by CHRIS BARRY

Has anyone, anywhere, ever witnessed a mime act that didn’t make them want to go up and punch the artist for being so… well, goofy? Let alone lame?

Rest assured, Billy the Mime is anything but lame. In fact, he might be the brightest light in comedy to come around since… hell, I don’t know when, but trust me when I tell you he’s funny. Really, really funny. Outrageous, irreverent, at times arguably disgusting, but every bit equally poignant.

You might have seen him in Penn Gillette and Paul Provenza’s excellent film The Aristocrats last year. He was, uh, the heretofore virtually unknown mime who decidedly stole the film from the likes of Gilbert Gottfried, George Carlin, Steven Wright et al. as he acted out the notoriously dirty joke in which a vaudeville entertainer tries to sell his “family act” to a potential booker. The joke generally involves bestiality, incest, sex with children, lots of bodily fluids and all those other fine staples of high-brow humour.

If you haven’t seen the film, let’s just say the telling of it is almost always somewhat “special,” but to see it done by a classically-trained mime, who actually has a razor sharp sense of humour, is to witness something else entirely.

The Mirror spoke with Billy last week at his home in Los Angeles. For a mime, he sure can talk a lot.

Mirror: So, mime. What makes one decide to get into that?

Billy the Mime: I discovered mime a long time ago, back when I was in high school. I’d seen Marcel Marceau perform and thought, “Gee, I think I can do this.” And there was, believe it or not, a brief shining moment there when mime was actually kind of cool.

M: Oh yeah? Not in my neighbourhood. Are you thinking, like, when David Bowie incorporated it into his Ziggy Stardust thing?

BTM: Yeah, exactly. Bowie was a mime. You can’t get cooler than that.

M: If you say so.

BTM: Anyway, I discovered I had something of a knack for it, and that it bled into other things, like the early film comedians—Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy—a lot of the stuff they were doing was mime. One person, no set, no props. Very basic and simple, yet they could get so much across. So I started studying it from books and later took some master classes with Marceau and others. Eventually, I started doing it out on the street, and with time began doing shows at high schools throughout California. Actually getting paid, so that was nice.

M: Were these more traditional mime performances?

BTM: A little bit more. The edgier, more interesting stuff came later.

Cripples, child molesters, abortions

M: Given mime’s reputation for generally, well… sucking, booking Billy the Mime must be a pretty tough sell for your agent?

BTM: Yeah, well, this is a show for people who hate mimes. I hate most mimes because they’re usually pretentious and boring and not funny. They certainly don’t go into the dark realms I do. Mime isn’t just about being on the street, making fun of people, imitating people or, you know, pretending to cry—there’s a lot more to it. People forget there’s a sort of power to mime, because it’s so basic and simple you can make quite a statement. The material I do is very far removed from the street stuff you see.

M: At what point did you start doing what you’re doing with the medium today?

BTM: I’d been thinking about the form and what could be done with it and finally thought, “What about doing adult stuff and go into black humour realms, really push the envelope?” I’d tried out this one routine—a tribute to JFK Jr.—and realized there was something there. And I’d done another one called Dreams of a Young Crippled Boy, which was the same type of thing where audiences weren’t sure—are you supposed to laugh at this or take it seriously?

After that, all these other ideas came to me. I wanted to be different from everybody else. I knew nobody was doing routines called “The Abortion” or “The Priest and the Altar Boy” or “A Tribute to Karen Carpenter” or whatever. Then it became the whole thing of doing topical stuff, going back to what the Greek and Roman mimes did. All the other mimes were doing “Man Trapped in a Glass Box.” The worst thing is most mimes are just pale imitations of Marcel Marceau, so I thought, “Wow, here’s something different, now how far can I push it?”

9/11 laffs

M: I can’t think of any precedents—are there any?

BTM: No. I mean, some mimes have done stuff that could be called a little racy or whatever but… I’m trying to think of someone… no, there really aren’t any. It’s funny, sometimes it’s just the little details in the routines that get people. There’s one part in a routine I do, “A Day Called 9/11,” where I portray a regular guy going to work at the World Trade Center and then one of the hijackers on the plane, a juxtaposition between the two of them. Anyway, there’s a part where the terrorist reaches up and adjusts the air [ventilation] above him, you know, like people do when they’re sitting in an airplane. I didn’t think to put that in because I thought it’d be funny or get a reaction, only to set the scene, to make it very clear that at this point he’s just a passenger getting on a plane, putting on his seatbelt, you know. It’s so bizarre, it always gets this laugh of recognition from people. But then they go, “Oh, but wait a minute, this horrible thing is about to happen.”

Like in the Karen Carpenter routine, I show her throwing up because she suffered from anorexia nervosa. And it’s very interesting seeing the audience’s reaction because the show is presented in very classical mime form. There are black-outs in between routines and signs presented announcing the title of each one. And when the titles come up, I hear the audience, and it’s always like, “Oh my God,” and gasps and whatnot. It’s a very interesting feeling to be on stage in a theater when you know the audience is thinking, like, “Jesus, what’s gonna come next? How far is this guy going to go? What is he going to present to us?”

Challenging perceptions

M: Well, from what I’ve seen, sure, it’s true you push the envelope, but it’s not like you’re only out there to shock people. There’s generally a certain poignancy to your work, whether that’s apparent to everyone or not, I dunno. Have you had any profoundly negative reactions to date?

BTM: No one has walked out so far. But maybe that’s because you never know at any time which way it’s going to twist. Like in the Karen Carpenter routine, I mean, she’s become a figure people make jokes about but at the same time, it’s like, “Jeez, this is really sad.” I like to take these sudden turns, to keep the audience unsure of what’s gonna happen. People walk away with their own perceptions. I present my view and the audience takes away what it takes. With “The Abortion,” for example, liberals will go, “Gee, he must be anti-abortion because of this and that and what he’s showing” but if it was titled, let’s say, “The Abortion: 1947 pre-Roe v. Wade,” it would be perceived as, “Oh, this poor woman is sneaking out to this horrible doctor because she can’t legally get an abortion” or whatever. The audience will come to their own conclusions. Yes, I’m trying to challenge people’s perceptions of things but, not to sound pretentious, well, I just let the work speak for itself.

Billy the Mime performs July 18—22 at Théâtre Ste-Catherine (264 Ste-Catherine E.), 11 p.m., $15

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