Gene Weingarten tells the fascinating tale of the highs and lows of the Great Zucchini, the most popular and successful children’s entertainer in the DC area — who shows up disheveled, with no costume and a few beat-up old props, but who leaves the toddlers literally convulsing with laughter:
The show lasted 35 minutes, and when it was over, an initially skeptical Don Cox forked over a check without complaint. The fee was $300. It was the first of four shows the Great Zucchini would do that Saturday, each at the same price. The following day, there were four more. This was a typical weekend.Do the math, if you can handle the results. This unmarried, 35-year-old community college dropout makes more than $100,000 a year, with a two-day workweek. Not bad for a complete idiot.
The Great Zucchini has mastered a brand of humor squarely aimed at toddlers:
Even before they respond to a tickle, most babies will laugh at peekaboo. It’s their first “joke.” They are reacting to a sequence of events that begins with the presence of a familiar, comforting face. Then, suddenly, the face disappears, and you can read in the baby’s expression momentary puzzlement and alarm. When the face suddenly reappears, everything is orderly in the baby’s world again. Anxiety is banished, and the baby reacts with her very first laugh.At its heart, laughter is a tool to triumph over fear. As we grow older, our senses of humor become more demanding and refined, but that basic, hard-wired reflex remains. We need it, because life is scary. Nature is heartless, people can be cruel, and death and suffering are inevitable and arbitrary. We learn to tame our terror by laughing at the absurdity of it all.
This point has been made by experts ranging from Richard Pryor to doctoral candidates writing tedious theses on the ontol-ogical basis of humor. Any joke, any amusing observation, can be deconstructed to fit. The seemingly benign Henny Youngman one-liner, “Take my wife… please!” relies in its heart on an understanding that love can become a straitjacket. By laughing at that recognition, you are rising above it, and blunting its power to disturb.
After the peekaboo age, but before the age of such sophisticated understanding, dwells the preschooler. His sense of humor is more than infantile but less than truly perceptive. He comprehends irony but not sarcasm. He lacks knowledge but not feeling. The central fact of his world — and the central terror to be overcome — is his own powerlessness. This is where the Great Zucchini works his magic.
The Great Zucchini actually does magic tricks, but they are mostly dime-store novelty gags — false thumbs to hide a handkerchief, magic dust that turns water to gel — accompanied by sleight of hand so primitive your average 8-year-old would suss it out in an instant. That’s one reason he has fashioned himself a specialist in ages 2 to 6. He behaves like no adult in these preschoolers’ world, making himself the dimwitted victim of every gag. He thinks a banana is a telephone, and answers it. He can’t find the birthday boy when the birthday boy is standing right behind him. Every kid in the room is smarter than the Great Zucchini; he gives them that power over their anxieties.
Clearly the Great Zucchini has a talent:
“In the beginning, I had almost no clients,” he said, “and I would sit at a table like this in a place like this, and if a mom would be walking by with her 3-year-old, I would pretend to be talking on my cell phone. I’d say, ‘Yeah, I do children’s parties geared for 3-year-olds!’ And a lot of times, the mom would stop, and say… ‘You do children’s parties?’”When he first started, he found out what other birthday party entertainers were charging — roughly $150 per show — and upped it by $25. That worked; it seemed to give him agency. After a while, his weekends were so crammed with parties — seven or eight, every weekend — he felt overwhelmed. So, applying fundamental principles of economics, he decided to thin his business but not his profits by raising his prices precipitously — from $175 to $300. It turns out that the fundamental principles of economics are no match for the fundamental desperation of suburban parents. He still was doing seven or eight shows a weekend.
Weekdays, he mostly haunts places like this, drinking coffee and tending to his cell phone. It rings a lot. It’s ringing right now.
“Hello. Yes. Okay, sure, what date are you looking at?”
He flips open the tattered appointment book that is always with him. He’s got dates penciled in as far into the future as October.
So, he clears six figures, working two days a week, and his clients come to him from word of mouth; he doesn’t even have to work to sell his services.
On the down side, he turns out to be a compulsive gambler who can’t hold onto any of that easy money. He understands toddlers, because he really is on their level.