The church event went first and most of the crowd had no idea what was going on during most of the show. The majority of the audience were vanilla tourists from outside Little Bigtop, so they had very little knowledge of what went on in a clown church. The fish-juggling contest was especially confusing to them. They weren’t sure if it was meant to be a comedy sketch or a real juggling competition. Buggy just hid in the back of the room for the duration, covering his face in embarrassment.
“Brothers and sisters,” Reverend Jellybottom said, stepping across the stage with yet another drink in his hand. “I hope you’re enjoying tonight’s festivities.”
The members of his church roared and applauded, but those who’d paid top dollar to be there stayed silent.
“Ahh-ha!” Jellybottom cried, applauding himself.
“Raarrfff!” Mittens barked at the reverend, as if booing.
“Mittens, be quiet,” Buggy said.
“Raarrfff!” Mittens yelled, tugging on the cords to his life support machine.
Buggy had to pick up his bulldog to stop him from barking at the reverend.
Jellybottom continued, “Right now, I want to take a moment for some serious reflection. In a short while, we’re going to have the one and only Bobby Goldstein out here to tickle your funny bone. But before that, I want to tell you a poem that will tickle your soul. Some of you may have already heard it before. It’s called ‘Footprints in the Sand.’ ”
Buggy knew the poem well. Pretty much everyone already knew the poem. It was a classic. He also knew it was the wrong audience to tell it to. He wondered if he could just run away.
“One day, a man was walking along a beach with the Lord,” Reverend Jellybottom said. He paced across the stage but never broke eye contact with the audience. “He looked behind him and noticed two sets of footprints. One set of footprints was made by him and the other was made by the Lord.”
“Please let this end…,” Buggy said.
Winky nodded in agreement, picking up another hot dog from the concession stand. Buggy snatched it away before he could take a bite and put it back behind the counter.
“The man turned to the Lord and asked, ‘What’s with all these footprints, Lord?’ And the Lord responded, ‘They represent your path through life. And as you can see, I have always been by your side.’ Then visions of the man’s life appeared in the sky above the footprints, each of his days corresponding to a step in the sand.”
Buggy rolled his head back and groaned. The preacher was too drunk to even remember how the poem went. He was messing it all up.
“Then the man noticed that during the hardest, most trying times of his life there was only one set of footprints. This upset him. He asked the Lord, ‘How come when my life was in its darkest days you abandoned me to walk alone?’ ”
Buggy noticed that Uncle Jojo and his whole row of associates were staring right at him. They were each giving him a look of confusion and disgust, as if to say, What the hell is this shit? Buggy just broke eye contact and ignored them. He knew he was never going to hear the end of this one.
“Then the Lord said, ‘When you see only one set of footprints in the sand, it’s not because you were abandoned. Those are the times that I carried you.’ ”
Buggy couldn’t take it anymore. He wondered if it was too late to have the reverend whacked.
The reverend continued, “Then the man noticed that in one area of the beach, near a single set of footprints, there were large dips in the sand. He asked the Lord, ‘But what are those large dips in the sand?’ ”
Buggy didn’t remember this part of the poem. He wondered if the reverend had gotten it mixed up again.
“And the Lord responded, ‘That was when you gained all that weight. You were too heavy to carry so I kept dropping your fat ass.’ ”
Then the reverend burst into laughter.
“Wait…What?” Buggy said.
“Ahh-ha!” the reverend said, as his parishioners laughed and cheered. “That’s how we do it in Little Bigtop!”
“What the heck is he doing?” Winky asked.
Buggy’s mouth dropped open. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“Ahh-ha!” Jellybottom said again, as if it were some kind of catchphrase.
“Oh my God. He’s trying to steal the show.” Buggy watched in horror as Jellybottom shook his round butt at his applauding parishioners. “He’s going to do a stand-up routine.”
Then Reverend Jellybottom told a series of jokes. He’d mentioned to Buggy that he always dreamed of one day being a stand-up comic before the Comedy Prohibition Act was passed, but Buggy had no idea the reverend would’ve chosen that night to make his dream come true.
“So…,” Jellybottom said. “Any of you vanillas out there ever been with a clown girl before?”
It wouldn’t have been that big of a deal—a comedy routine was still better than a boring sermon—but the reverend chose to tell some raunchy, distasteful jokes that just didn’t feel right coming from the mouth of a holy man.
“I like me the rainbow-headed clown girls best. Mmm-mmm. Those are the yummiest. They taste like a bag full of Skittles.”
He even made his own parishioners feel uncomfortable.
“You know that with clown girls the carpet always matches the drapes…if you know what I mean.” The reverend paused to point at his crotch. “So doing it with a rainbow-headed girl makes you feel like a leprechaun. You have to follow the rainbow to get to the pot of gold.”
The audience just stared in horror as the reverend stuck out his tongue and made licking motions.
“Ahh-haa!” Jellybottom said, bursting into laughter and slapping his knee. Other than his own laughter, the room was completely silent.
This went on for an hour, and each joke was more perverted and disturbing than the last. If it were a normal comedian the jokes wouldn’t have been so bad, but because it was a preacher telling them they came across as extra creepy. He only got a small pity-applause when he was finished.
“See you at church on Sunday” was how the reverend decided to end his performance before he walked off the stage. It was clear that many of his parishioners were debating on whether they should sleep in that day or not.