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for breakfast. For the Barcelona Olympics, he found corporations outbid for official events desperate to become part of the program somehow, and along came Jango: »It was the easiest money I ever raised«. He will play Christopher Columbus in a low-budget travel movie »like a 15th-century ’Easy Rider’«. And helping him with cruising a street theater production billed as »Four Seasons«, the city will provide caravans to house 150 fools, a bullring to park in and four flatbed trucks, one for each season. Autumn, for example, will feature trees doing a strip-tease, losing their leaves while farmers sit at a bar drinking (lemonade) and shouting encouragement like in a topless club. »Imagine«, he said. »You’re sitting on the Ramblas, and suddenly Autumn passes by.« A good business head must be immodest, without doubts, willing and eager to state and even exaggerate his case. Edwards stated a case and a half at breakneck speed. Continually asked to repeat himself, he apologized: »Words don’t have any meaning in what I do. I’m used to relating to words as rhythm«. On the other hand, he considers a clown a journalist. Basically, it’s always the same simple story which goes something like this ... Life is short, down time is wasted time. Even in pain, you could have at least »tried« to enjoy yourself. Once when a window smashed his fingers, instead of shouting »Ouch«! or worse, he segued into the first line of a silly song: »Ou -1 have fun in my life«. He jumped up for a light fandango: »I really do. I have a great life. It’s incredibly interesting«. He calls himself a »reflector«, showing people what they look like. Suicide, for example. One more newspaper article would simply become part of our daily overload. Suicide with a laugh, however, will be remembered. And evaluated. Accompanied by a taped voiceover describing his miming, suicide goes something like this: »Guy is shaving telegram comes from his wife »I’ve left you for your best friend renamed our son after him mortgaged the house taken your credit cards and the dog sold tha car and there’s cereal for your dinner in the fridge«. The guy turns on the gas but he just gets sick takes poison and just pukes he goes to shoot himself but the bullet falls out of the chamber. He goes on the ledge to jump but can’t do it meanwhile the window closes he’s locked out he tries to kill a fly that’s bothering him and falls off anyway and... blackout. It’s not funny but when the lights come on people are laughing. Laughing at the errors of our ways raises consciousness. Others are laughing also, it’s uncomfortable. Maybe you’ll watch it next time. He feels close to the late French clown Coluche being silly about xenophobia, for example. In Israel, he told his public: »If you’re going to shoot rubber bullets at the Palestinians the least you could do is let them have rubber rocks so they’ll bounce back. Be fair about it, they don’t have enough ammo«. He says he »barraged everybody« in Israel. »I made fun of everything, threw rubber bullets and rocks in every direction. The reaction, from far right to far left, was positive. People were »laughing« about the »intifada«. He says

he’s »never« failed to raise laughter [the record was 45 minutes to get a chuckle out of 200 bankers in Geneva]: »Clown power can be heavy, man«. When he went to the U. S. S. R. in 1985 as a ringer with a troup of gay Dutch Communists, he became, he claims, the first American comic to work there. He played an American military man named General Disorder singing a song about Pershings. Glasnost had not quite arrived and when Edward’s guides - »KGB ’journalist’« - discovered he was neither Dutch, gay nor Communist, he was put on the first plane west. Returning two years ago, he discovered a show called »Jango«, two Russian clowns copying his act. A »union of clowns« had been formed. A class in a clown school dealt with his work. He sold out three weeks in a Leningrad theater. At Le Splendid in Paris, it was 178 straight sold-out performances, which »makes me the most popular American in Paris since Josephine Baker«. Is this the clown or the business head speaking? Never mind, it’s time to move on. After his upcoming threemonth French tour called »Holey Moley«, starting Feb. 17 with 10 days at La Cigalle in Paris, he figures he’ll have saturated this market. There’s been hardly any work for him in the United States: »William Morris and HBO and those people don’t know

what to do with me«. So he’s moving in the opposite direction. After Barcelona, there are contracts in New Zealand and Japan.□ Mike Zwerin