A hot, sweaty night with Brooklyn’s young clowns

It’s a Saturday night at 3 Dollar Bill, a cavernous club in Bushwick, and CLOWN CULT – Brooklyn’s beloved sold-out monthly variety show – has transformed the space into a neon fever dream. The theme for its second CLOWN CASINO show and party is Viva Las Vegas, and the crowd has understood the assignment. Sequined showgirls squeeze screaming rubber chickens. A Joker wanders about in an oversized red suit, awing strangers with a magic trick. 

CLOWN CULT was founded in June 2023 by Chuckie Sleaze, whose origin story reads like any other slightly confounding hero’s journey. “I say during the show that I ran away with the circus when I was 17,” she tells me. “And that’s kind of the truth to me, but it’s also an allegory for how I started going to music festivals, fell in love with the culture and the art, and having a temporary community that’s so connected and expressive.” From there, she worked her way through cabarets like Poetry Brothel, immersive theater and circus troupes, eventually founding what she describes as “a perfect blend of ritual, immersive theater and clown.” The name clicked immediately: Clown Club, Clown Car – CLOWN CULT. It stuck.

Three years and several venue upgrades later, CLOWN CULT has outgrown its scrappy Bushwick origins and landed at a proper club with a full sound system and lighting rig. The show has developed recurring characters, plotlines and mythology-adjacent notoriety. Tonight’s storyline follows Chuckie, exhausted from cult leadership and desperately craving a pool vacation, finding her escape derailed by an Evil Lady CEO extorting the casino for every last penny and her devoted subordinate, a Sexy Lady Elvis (played by Miss Woman the Woman), who has very inappropriately fallen in love with her boss. It sounds outlandish. It is outlandish. But it is also, somehow, completely cathartic.

The CEO is embodied by Mx Ology, who (spoiler!) ends the show by dashing offstage in a confession that she comes from a family of clowns. We recognise her from our current news cycle: the person most invested in enforcing the system is often the one most desperate to escape it. “In a lot of clown traditions, they’ll have a serious stock character to highlight the absurdity of, in this case, corporate greed or capitalism,” explains Mx Ology. “It exposes the ridiculousness of some of the systems they’re upholding.” When the CEO surveys the crowd and asks who opposes certain business practices – “ChatGPT?” – the room erupts in boos. The clowns give the audience permission to say, out loud, how tired they are.

It’s this opportunity for release and liberation that is part of the reason behind why clowns have been mounting a cultural comeback. When Chappell Roan broke through in 2014, her Pierrot-meets-drag stage persona turned clown make-up into a queer feminist rebuke to the male gaze. Sarah Sherman debuted her HBO special Sarah Squirm: Live + In The Flesh last December, a maximalist body-horror clown show. The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula has long understood the overlap between clown and drag, dedicating an entire episode to “Killer Clowns” and proving that the most subversive drag lives closer to the circus than the pageant stage. Beyond New York, similar underground scenes are taking root, including CDH SIDESHOW in Philadelphia and Church of Clown in San Francisco. The clown has long been tied to queerness, defying gender binaries since before the terminology existed; the mainstream is simply catching up.

Back at CLOWN CULT, Cochina Divina invites four audience members onstage to slurp cream pie filling from tin pans, their faces entirely submerged in whipped cream. When one contestant puts on an absolute show, her friends scream themselves hoarse in support. This, Gimpl the Fool tells me, is the whole point. “Clowning is spreading joy through vulnerability, and being the fool that people can laugh at.” Gimpl, who attended Coney Island Clown Skool, a grassroots week-long intensive that has quietly become the scene’s informal conservatory, went from their first CLOWN CULT visit last April to attending nearly every month since. 

That openness draws in people from every corner. Giggles, who has clowned at several music festivals since discovering the look on Pinterest a couple of years ago, works in a STEM field during the week, and found in clowning a release valve for everything that get compartmentalised at the office. “Clowning is all about exaggerating parts of yourself that you want to exaggerate,” she says. “When I’m in the moment, and I become Giggles, I don’t have to worry about my day-to-day responsibilities. Character work is so freeing.” Her corset, sourced from a clothing swap and hand-dyed, has been accumulating trinkets for over a year. This ongoing art piece transcends the trend cycle, representing the accumulation-over-acquisition ethos of clown fashion.

The glamour, however, runs on a shoestring. Most performers here hold day jobs. The ones doing this full-time are, as Sir Clover, who wrangles the popcorn shop and produces shows of their own, puts it plainly, often still struggling. Mx Ology describes a landscape where performers feel they can’t access their dreams “unless they participate in a very specific experience” – meaning the reality TV pipeline that has come to define drag’s mainstream moment – while booking rates have “barely adjusted for inflation.” The dream, she says, is modest and enormous at once: to make enough from performing to pay rent on a drag studio.

Despite the struggles, the self-actualisation is worth it for many on the scene. Sir Clover says: “I find myself helping people who may not otherwise have the opportunity to be a louder version of themselves – to take up more space for a night,” they tell me. “I see what that can do, the sparkle it puts in their eyes.” This, they add, is also the ask: follow individual performers on Instagram, show up to open sets on a Tuesday at 11pm in the outer boroughs, and look out for mutual aid shows — fundraisers for housing insecurity, gender-affirming care, emergency needs — that run on the same energy as the main events, and need the audience just as badly.

Elisha Madison, or Dealer Red, has been at the Frick Frack Blackjack table for four years. “You don’t have to be an artist, a performer, or ‘in the industry,’” he says. “We’re all just humans having fun in our silly outfits showing up to play with each other.” Snail the Clown named herself after a pet snail called Biscuit eight years ago. “I just made a decision that I was going to choose to have fun and engage with others in any way I could muster,” she says, “and it turned out to be really liberating.” In clowning, she found “a bold authenticity” – the line between person and performance blurring just enough that the truth becomes more approachable. 

I leave at midnight, smelling of popcorn and covered in confetti. My notebook is full. My heels have given up. On the L train platform, someone is still in full clown make-up. Strangers steal curious glances, but the clown is beaming. The clowns are onto something.

CLOWN CULT takes place monthly at 3 Dollar Bill in Brooklyn. Follow @clowncultclowncult for dates.