After a pause, a single clown stepped out onstage, dressed in baggy white overalls, a poufy red wig, and oversized shoes. He held a chrome bicycle horn, the kind with a squeeze-bulb, and was looking at it with a comically puzzled sort of frustration.
He gripped the bulb with all his might, but no sound came out. Two other clowns stole up behind him, and clapped a large jug, painted with daisies, over his head. The audience burst into laughter as he struggled to pull it off his head.
As he flailed helplessly, the other two took the horn, now forgotten, and experimentally gave the bulb a squeeze.
Still, no sound came from it. One, in an exaggerated fashion, mimed that an idea had occurred to him. From with the folds of his baggy costume, he pulled an outsized mallet.
Then, with all the determination of a thousand great warriors etched on his painted face, he began to hammer away at the horn like there was no tomorrow.
The other clown, now freed from his ceramic penitentiary, stayed the hand of his more violent peer.
Two more clowns, in neon livery, emerged from the wings, and clapped a pie apiece into the faces of their onstage counterparts, and all hell broke loose.
Clowns chased other clowns around the stage, one flailing a clapper wildly and catching another on the bottom. Neil let out a small, muffled giggle. The crowd laughed uproariously, many in front tossing rotten vegetables at the stage from pails that had appeared, seemingly, out of nowhere.
Suddenly, a magician, resplendent in top hat and tails, appeared in with a bang and a flash of red sparks.
The clowns grew silent, and stood, slack-jawed, in awe. The magician flipped his hat off his head of slicked-back black hair, and presented it with a flourish.
He reached his hand, gloved in white silk, down into the hat. With an expression of intense concentration, he reached down, down into his hat, until the entire length of his arm was reaching into it.
All the audience, Neil included, leaned forwards in their seats with a collective creak almost drowning out the drumroll.
Screwing up his moustachioed face, he wrenched his hand out, gripping the bicycle horn. The clowns all made a big show of gasping, but one of them, ever so slowly, tentatively reached out and squeezed the horn.
A pathetic little wheeze escaped it.
The audience roared with laughter, and the clowns took a collective bow, while the magician took an elegant leg.
To the whistles and cheers of the crowd, the curtain drew shut, and the lights slowly dimmed.