Excerpt from Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Orange You Glad

It's not all good.

I mean, I adore being a clown, regardless of anyone else's feelings about it. But there are times when it wears me down to a flat‑out nub. Makes me wish, at least for a moment, that my heart had picked any‑ thing else to love.

First, there's the issue of money. Clowning is cost prohibitive for people like me who live paycheck to paycheck. Like most creative arts gigs, you start off doing stuff for free, hoping to get picked up by an agency. And once you start getting paid for clowning jobs, you're lucky if you manage to rake in enough to cover the time you took off from your actual job. Plus, there's the matter of your agency's cut, which can sometimes be as large as 20 percent. I've never met somebody well‑off who decided they wanted to get into clowning. Stand‑up comedy, sure. That's all focused on the self. It's the I, not the you.

Most clowns, myself included, are struggling to pay off one bill just to have four more crop up in its place like someone poured water on a Gremlin, or they're retirees who genuinely love kids and want to spend their golden years feeling like they finally gave something back to society. I enjoy that stuff too, don't get me wrong—if you hate kids, you'd be better off driving Lyfts than donning the greasepaint—but it's deeper than that. When I clown, I become something bigger than myself. And hey, I know what it's like to have to work harder for what I want than anyone else. I'm a queer person living in Florida, aren't I?

To clown, you need lots of things: clothes and makeup and props and, above all else, you need time. Large, uninterrupted swaths of it. That's when you can plot and plan and polish your craft. Try out those prat‑ falls without anyone watching. Perfect your gags. That way when you get out onstage, all the audience sees is your persona. No visible seams.

Of course, there's the other obvious clowning hardship: you're universally despised.

Grown men will cry out for Mommy when they see me walk down the street. Kids often run screaming. They do this because they're frightened by the lore that's been built around my profession. To them, I'm the boogeyman: something that crawls out of their closet in the middle of the night, intent on devouring them whole. Many of the things I love about clowning—the swagger of it, the slyness, the bold colors and absurd shapes my body makes—are, for some, the exact behaviors that fuel their worst nightmares.

You need very thick skin. Clowning requires a kind of steeliness that I associate with my coming‑out process: the knowledge that there will always be people in life who will hate you for who and what you love. There are women who won't date me once they find out what I do for a living. I've lost friends over it. My own mother nearly disowned me the first time she caught me in full clown gear. I had wanted to surprise her with how good I had gotten, to show off my act. Tumbling, juggling, magic tricks. Dwight had already seen me perform back when I was first starting out. He'd liked it fine, he'd said, but it wasn't exactly his thing. That I understood—my big brother was never going to be the kind of guy who'd admit that I was funnier than him. But my mother, that was different. I'd wanted her approval. The look on her face, I'll never forget; it was as if I were the most revolting thing she'd ever seen. Like she couldn't believe she'd given birth to something so foul.

"Cheryl," she'd said, after several agonizing seconds had passed, "What do you want me to say?"

That was the first and last time I ever performed in front of my mother.

But you get used to it. Much like you hone tricks for your act, you devise the necessary skills to remove yourself from sticky situations. You learn to spot trouble before it happens and therefore avoid it entirely. Eight years into clowning, I can easily recognize the guy who might deck me if I get too close. Men get violent when confronted by the things that scare them. I watch their fists. Are they balled up, knuckles white? If so, I keep to the opposite side of the room. I twist my act, like I'm turning the wheel of a car, and completely change direction. I'll tell jokes they already know. No surprises.

Excerpted from Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett. Copyright © 2025 by Kristen Arnett. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.