Chuckles the Clown

I don’t know if I ever saw it, or just plain forgot the Chuckles the Clown episode from the Mary Tyler Moore show, but thanks to Bruce Weber (and the recently departed David Lloyd for writing it) I will now forever think about the possibilities of a rogue elephant mistaking a clown dressed as a peanut and accidentally killing him in an attempt to shell him.

Salted or unsalted, shelled, or otherwise, it’s not safe to be a peanut around an elephant. What if you were dressed as a crumb at a picnic? You’d soon be covered in ants.

Obituary writers bring life from the dead. Mr. Weber, perhaps correctly, has his own interpretation on what the episode means. We use laughter and tears to get through things. At my mother's wake Father Hannon asked me if there were any special prayers, poems, or songs they might use at the church the next day. She might have had a Greek married name, but if he's a Catholic priest he was correct to assume she wasn't Greek Orthodox. Father Hannon, with a brogue and a cold, seeing my mother in a green suit topped with wisps of faded red hair, must have thought she was Irish. After all, he was Irish.

I thanked Father Hannon for his thoughtfulness, but I explained that my mother was of Polish and German ancestry, and unless they were prepared to play a polka or a march in church, there really wasn't anything I could recommend.

The poor man turned into Mary Richards at Chuckles' wake. He had all he could do to keep from bursting out loud with laughter as I was grinning at him. He turned away and went on with his work.

The You Tube link above is really a link. It's a link to an age of TV comedy that we're not likely to see again. We're probably not even going to see people who dress like that again either, even at a funeral. Ted Baxter's 50 cent cream shoe shine is long gone as well. As is Ted Knight.

Nestled in the episode's dialog is something Red Skelton is known to have said at the funeral of Harry Cohn. Cohn was head of Columbia Pictures, was powerful and strongly disliked. Seeing the size of the crowd at the services, Red said that it proves that if you give the public something they want to see, they will turn out for it. (I read that in Skelton's obituary.)

Ted Baxter boasts that his funeral will have more people than are there for poor Chuckles. Murray turns and explains how well attended a desired event can be once the word gets out.

Think of how many ways Chuckles is remembered by in the episode that are so well recounted in the obituary. When the popular actor Ed Wynn, (Keenan Wynn's father) a rubber faced vaudeville comedian who was in Mary Poppins, passed away it was commented that when he died it was the only time he made people sad.

David Lloyd will be missed. There are those of us who were already missing the kind of shows he was part of and contributed to. It might even be the only time he made people sad. I don't know. I do know that any man who invents a clown who meets his demise when he's dressed as a peanut and is accidentally shelled by a rogue elephant in a parade makes both the clown, and himself, forever memorable.

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