Some people crack themselves up. You know - it might be a slip of the tongue, or the accidental phrasing of an embarrassing sentence - anything surprising turn that actually forces a person to laugh at themselves.
Street comedian “Claude Monet,” is a little different. As a performer, his job is to be tight-lipped and serious in his delivery, but his style of speech seems to consist exclusively of inside jokes he only shares with himself. And while the standard comedian bleeds for an audience’s laughter, he’s pretty content with self-satisfaction. Simply put - he tells stories that only he would laugh at, and that becomes pretty obvious after spending a couple minutes with him.
I met Claude in Union Square on a Wednesday afternoon - I was listening to music, and he was babbling into a cordless microphone. Beside the street performers with guitars, boomboxes and tables, Claude looked a bit out of place - somewhere on the border between homeless and hopeless. Unlike all of the other performers, though, he was smiling. So, I approached him in the middle of his “set.”
The few minutes remaining consisted of stories about his parents, and a few quips about New York City - nothing out of the ordinary, just stuff you’d hear during the early hours at Comedy Cellar. He tried to incorporate the crowd - a small clique of people who actively pretended there wasn’t a man standing in front of them with a microphone - but got no reaction. When he finished, he thanked the group and sat back down.
When I sat down next to him, he opened immediately -
“What’d you think?”
“It was good. I liked it…” I defended.
“Thanks. Thanks, thanks, thanks. Good crowd.”
I sat with Claude for a couple of minutes, discussing his routine and his living situation, and it wasn’t long before I noticed that he hadn’t looked me in the eyes once - too distracted with new punch lines and fleeting ideas.
He constantly looked around, or at other people, as if rapidly soaking up material for his next set. Still, he never stuttered. He always knew the next word, and his tongue was quick to draw on the next syllable as soon as I asked him a question.
Claude was a performer, I tired to remind myself - he’ll say just about anything for a laugh. He was, however, a very different and very lonely kind of performer. He was a street entertainer - the kind that lived outside and played for nobody in particular, often for no other reason than not knowing what else to do. Maybe this accounted for his jolly spirit.
He welcomed me as if he hadn’t spoken with anybody in a long, long time, and the pace with which he divulged made me wonder how long it had actually been.
I had to leave him to get to class and would be missing his show, though, so he offered me a parting gift as I stood - an impression of the impressionist who’s name he stole. In his best throaty accent, he looked at me with eyes wide and asked -
“Parlez-vous painting, mon ami?”
The next time I saw Claude, he was again getting ready to hit the “stage” - a small pit in the northeast corner of Union Square, where eight people-watchers sat and sipped on iced coffees. As he dropped his bag on a bench beside them, he whispered to me over his shoulder -
“Watch this.”
Within seconds, he’d introduced himself, and started telling the crowd about the last time he threw up - the result of a challenge he held, with himself, in which he tried to force down ten donuts in an hour and then sprint two blocks.
The obvious result of the challenge was a few minutes of vomit, the timeline of which he carefully and descriptively detailed. By the time he reached his second anecdote, seven of the onlookers walked away, shaking their heads, prompting in him a feigned look of agony –
“You’re leaving me?”
After a few more minutes, only two people, plugging away at their cell phones and avoiding all eye contact with Monet, remained. He took this as an invitation for a more intimate affair – sitting down between them on a bench and opening up about another challenge he participated in back in high school.
“We did this milk challenge, where you have to drink a gallon in an hour. One of my friend’s puked, the other got about halfway, and I drank 2/3 of my gallon. But I didn’t puke. So that night I just sat on the edge of my bed for like three hours with all that milk in my stomach. And I guess my body just couldn’t take it. There was this one time, I just went to a pharmacy, bought gum, and ate it – and I wish I’d done that instead, because man, I felt terrible. And now I’m lactose intolerant.”
The punch line quietly came and went, as the remaining man and woman packed up their bags and stood, leaving Monet alone on the bench, holding his microphone. He didn’t seem fazed. Looking up at me with a grin, he asked –
“You get all that?” I nodded.
Turning off my camera, I realized that I just got footage of either the funniest or saddest things I’d ever seen - one man discomfort an audience and literally force them to migrate. Sympathy struck, but I remembered what Warren D, a filmmaker I’d met in Union a week prior, said when I asked him about a comedian’s potential drawing power in the park - “I’ve seen a lot of comedians perform for six, seven people…it depends on the style of comedy…but as long as somebody’s videotaping, that’s fucking funny.”
He was right. During the show Monet was almost impossible to watch, but in reviewing my footage from the day later that evening, I remained doubled over for the entire length of the performance.
Back at the park, though, one set was all I could manage to watch, so I quickly interrupted his preparation for the next go-around, and asked if we could do the interview. I opened up with biographical information - background, parents, where he grew up - before reaching the topic that ended up dictating the majority of the conversation. School.
Maybe it was my fault for bringing up the class project he was going to be the subject of, or for asking about his non-existent degree - but I turned a certain switch in the Claude Monet I’d seen, and suddenly he started a long rant about his overexposure to calculus, and the pitfalls of education.
“School’s fucking stupid, man. I didn’t exist in school. There’s no point in me being there. I don’t do that. I make people laugh.”
He may have been over-exxagerating with the emphasis - because in the two sets I’d seen, I didn’t even overhear a chuckle. Still, I nodded along.
“Okay so it’s not for you, but what about the kids in school right now?” I asked. “What would you say to them?”
“Get out of there!” he exclaimed, in his best crack-head impersonation. Looking directly into the camera, he begged, “what’s it doing for you, man? What’s it doing for you? Answer the question, seriously. Tell me.”
Maybe he caught me off-guard, but I didn’t really have an answer for him. I just looked him in the eyes - and realized that he was doing exactly what he wanted to be doing, without school in his way. In his weird approach, he got me to question what the hell I was doing with my time.
Stalling, I gave him a few excuses, like “it gives me time to figure out my future,” and “I’m learning,” but he got outraged by my tiptoeing. He knew I didn’t have a legitimate answer, and got even more excited because of that.
“School is for fools, man!”
Leaving Monet to look around at his next victims, I started thinking - what if he’s right? I mean - how many students of the arts - liberal or otherwise - actually follow through on the subjects that they study? How many music students become musicians? How many drama kids become actors, or auteurs? How many journalism students become journalists?
The percentages are probably depressing. Still, most students go to school to learn their craft, and some graduate without ever having tried outside the confines of the classroom. But here I was, staring at a kid who gave up that comfort to do what he loved on a sidewalk.
He wasn’t the only one, though. All around me and all throughout the city stood performers - bands, singers, dancers - trying to make something of themselves on the streets. When I asked a 19-year-old park pedestrian named Nick about why anyone would go out and do this, he reasoned, “A lot of people do it for money. But a lot of people do it to see if they could – if they have the balls to do it.”
With Monet, it didn’t seem to be a matter of balls or bills - but rather just the experience of it all, in some ways similar to performer Matthew Tillman, a 41-year-old spiritual counselor who sits in Union Square twice a week and both offers and accepts donations for his services.
Looking back at Monet after the ruminative moment, I clarified - “So, you said you make people laugh?”
He nodded.
“But - people don’t really laugh at your jokes. Does that bother you?”
He shook his head, this time. “I don’t do it to be liked, man. It’s not about that…I don’t care if people aren’t laughing, because I’m laughing. No matter what - I get my shit. I go, and I release into this world, and I give the world something.”
Monet was poetic. Slightly delusional, but poetic. Still, though - he was an entertainer, and every entertainer dreams of financial success and notoriety. He could keep up the childish naivete, but I wasn’t buying that he was just doing this for the art of it.
“Do you want to be famous?” I asked.
“I spent a lot of time wanting to be famous, but then I realized - why do I want to be famous for a bunch of fools? I think it’s better if I just go somewhere, where people are laughing. That’s all I need - is that laughter.”
Well, he wasn’t getting that in Union Square, but I had to commend him. He was a purist - an honest entertainer in an era of ironic gestures of superstardom. He seemed to be unattracted to the glitter of fame, and really just wanted to make people smile. I couldn’t help but feel warmed by his sentiment, but that didn’t feeling didn’t last long. Just a few seconds later, he looked up at the camera, and chirped -
“Fuck you guys, man. What have you given me?” I wasn’t sure if the question was rhetorical, so I stood silently and waited for him to carry on. “I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t know.” A moment later, though, Claude Monet’s comedian (sensing the gloom of the conversation) kicked in. “I don’t know, man. This shit’s stupid. I’m just trying to laugh for the rest of my life. I’m trying to smile, and eat tits, and jizz, man. That’s it.”
And in the midst of Monet’s bitter spite, the laugh-less comedian got a laugh. As I keeled over giggling for what felt like a few minutes, he continued to look around - seemingly pleased by his work. He’d finally accomplished the very thing he’d been babbling about for the past ten minutes, and he seemed satisfied. By the time I lifted my head up for a breather, he shook his head at me - as if I’d laughed at the one thing he said that wasn’t a joke.
“That’s just me, man. And shit - I don’t even know why I’m so interesting to you. What the fuck do I do, besides what I want?”
Again, I didn’t really have an answer for him. Only another question - why? Why, if he was so intent on comedy, didn’t he just connect with people in regular places like comedy clubs or open mic nights? I didn’t have the courage to ask, and even if I did I expected more of the same frustration. So instead I thought about Wendell, who told me about the obligations that some performers have to themselves. “It’s just part of their personality. Not everybody can do what they do. But hey - desperate times call for desperate measures.”
Apparently the allegedly-homeless guy I’d been speaking with once lived in a time more desperate than the present - stuck in his mother’s home, abidingly doing his calculus, yet forgoing the heartbreak he now endures every day.
Now, Claude Monet might be crazy.
He might also be stifling and bothersome. And he might tell terrible jokes. But, he does what he wants - and that is the reason he’s worthy of attention from the countless people who pass him by and refuse to give him any.
Those people, who either make their way through Union Square to meet a friend, get to work, or go to sleep - likely aren’t taking steps through the park toward their dreams. And even though Monet’s quest is an unglamorous, potentially hopeless, and unbearably painful one to watch - he’s already living his.
