening phone calls. It's because clowns are creepy, whether or not they want to kill you. National Geographic published a piece explaining why earlier this month, but essentially, they're creepy because they vacillate between looking human and looking… not.
"The girls say we're sexy clowns," Sutter says. "We say 'contemporary clown.' The old birthday clown is dying out and we are trying to set the stage for this new style of whiteface performance. We developed the characters from old circus and Vaudeville."
Sutter's character wears white clown face — also called whiteface and, obviously, why his character evokes mime. He plays what he calls "the stereotypical whiteface clown" and, like clowns did in the pre-Bozo days, portrays the "boss" clown — the one who calls all the shots, runs the show, beats up the other clowns and, perhaps most significantly, plays the straight man.
"The solo acts I have don't have much comedy to them. They are more surreal. I have lots of comedic lines but I'm not the comic relief," he says. That role belongs to Skenes, whose character calls to mind "creepy" but gets hit so much it's hard not to empathize.
"Carl, his character is based on Scaramouche from comedia dell'arte. He is the comedic relief. He is the one who does the bowling ball dick lift," Sutter says, adding that the music to that particular part of the show is a mashup of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" and Justin Timberlake's "Suit and Tie."
"We're raunchy, comedic clowns. We're vulgar, we're edgy, we've got a rock star vibe. I think we get away with it really well," he says. It's a definite niche, and one they cultivate: They choose clothes to set them apart from a mid-century clown.
"Visually, we lean more towards the mime-esque style. We specifically wear well-fitted clothes. Even if people look at us in clownface, when you see our show, it's totally different," he says.
The recent clown-tastrophes that swept the nation last month?
"What is happening now — which is all fake, by the way — doesn't affect us. The only way is, I don't walk around the street with the clown face, which you aren't supposed to do anyway."
This is not a kid's show, so the dynamic of a seemingly benign kids' clown turning out to be a horrible person doesn't factor into how people see them. Which is not to say Sutter's character doesn't physically abuse Skenes, but it doesn't seem discordant when he does. Perhaps that reflects on my sense of the grotesque; Sutter tells me 20 Penny is "a show for people with questionable taste,” and I happen to have questionable taste. When he talks about how, during their act, one of them lifts a bowling ball with his penis — which is its own sort of horror, but mostly for the person doing the lifting — I swoon a little bit. Not because of the penis thing — don't bother trying to Google it, by the way, that's a rabbit hole you don't want to go down — but because if so many of us find clowns upsetting, well, at least 20 Penny Circus doesn't hide that part of them. When you see clowns behaving badly in their natural environment, it's more fascination factor than fear factor.
It doesn't hurt that what they do as part of the show — the "tricks," if you will — don't fall into the "saw a girl in half" category. The men come by their skill honestly, too.
"Carl's dad's a magician, his mom is a dance teacher and his sister is a showgirl — if he were to become a doctor, they would have frowned upon that," Sutter says "His dad went on to teach David Blaine the bullet trick."
The bullet trick — which Skenes's father perfected and named the "bullet catch" — involves an illusion where a magician appears to catch a bullet fired from a live gun… in his mouth.
The twosome met in 2010 at Universal Studios at the now-mothballed magic show. They started performing together outside of their day job, and since starting 20 Penny Circus, they've brought their brand of freaktainment to Halloween Horror Nights, the Rochester Fringe Festival's "Cirque du Fringe" and, more locally, the Improv.
It's about to go bigger for this whimsical, dastardly duo, too — and it started (as all truly fine things do) with Telemundo. Ripley's came calling in 2015 and asked them to do a commercial for the Spanish network, to promote the 2016 installment of its annual book. After that, they did a photo shoot with Ripley's props — pulled from the vaults of things you can believe… or not. Next, Ripley's decided they wanted to feature the duo in the 2017 book.
Since then, Sutter and Skenes have filed four commercials for the oddities giant. This week, Ripley's flies them to London, where they'll perform at Piccadilly Circus.
"It's kind of surreal," Sutter says.
This article appears in Oct 20-27, 2016.