Chiche Capon

CHICHE CAPON
“To be funny is to have been where agony was.”

I have this quote on the bulletin board above my desk. I forget where it’s from. I love it. And I love Chiche. Probably because they’re in such agony.

This is clowning at its funniest, most simple and truthful, and most agonizing. Of course there will be no Beauty. Not the beauty Firmin envisions. And his final realization of that will just about break his … neck.

We don’t love these guys b/c they cant create Beauty. We love them b/c they are Beauty. We do plug for them to create Beauty, even as we hope they wont. If they do, the game is over, and we love watching them play it. But even more so, if they do create Beauty, we’ll feel cheated. We’ve come to see that Beauty is already onstage. In the mess of it all. In the unrelenting crash and burn and recovering mess of it all, the human spirit perseveres, and that’s Beauty. And if that’s Beauty, - and we see that it is, - then maybe we boobs in the audience have a crack at it too.

When finally each member of this ragtag crew has its turn at virtuosity .. when Firmin’s juggling pin act is timed out perfectly to Ricardo’s music. And Flash does his dance. And Philippe .. oh god … who has never stopped defying gravity in the first place, shows us how accurately he has simulated an otter. And Ricardo sings his song. Finally our hearts, and our necks, are relieved of their pain. The game has become a hymn. And we can go home.

Who would these guys be without each other? Other than odd and alone? Can you imagine Philippe and his otter without Firmin Crapette to be upstaged and undone by it? Or Flash without Patrick to ignore him or Firmin to insult and abuse him? Or Ricardo to tolerate and befriend him? And why does Ricardo stick around? At first he seems the most normal of the bunch .. until we discover his virtuosity is largely pre-recorded. And that he is non-plussed by the deception.

This is the silliest stuff that e’er you’ll see. And the perfect comic team .. these odd fellows .. holding on tight to each other even as they provoke and torment each other to the brink of annihilation. But how else will they take us to the brink of our own vast capacity for the same? These heavenly co-dependents .. grist for each other’s mills .. reflecting all of our agonies and the ecstasies in a single bound.

Last year I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. This year was different. A darker slower tone to it all. Beauty seemed an impossibility from the start. Dressed in his salmon robe and ridiculous blue soldiers hat (an ersatz helmet left over from some regiment that pulled out of town in the 19th c), Firmin’s knee-to-the-chest prance which convulses through his body each time he contemplates the arrival of Beauty is so funny and stupid I cant think about it without laughing. Last year the imminence of Beauty’s arrival kept occurring to Firmin. It took him over in waves .. over and over again. Each wave more deliriously happy than the next. And then as each wave of happy anticipation crashed .. on the shores of Philippe’s flying otter or Flash’s ill-timed and useless entrances, Firmin’s despair/fury/collapse sent us into paroxysms of laughter. I missed those highs this year. Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but somewhere in the thrashing from one extreme to another, I was sent on a journey I didn’t go on this year.

What struck me this year, and what I found equally compelling though not as thrilling as last year, was the time they took between games. They are so easy with Stillness. So content to wait. And as they stand there waiting, looking, for the next game, they are looking at us .. mirrors reflecting us back to ourselves. On their faces we see we are no different than they. From the particular to the universal in a simple gaze that seems to say: “I know you understand my agony. I see yours. You see mine.”

So … that means you know we see your Beauty as well? And you see ours?

“..what visions have I seen?
Methought I was enamor’d of an ass.” Or an otter.
We laugh at the agony of it all.