Flying Funny: My Life without a Net

by Dudley Riggs

  In all our efforts to save the world from people who are always trying to save the world, there have been no sacred cows. Looking back at all the subjects and crises of the world that we satirized for laughs, I see that most remain today. The problems are still here. And we have more work to do.

  I have always said, “In this theater, we’re not doing Shakespeare; we’re not doing Chekhov. This is not meant to be great and lasting literature.” What we’re doing is found in this performance only, this moment, this now. It should be funny, and it would have to be new, it would have to be brave. Brave and new!

  But remember, nothing is sacred except the circus.

  The height is not a problem. Even at this advanced age, my grip is still strong enough for solo work, though I do get a little winded going up the stairs. The aerial work I do now is not my personal best anymore, but it’s well ahead of my personal worst. It’s a secret (my secret), a necessary personal challenge—like my dad’s habit of doing a handstand every morning.

  My own private ritual—I try to keep it very cool. I look down from our tenth-floor balcony and see people on the sidewalk who are the right size to know that I’m above seventy feet—twice my flying-act elevation, half the altitude of my sway pole rigging. The steel rail is the same one-and-five-eighths-inch steel tubing I used for years, a very familiar size that feels good to my hands. Just think, I say to myself, I used to fly at this height.

  My “civilian” friends never quite understand. High places make them nervous. A New York friend allowed me to see the view from his co-op on the fourteenth floor, and he said, “We don’t use the balcony, I’ve lived here four years and have never been out there; I’m afraid I’d fall off . . . or jump.”

  A few years ago, I climbed the Sydney Harbor Bridge in a self-guided tour of the solid steel girders 350 feet above the water. That gave a great lift to my spirits, the best I’ve felt in years. I’d do it every day if I lived in Australia and if getting there were not such a grind.

  Why do I love to go high? I guess I just hunger for the top of things, not the competitive award-winning trophy top of things, but the sheer fun and ebullience of being up where most people fear to tread.

  I try to not scare people by standing too close to the edge, and I try to avoid reminding them that there are some sensations that they will never ever feel. In these high-up quiet moments, I hear circus music in my mind’s ear and feel the warm arousal of muscle memory just from pushing gently on the barrier. The exhilaration, the assurance, the feel of flying, comes back. I know that if I were offered a booking, I could still do the act.

  Acknowledgments

  Why did I leave a successful life of show business glint and glamour to bring comedy improvisation (and espresso) to what was deemed “Flyover Land”?

  “You should write a book.” That was suggested often by hip friends, usually spoken in that moment right after I got caught reminiscing about all the wonderful events and life lessons learned during my early circus and show business life—Riggs family tradition, aerial energy, managed fear, joyful applause. Too often I was recounting the pride I felt in those wondrous years before I became a settled towner. And before the Brave New Workshop.

  To Erik Anderson, my exceptional editor at the University of Minnesota Press, thank you for being someone who is really “with it.”

  Thanks to Rob Hubbard for writing the history of the Brave New Workshop (Brave New Workshop: Promiscuous Hostility and Laughs in the Land of Loons) and to Irv Letofsky (author of Promiscuous Comedy). Both freed me to write my own history as this memoir.

  This book was years in the making. A very special thank you to Carol Mulligan, who was able to decipher my cursive, find the stories I had lost, and encouraged my use of correct spelling.

  Thanks to my son, Paul Dudley Riggs, who with his mother, Ruth, were my early support in the development of the theater in Minneapolis.

  Thanks also to Joshua Will, Carl Vigeland, David Tripp, Patricia Weaver Francisco, Stevie Ray, Dane Stauffer, Roxanne Sadovsky, Jim Lenfestey, and Paul Von Drasek.

  I remain forever grateful to John Sweeney and Jenni Lilledahl for honoring the Brave New Workshop vision, and me, by creating thoughtful comedy and satire under my original banner of Positive Neutrality and Promiscuous Hostility. You and your company, led by artistic director Caleb McEwen, continue to make me proud.

  Many thanks to Pauline Boss, my lovely wife, who has persistently encouraged me to publish my stories . . . since the early 1980s.

  Plate Section

  A promotional photograph for my parents’ act, taken a few years before I was born. This photograph was rescued from the mud after a tornado took our home.

  A true child of the circus, I perched in the mouth of a tuba in the spring of 1932.

  My debut “act” with the Russell Brothers Circus was as the Polar Prince of the North. The miniature horse was soon replaced with a polar bear cub.

  I grew up watching my parents perform, and learning from them.

  Playing “Buck Riggs the All-­American Cowboy” alongside my father, “The King of the Kokemos,” during the circus off-­season in 1937.

  Riggs & Riggs holiday card, showing my juggling mirror act.

  I’m on the bars practicing my act. Note the clown shoes (my feet are not that big).

  The E. K. Fernandez All-­American Circus. I’m ringside at bottom left, holding my hat in the air.

  Opening Day of the All-­American Circus. I am spotting my dad on the bars, with Punch Jacobs at right.

  Taking a break with fellow performer Baba Dewyne in Manila, 1952.

  My controversial handshake with Crown Prince Akihito of Japan, which caused an international crisis and changed Japanese policy.

  Dudley dangling from the trapeze in the early 1950s.

  Performers spend a lot of time waiting in between our shows.

  Entertaining children in a military hospital at Clark Air Base in Manila, 1952.

  Program for the Kelly & Miller Bros. Circus.

  Every few weeks you would receive a new official route card informing you where you were off to next. Note that we visited a new town every day.

  On the road with the Dolly Jacobs Circus along the Alcan Highway—­the crowds were not huge.

  My first trip to Minnesota with the Shrine Circus in 1952. People told me I wouldn’t be able to winter tour Minnesota and the Midwest in my MG, but after a big snow the MG was always the first one off the lot (but it was “breezy at best”).

  The New Ideas Program in Minneapolis, 1958.

  Performing with the Instant Theater Company in 1956.

  First promotional shot for Café Espresso in 1959: drinking espresso while doing a one-­arm handstand. Photograph by Jim MacRostie.

  Posing with the first espresso machine in the Midwest, 1956. Photograph by Dwight Miller.

  Always new, always brave. Early days at the Brave New Workshop, 1963. Poster by Richard Guindon. Photograph by Henri Dauman / Life magazine. Copyright Henri Dauman / Dauman.pictures.com. All rights reserved.

  Dudley Riggs grew up in a distinguished show business family and has worked (since age five) as a vaudevillian, circus aerialist, clown, stage director, writer, and producer. A noted satirist of the daily news, Riggs is widely considered the father of improvisational theater. In the early 1950s, he created the Instant Theater Company in New York. In 1958, he founded the Brave New Workshop in Minneapolis—now the longest-running improvisational theater in the United States. In 1987, Riggs received the Charlie Award from the National Association of Comedy Arts. In 2009, he received the Ivey Award for Lifetime Achievement for his significant contributions to the exceptional theater community in the Twin Cities. In addition, he received a Kudo Award from Twin Cities theater critics and the Urban Guerrilla Award. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Pauline Boss.

  Al Franken began performing comedy in high school and was a featured performer at the Brave New Workshop before moving to New York to write for Saturday Night L
ive in 1975. He is the author of several books, and, in 2008, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he represents the state of Minnesota.