“French” put-on sends Justin Case's circus act into high art

I know I was supposed to love it, but when I was a kid I was scared of the circus.

As a 4-year-old, I cried at the aggressive, in-your-face antics of French clowns under a one-ring tent in Paris. In the early '60s, when I was 7 and braver, a small traveling circus came to my then hometown of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., with two notable sideshows. One was a python that would squeeze a live chicken to death and swallow it; the other was advertised as the Wild Man of Borneo—actually a half-naked man in dark purplish makeup and a wild-looking wig who charged relentlessly around his cage banging a metal pipe against the bars and grunting. I didn't beg my parents to take me to the evening big-top performance.

My feelings changed with the advent of the intimate, more subtle circuses of my adulthood, like Cirque du Soleil out of Montréal, and the nonprofit Big Apple Circus, in New York. Popular tastes evolve and circuses have improved (at least in the U.S.) since the old days of death-defying clichés and grotesque gestures, which cynically exploited the audience's prejudices as well as the animals in the ring. Circuses are best when they make children smile as often as they gasp.

By no means am I advocating a politically correct circus (although I'm no fan of the amusement-park freak shows of my childhood). These days my favorite performer under a tent is Justin Case, whose act, even in a milieu replete with exaggeration, seems to me unique in its melange of sheer acrobatic skill and ironic humor.

To be sure, Justin does a truly amazing bicycle act. Backwards, forwards, completely upside down—I've never seen such virtuosity on two wheels, much less one. But circuses are by definition overloaded with great acrobats and jugglers—every act must have its astounding feature—so even the best performers have difficulty getting noticed.

What sets Justin apart is his comedic persona, which dangles somewhere between straightforward standup and sophisticated cultural satire. He's so convincing that when I saw him for the first time—in December at the Big Apple Circus—I actually fell for his shtick—that of a pathetic, self-deprecating Frenchman who should have studied harder and sorely wishes he had pursued another trade than circus work (think Inspector Clouseau with the coordination of Nadia Comaneci).

That is, I fell for the French accent, for I really believed that Justin was a stereotypical Frenchman speaking English with an absurdly exaggerated French accent. At intermission I bumped into Paul Binder, Big Apple's artistic director and ringmaster, and complimented him on the “Frenchman's act.” With theatrical aplomb, Binder replied, “what's even better is that he's Australian.”

Indeed he is, and with a stereotypical Australian accent and sense of adventure. Born Justin Beggs in Melbourne, the son of an advertising man, he alternated as a kid between his daredevil and creative sides. By the age of 12 he was an accomplished competitor in motorcycle “trials,” a sport in which you're rewarded for not putting your feet on the ground while maneuvering through an obstacle course. Art college and painting satisfied Justin's creative urge in “two dimensions,” but it didn't satisfy his craving for 3D feedback from a live audience.

In the early 1980s, inspired by a circus performance in Melbourne, Justin found himself obsessed with getting into one. “A painter becomes a painter because he just has to be a painter,” he remarked to me on the phone from Las Vegas the other day. “It's not the money.”

Surely not. Justin's tales of itinerant street performing all over Europe would make for a pretty good novel but never a stable bank account (his steadiest gig seems to have been a stint in Malaysia juggling apples to promote Australian exports). Once he nearly incited a riot in Paris's volatile Latin Quarter when the police asked him to halt his act and move along. Justin needed the money and he objected: “I yelled to the crowd, ‘what about Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité' and they went ‘yeah!' and started to surround the cops.” On the advice of a plain-clothes officer he wisely departed the scene.

Justin received some formal training in Melbourne from a famous Chinese acrobat known as Mr. Liu, and realizing the unicycle market was overcrowded, he created an act using a two-wheeler designed and handmade with an engineer friend. For serious circus people, all roads lead to France, where circus performers are considered artists, not freaks. In 1989, after time at the Fratellini School, in Paris, and having reached the too-old (by circus standards) age of 25, Justin badgered his way into a scholarship from the prestigious French national circus school, le Centre National des Arts du Cirque, in Châlons-en-Champagne.

Unfortunately, the Harvard of circus schools doesn't guarantee a career, and one day Justin found himself back at the Burke Street Mall, in Melbourne, pretty much broke and facing an indifferent audience. He'd long relied on a self-mocking patter (always in English) while he did the bike tricks, but this day harked back to his early street career when “I was failing endlessly.”

One option for a comedian in such a situation is to insult the crowd, although as Michael Richards, late of Seinfeld, can attest, it's a risky tactic. On the spur of the moment Justin began to berate the unresponsive spectators, but in French and employing the kind of hurt, self-pitying tone he uses in his act today. It worked—nobody took it personally if the insults were in French—and people started laughing.

Australian stereotypes of the French are much the same as American ones—the Frogs are viewed as arrogant know-it-alls who take themselves too seriously and think they're better than Anglos. Very simply, says Justin, “[Australians and Americans] love to see a Frenchman fail . . . the superior guy goes down.” Accordingly, Justin added more French phrases to the act, though never so many that he lost the audience, and started doing the English patter with a French accent.

By becoming “French” Justin also arrived at what I think is another, paradoxical insight about human nature: “If an audience understands everything they don't have to listen.” Yes, “they're charmed by foreigners” but they also listen more attentively to the jokes and the asides if the English is foreign-accented. Meanwhile, the astonishing bicycle tricks don't seem quite so overwhelmingly spectacular, which makes Justin more human and endearing.

It's logical that Justin's act wouldn't work long-term in France, where he occasionally performs on television. I suspect the French would be confused, even insulted, by such self-mockery turned against their own culture by a foreigner—a milder version of what makes Borat offensive to many Americans. Besides, says Justin, “I can't speak perfect French and I can't fool a Frenchman.”

He fooled me though (and I'm half French), which was enough to entice me back a second time with my kids to see Justin's ultimate trick: a ride through a flaming hoop on a minuscule bicycle. Come to think of it, maybe the French really are smarter than Americans. Not only did they understand Iraq better than we did, they recognized Justin Case's talent, even if they didn't understand his accent.

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