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BEING CHASED BY A BULL IS MARTIN KIFF’S JOB. AND, YEAH, THERE’S AN ART TO IT. BUT THE BIGGER QUESTION IS, HOW DOES MARTIN KIFF FIT 26 RODEO CLOWNS INTO ONE TRUCK? BY JACK BOULWARE. ILLUSTRATION BY TODD JULIE. PHOTOGRAPHS BY TERENCE FORD.
DUNCANS MILLS IS A SPECK OF A TOWN AND IS LOCATED I N NORTHERN CALIFORNIA’S SONOMA COUNTY, 10 MILES FROM THE PACIFIC OCEAN. ALONGSIDE THE HIGHWAY, THE ANNUAL RUSSIAN RIVER RODEO IS ABOUT TO START ITS SECOND DAY OF ACTION.
 Barbecue smoke rises into the air, mixing with the earthy odors of dust, sweat, and livestock. Booths offer knives, hats, and other cowboy gear. Although we’re only two hours north of San Francisco, we could be anywhere in rural America — except the bartenders here are serving Chardonnay.
Behind the rodeo arena, Martin Kiff sits in front of a mirror in his trailer, calmly dabbing white makeup around his eyes. He’s been a rodeo clown since 1981, and he’s carrying on a long-standing tradition that we all recognize but that few of us really understand.
I grew up in a rodeo family, and I have to admit that the most interesting aspect of any of it was always the clown. As a kid, I watched those country comedians entertain crowds with wacky and corny routines, which usually involved little cars, toilet seats, suitcases fi lled with lingerie, brooms, burros, birds, monkeys, or chickens. In one case, there was even a Chihuahua named Pimiento. Today, Kiff has graciously accepted my slight obsession and agreed to explain the world of rodeo clowns.
OVER THE YEARS, Kiff, 44, has worked rodeos around the United States, including the Professional Bull Riders tour and the Dodge National Circuit Finals Rodeo. He’s worked with some of the biggest clowns in the business — people like Leon Coffee, Shorty Gorham, and Loyd Ketchum.
But he still loves to do the smaller rodeos, and today’s event is defi nitely small. There are no ESPN camera crews, no bigname professional cowboys on the schedule, just local guys and gals competing against one another.
“What you’re going to see today, this is what it used to be,” he says, pulling on a pair of garish yellow-and-black-striped socks. “This is how it started.”
One bonus of a smaller rodeo is that the clown actually gets more time. “I’ll be doing two bits today. Usually, I just do one. At the big rodeos, they want it done in two hours,” he says, and then adds, chuckling, “Give me the opportunity to goof off a little!”
The key to any rodeo-clown act is material the audience recognizes, Kiff says. “You try to keep it somehow age-related. One of the funniest things about comedy: Pain sells. I do a bit with a little fi re truck; I have to rescue a cat out of a tree. Everything breaks, and there’s a chance I could fall off the ladder. Your classic comedy. All those Jackass movies — if those guys weren’t getting hurt, you wouldn’t be watching it.”
He recalls a performance of one of his favorite routines, in which he announced to the crowd, in great detail, that inside one of the chutes was a vicious fi ghting bull and that he was going to release it into the arena. The chute opened, and out charged his trained Great Dane, outfitted with fake bullhorns.
“He came running out at 90 miles an hour past all the chutes,” laughs Kiff. “Cowboys were killing themselves to get out of the way, falling over the fence. I just howled.”
Kiff believes that rodeo clowns are even funnier than circus clowns. “We work in front of more people. You’ve gotta play it by ear; you’ve gotta deal with the elements — I’ve been in snow, I’ve been in 110 degrees, I’ve been in pouring rain.”
And when the bull-riding event starts, the job gets serious, because a clown also must help protect a cowboy from getting trampled.
 Bull riding is considered one of the most dangerous sports in the world. A rider attempts to hang on to a powerful 2,000- pound animal for eight seconds, and if he gets hit by the kicking hooves, the force can break bones, puncture a lung, and even kill him. The pro-rodeo circuit averages one or two deaths each year.
Fortunately for the riders, clowns study the psychology of the animal and learn how it moves, how it turns. A bull running at full speed is easiest to avoid — you simply step out of the way. But the smart ones, Kiff says, will walk slowly toward the clown, because they know the human has to wait until the very last second to run away.
Sometimes, being chased by a bull can be very entertaining. Kiff recalls one rodeo in Salina, Kansas, where it was inevitable that the bull was going to catch up to him. “I knew I was gonna get it, and I just started yelling as loud as I could: ‘AHHHHH!!’ He hit me right in the butt, and I went up and hit the top rail, flipped over and rolled, and landed in the seating area. I got up and kept going up the stairs, and there was this big lady coming down with a tub of popcorn. I stopped and thought to myself, clear as day, You shouldn’t do this.”
But Kiff couldn’t help himself. “I yelled twice as loud, turned around and ran back into the arena, and jumped over the bull, who was still standing there at the fence!” he says. “She was angry. But the crowd went nuts, you know? I got in trouble, but it was just perfect.”
RODEO CLOWNS TRACE to the early 1900s, when organizers would provide comic entertainment to keep people in their seats during a lull in the action. The early acts dressed like actual clowns, hillbillies, or inept police officers, and performed rope tricks and riding stunts. Many were performers from circuses or Wild West shows, or they were cowboys who wanted to make extra money between events.
The clown’s additional duty of protecting the cowboy from an angry bull began in the 1920s, when rodeos started using Brahma bulls from Texas, a breed known for its distinctive humped back and its nasty habit of attacking a man on the ground. Barrels were later added to clown routines, both to distract the bull and to protect the clown from harm. (One of the most famous clowns from this era, Slim Pickens, eventually starred in dozens of movies, including the classic film Dr. Strangelove.)
Until the late 1970s, there was only one type of rodeo clown — the kind that did comic bits, joshed with the announcer, and protected riders from a wild horse or bull. Then Wrangler began sponsoring bullfighting competitions, and the events were so popular that a subset of clown evolved that was more bullfighter than rodeo clown. These guys dressed like clowns but usually didn’t wear makeup. They didn’t tell jokes or brandish wacky props. Their sole task was to protect the cowboy by running around the bull and distracting it away from the rider.
As a result, the clown became known as the barrel man, or the man in the can. Today, most rodeos feature bullfighters as well as a barrel man, and, with the duties divided up, clowns now have more time and freedom to develop their material.
Utah native Troy “the Wild Child” Lerwill features trick motorcycle riding as part of his routine. Nebraska’s Butch Lehmkuhler incorporates a trampoline into his act. Dale “Gizmo” McCracken, from Missouri, has created the character of a crackpot inventor and introduces a series of homemade contraptions. Montanan Flint Rasmussen, perhaps the most famous rodeo clown working today, uses his natural athletic skills to perform acrobatic comic bits based on rock music and popular movies. “
Flint has basically put us back on the map,” Kiff says. “He has dance moves … and he’s a funny, funny guy. It’s nice to have someone at the top represent you whom you really have a lot of respect for.”
KIFF GREW UP in the nearby town of Healdsburg, and like most young adults in the 1970s, he loved the zany wit of that era’s comedians. He absorbed everyone’s work, from Richard Pryor’s to George Carlin’s to Woody Allen’s to Bill Irwin’s to Monty Python’s.
While studying at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Kiff got involved with the school’s rodeo team. He paid his dues, and when rodeo expanded to include bullfighting, he chose to remain a barrel man.
“Some people like the pain,” he says. “I was always a wimp in that sense. I thought if I had a shot to keep going in the business and stay around, that was where it would be.”
He quickly learned how to transfer comedy he loved into an act that worked in the arena. Kiff tells me one of the bits he’ll do today is a classic circus-clown car routine that he’s adapted for a rodeo crowd. He loads his lip with a pinch of chewing tobacco, and I follow him out of the trailer.
The afternoon progresses through broncriding and roping events, and throughout, Kiff wanders around the arena, carrying a hockey stick. When the announcer asks what he’s doing, he explains that he’s looking for pucks. “The green ones,” he adds helpfully.
 After the team roping finishes, the action stops, and Kiff drives a tiny yellow truck into the middle of the arena. Bales of hay are lashed to the back of the vehicle. The announcer again asks what he’s up to, and Kiff replies that he has a truckful of rodeo clowns. The announcer acts like he’s skeptical and makes him a bet: He’ll give Kiff $20 for every clown he can produce.
Kiff says that’s no problem and opens the door. A stream of children pours out of the truck. The announcer counts each one out loud as he or she emerges, and in the end, there are an amazing 26 kids in total, all laughing and fidgety. It’s hard to describe in words, but it’s really hilarious to watch.
“Okay, but I thought you said these were rodeo clowns,” says the announcer. “They have to be funny.”
“Oh, they’re funny,” Kiff answers. He gathers all the kids and says he’s going to teach them all to walk like a bulldogger — a burly tough guy who jumps off a horse and wrestles a steer to the ground by the horns.
The kids all scoot their rear ends down, hold out their arms as if they’re rippling with muscles, make tough faces, and swagger about like a group of apes. The crowd roars with laughter.
Kiff says they’re now all going to walk like a barrel racer — a female rodeo competitor whose stereotype is that of a stuck-up beauty queen. As one, the children all point to the sun, take their index fingers and push up their noses into the air, and strut about the arena. Again the crowd goes wild.
Being from a family of barrel racers, I myself feel slightly guilty for laughing along. But not much.
The routine ends, and the kids dash out of the arena, faces beaming with excitement. I catch up with Kiff afterward, and he tells me proudly, “Every one of those kids falls in love with rodeo.”
After 26 years, Kiff no longer works the clown circuit full-time. He is busy raising a family and running a custom-metalwork business. But he still does several rodeos each year around the country, and he’s the current president of the California Pro Rodeo Circuit.
“If you’re good and you show up and you’re nice to people,” he says, wiping the paint off his face, “it’s a hard job to screw up.”
JACK BOULWARE is based in San Francisco and writes regularly for a variety of publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Playboy, and Salon.com. He is a cofounder of San Francisco’s annual Litquake literary festival.
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