A Tale of Way More Than Two Bozos

This week, Frank Avruch, an 89-year-old entertainer best known for portraying Bozo the Clown, died. When I saw tributes to Bozo online, I felt sad--but also confused, like I’d been bonked on the head by a circus performer. I could’ve sworn that the guy who played Bozo the Clown had already passed away. After a morbid Google search, I confirmed that, yes, several other Bozos had already died. I’d grown up watching The Bozo Show, and my parents had too, and so it made sense that more than one person had portrayed the friendly, bucket-loving clown over the years that the children’s variety show aired. But what stood out was the sheer volume of Bozos, and the surprising geographic variety. I’d always assumed that the Bozo I saw growing up, watching on WGN in Chicago, was the same Bozo people saw all over the country, that it was a local program syndicated nationally. But something much weirder was going on. An astounding number of people played Bozo over the years, in city-specific versions of the same show, creating enough confusion to provoke a clowning scandal and intra-Bozo beefs.

Before the drama, the backstory! Bozo was created by a man named Alan W. Livingston back in the 1940s. Livingston, who worked for Capitol Records, released a storybook and children’s entertainment record called Bozo at the Circus. He teamed up with a vaudeville actor named Pinto Colvig, who played Bozo for his original 1949 television appearance on Los Angeles’s KTTV. (Colvig, a consummate children’s performer, was also the original voice actor for Disney’s Pluto and Goofy.)

In 1956, a man named Larry Harmon, who had been hired by Livingstone to play Bozo at promotional appearances, bought the licensing rights to the character. He fiddled with the look and voice, and then released an animated cartoon series, voicing Bozo himself. He also sold franchise rights to the character to local stations, which meant that different actors portraying different versions of Bozo popped up on different local television shows around the country, and eventually in Brazil and Mexico. While every actor was different, the show’s through line was a mixture of circus performances, games, comedy sketches, and local entertainment, all overseen by Bozo and his friends.

According to the Larry Harmon Pictures Corporation, at one point there were 183 different Bozo shows airing during the same time period in the United States alone. People complain about “Peak TV” and how there are too many television shows on now, but, uh, at least there aren’t literally hundreds of different versions of the exact same clown show on. There were almost as many names for the show as there were men filling the enormous shoes. Sometimes it was The Bozo Show. Others, Bozo’s Circus or The Bozo Super Sunday Show or just Bozo. (The last version, based in Chicago, was canceled in 2001.) Nobody seems to have a comprehensive list of exactly how many Bozo shows there were altogether. “I believe that nobody really knows the answer. The truth is that it would be a larger number than most people realize,” clown historian Bruce “Charlie” Johnson told me by email.

The Chicago Bozos, Bob Bell and Joey D’Auria, were the best known, because WGN spun into a national cable network in the 1990s. But there were unique Bozos all over the place, from Moline, Illinois, to Miami. Detroit alone had four different Bozos over the years. Windsor, Canada, had its own Canadian Bozo. One of the Washington, D.C., Bozos in the 1960s, Willard Scott, went on to have a long and successful career as the original portrayer of the McDonald’s mascot Ronald McDonald, the only non-evil clown more famous than Bozo. Avruch, the man who died this week, portrayed Bozo from 1959 to 1970 in Boston, and his version was also the one that appeared in the first nationally syndicated episodes of the show, which meant he was an Elite Bozo. Rest in peace!

Ready for the drama? So Harmon, the man who owned all the licensing rights, had a habit of telling reporters that he invented Bozo, even though technically he only popularized Bozo. (Later, he argued that he was consistently misquoted.) His tales of spreading the gospel of Bozo internationally were very entertaining and very, very fake sounding. “I have been in the jungles of New Guinea with the cannibals, I’ve been down in the Amazon with the head-hunters, because I was trying to see one thing: Can I relate to the world, can I survive in the jungle, dressed as Bozo?” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1993, claiming that he had survived two weeks with cannibals in the 1970s by greeting them with “Howdy, this is your pal Bozo.”

Harmon’s yarn spinning caused conflict. “Larry Harmon was just an out-of-work actor when I hired him to do some promotional work,” Alan Livingston told ABC News in 2001. “He’s been misleading everyone — and taking credit for [original Bozo] Pinto’s work.” Harmon also had a reportedly frosty relationship with Bob Bell, the long-running Chicago Bozo. “Harmon’s problem is that he can’t bear another clown getting any credit,” Joan Roy, Bell’s daughter, told ABC News in 2004, claiming that Harmon had refused to let Bell wear his Bozo costume during his International Clown Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Milwaukee. The International Clown Hall of Fame actually took down Harmon’s plaque in 2004, deciding to honor Colvig instead. Harmon was reinstated in 2008 and died that same year, insisting to the end that he had not misrepresented his Bozo connection. Whether he exaggerated or not, he is definitely the person responsible for taking Bozo global and should be remembered as such.

It seems clown competition made even the most jovial men foolish, but the excess of Bozos wasn’t all bad blood. After all, not only does Bozo live on as a cherished childhood memory for many adults, he also lives on because there were countless entertainers playing him, and many are literally still alive.