The Last Pratfall

By Wendy Cole/Chicago

Knowing it could take years to get seats, new mom Chris Breault of Kankakee, Ill., wrote for five tickets to Bozo's Circus in 1977. She expected to give birth a few more times and didn't want any of her not-yet-conceived children to miss out on the chance to be part of the beloved TV show. The yak-haired clown with the red nose and floppy shoes had provided Breault with some of her favorite childhood memories, and she longed to sit in the studio bleachers with her own kids. By the time her tickets finally came, eight years later, she and her husband had three daughters, and they all spent a blissful 90 minutes together at the show. Even today, Breault, 47, occasionally tunes in to the show on Sunday mornings.

But not for long. Breault's childhood will officially end in August when Bozo, the country's longest-running kids' TV character, goes off the air in Chicago, the last city where he still takes pratfalls. With its relentlessly slapsticky approach to entertaining kids, and competition from edgier children's fare on channels like Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network, "this type of programming is a dinosaur," says Joey D'Auria, a former stand-up comic who has played Bozo on Chicago's WGN since 1984. The station's general manager, John Vitanovec, calls cancellation of the low-rated show "strictly a strategic decision."

Introduced in 1946 on a kids' record album by former Capital Records executive Alan Livingston, Bozo debuted on Los Angeles TV three years later, played by Pinto Colvig, who had provided the voice on the records. During the clown's heyday in the mid-'60s, 183 different TV Bozos entertained kids in almost every major U.S. city, as well as countries from Brazil to Thailand. His popularity even prompted a dispute over authorship. Larry Harmon, an early Bozo who bought the rights to the character in 1956, for years promoted himself as Bozo's creator, until Livingston and others exposed this as revisionist clown history. The embarrassed International Clown Hall of Fame even took down Harmon's plaque for a Lifetime of Laughter Achievement Award when it learned of the deception. Harmon, 76, sidesteps questions about Bozo's origins, but he still owns the rights and says he's eager to repackage the character for future TV, movie and theme-park deals. "Bozo never lost his fun or innocence," says Harmon. "Anything that good doesn't go away."

Of all the Bozo TV shows, Chicago's was probably the most elaborate. At its creative height, it had a 13-piece orchestra and guest circus acts, including sword swallowers and trapeze artists. There was also lots of familial repartee between Bozo and his clown sidekicks. In 1990 five years of tickets were given out in just five hours via a phone hot line that logged 27 million calls within Illinois alone.

But elsewhere, Bozo's audience was dwindling. Only a handful of Bozo shows remained on the air by 1990, and when the Grand Rapids, Mich., station axed its Bozo in 1999, Chicago's became the sole survivor. The end was inevitable. In 1994 WGN moved the show, a longtime weekday staple, to the ungodly time slot of Sunday mornings at 7. To fulfill FCC requirements for educational children's programming, the show added unfunny bits about things like stamp collecting and dog grooming. Fans grumbled. "Bozo is not my school-teacher," says kids' TV historian Jim Engel. "I don't want to see him talking about butterflies any more than I want to see Mister Rogers getting a pie in the face."

The final Chicago Bozo show was taped last week, though two more months of reruns remain. "It's hard to believe it's not going to be around anymore," says Breault. D'Auria, 48, a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, is less concerned with the passing of a TV era than with the future of his acting career. "Casting directors can't get past thinking of me as a kids' show host," he says. "But I'd be the perfect dumpy, middle-aged college professor."