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“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” 

I wish I were lying about all of this.

I used to ask why a lot, y’all. Why Curious George does the things he does, why he gets away with it, why everyone defers to MYH like he is the Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu of the universe. Whatever pain-starved and masochistic readers I have left will no doubt agree that I have attempted in my ramblings to understand the why, and I have failed as utterly as when I tried to play basketball in high school. Know your role, saith the universe, basketball is not for you. Not only was basketball not for me, certain things were for me, and none of them were athletic, nor were they attractive to high school girls. That, in itself, was enough why and why me and why them to keep me filling notebooks with whiny, maudlin, cringy bullshit for years, chasing an unobtainable goal through various adolescent stages of goth, emo, grunge and whatever-the-fuck else in an attempt to be something (anything) different than what I was.

It took longer than it should have for me to realize that ca-caw, ca-caw and tookie, tookie DON’T WORK.

Yell for the monster all you want; he will not show up until his time is fulfilled.

Ask why all you wish; God will ignore you and focus on the what and the who because, if thou canst not draw out leviathan with a hook, then buddy, God ain’t got to explain shit, feel me?

ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die

Consider Kafka. There is no point, and that is the point. Sometimes people wake up as insects; sometimes people get arrested and stabbed for no reason at all. Sometimes people get beaten up by hoboes and change their name to “Negro.” Sometimes the moment is structured such that our protagonist lives in a village for no reason, has sex with a barmaid for no reason, and bides his time by fighting against a faceless bureaucracy for reasons he doesn’t understand towards a goal that doesn’t matter and we don’t even get to know what that goal is because Kafka died before he could finish Das Schloss. And anyway we wouldn’t even know or care if Max Brod would have just burned the notebooks filled with whiny, maudlin, cringy bullshit like he was supposed to.

The Man in the Yellow Hat knows what Kafka was throwing down. There is no point to the monkey; there is no purpose to be served. Life is a serious of random happenings that occur without our interaction, without our blessing, and without any manner of the control we like to think we have.

This is why clowns are funny.

This is why clowns are fucking terrifying.

Clowns do not follow the rules society has set down; they perpetually exist in a netherworld of obfuscation and misdirection. Why do they look like that? Why do they do all the patently ridiculous things they do? Why do they exist?

Because they do.

In this episode, MYH and George are traveling to a clown school. Nobody knows why other than a vague MacGuffin of wanting to see Pepe El Loco, ”the world’s greatest clown performer.”

But it is not a clown school.

It is madness.

And I don’t mean Lovecraftian Mountains of Madness, where the countless gibbering things at least have an unfulfilled hunger, a desire to devour , a desperate yearning to escape the foul darkness and feast upon the cracked psyches of all who behold them. I mean the kind of madness that plagues Pink Floyd’s Lunatic on the Grass, a meaningless madness, laughing at things that aren’t funny, laughing at nothing at all.

MYH almost finds a parking space, but then a clown car full of two other clown cars and like fifteen clowns cuts him off and steals it. Thus, it is the parking lot that becomes MYH’s Kafkaesque hellscape, and Curious George must brave the clown school alone. He is told to proceed to the ninth floor, where the Pepe El Loco show will be held.

First Floor: George sees a clown dancing with three dogs dressed as clowns around a fountain that is also a clown. The lobby looks like somebody paid Betsey Johnson to gravely insult Banksy using only decorations available at Party City. Another clown comes in, joy-buzzes himself for no reason, and leaves. Then, a messenger clown gets attacked by yet another clown who comes out of the elevator with a bucket filled with confetti.

Somehow, this means two things:

A. George cannot use the elevator. He must take the stairs.

B. George acquires the messenger clown’s bag, hat, and nose, which now makes George the messenger, like what happens to that suicidal guy in the Piers Anthony book about Death.

doctor you have to help me

Third Floor: George is distracted by a clown walking down the stairs on his hands. He forgets what floor he is on, and so opens the door on the third floor to ask for directions. The third floor looks like the playroom in that Richard Pryor movie The Toy. The woman behind the desk looks like one of the Murmurs joined the Swiss Guard and sounds like Fran Drescher.

She hands George what looks like a twisted green bongpipe and then genuflects to the portrait of Dear Leader Pepe El Loco on the wall. She explains that the bongpipe is part of the “greatest clown gadget ever” and George must go to the fifth floor to pick up another piece of it. George tries the elevator, but as soon as the doors open, a clown shoots another clown out of a cannon. The clown that is thus ejaculated bounces off a trampoline and back into the elevator. Who could use an elevator with all that mindless bullshit going on? Not George—back to the stairs.

Meanwhile, MYH finds another parking spot, but it is reserved for elephants. A clown shows up on an elephant and demands that he move. MYH keeps driving; elephant is parked. The clown leaves the elephant, but only after he hits a button on his keyring and the elephant-car-alarm beeps.

At this point, I paused the show and screamed at the heavens. The heavens did not answer.

i am sad and depressed

Fifth Floor: George is dumber than a football bat. I wonder if his intelligence fades in and out, like a variable Flowers for Algernon. Sometimes he can build fabulous machines. Sometimes he can solve mysteries. Today, trapped in the Tower of Madness, George cannot count from three to five, and thus must walk all the way down to the first floor and start over.

On the first floor the clown and his dogs are still dancing. Stop asking why—hear you nothing that I say?

On the fifth floor a clown riding a baby’s tricycle and sounding like Snagglepuss gives George some sord of weird-ass metal thingie with a red disk on the end of it like that orgasm-game Commander Riker played on TNG. This clown says go to the second floor. George still can’t count, so he goes down to the first floor and watches the clown and his dogs for a bit.

A worm crawling in my brain tried to make me say WHY? but I ignored it.

life is harsh and cruel

Second Floor: Second floor was just Paul Lynde bouncing around on bedsprings tied to his shoes. George collects another piece of metal tubing, heads down to the first floor to watch the dogs-and-clown, and then climbs the stairs up to the eighth floor.

pagliacci is a famous clown

Eighth Floor: Edith Bunker is dusting a bicycle seat in front of the Macedonian flag. She gives the seat to George and tells him to go to the fourth floor.

George has an epiphany. Instead of walking back down to the first floor and then up to the fourth, he can instead tape numbers to all his fingers and use them to subtract eight from four.

MYH is still circling the parking lot. As soon as he says “I’ll NEVER find a parking spot!” a clown jumps out of nowhere and paints a parking spot around his car.

I begin to believe Marcel Duchamp and Frank Zappa wrote this episode in a Navajo sweatlodge.

pagliacci is in town today

Fourth Floor: The fourth floor is the swimming level from Super Mario Brothers. A seal gives George something that looks like a can of pepper spray. A clown with a Minnesota accent unfolds from a filing cabinet and tells George to go to floor ten.

Now, follow me on this. We were told at the beginning that Pepe El Loco’s show happens on the ninth floor. That was the whole reason George and MYH came to the clown school. Now we know there is a floor above nine. Why this made me want to eat aquarium gravel will be soon made clear.

you should go see pagliacci

Tenth Floor: Clown on stilts gives George a toilet plunger and says he better hurry to the first floor to meet Pepe El Loco. George hurries. The clown and dogs are gone. MYH and the great Pepe El Loco are there.

pagliacci will cheer you up

FIN: They all take the stairs to the ninth floor. Pepe El Loco’s all-important gadget is a disassembled pogo stick with the plunger as the bouncy part. He gets to the center ring of a three-ring circus just in time to bounce around and do little flips with it.

Y’all.

Y’ALL.

The ninth floor of this ten-floor building is a cavernous bigtop the size of the dadgum Astrodome. The ceiling is made of vaulted tent-canvas.

There is no tenth floor. THERE IS NO TENTH FLOOR EVEN THOUGH I SAW GEORGE GO TO THE TENTH FLOOR AND RETRIEVE A TOILET PLUNGER FROM A CLOWN ON STILTS