Like many of the greatest clowns, “Boris” was also the perfect ambassador of meaninglessness. He offered not just a unique Schrödinger’s clown of a performance – simultaneously serio-mocking and mock-serious – but he further placed the action beneath the proscenium arch of grotesque self-commentary. And it was this triple faux-Juvenalian layer to his work that surely made him one of the greatest buffoons of all time. He would vehemently assert one and then the opposite and then both – trumpet his ability to do so – only to debunk himself by denying he had made any such statements at all. He would write his own previews, for example, saying that his coming show was both “the only way to go” and “the wrong way to go”. For he alone would gloss and counter-gloss his own appearances. Events and Offers Sign up to receive information regarding NS events, subscription offers & product updates.īut what set him in the firmament was a third meta-operation to his act. Ideas and Letters A newsletter showcasing the finest writing from the ideas section and the NS archive, covering political ideas, philosophy, criticism and intellectual history - sent every Wednesday. Weekly Highlights A weekly round-up of some of the best articles featured in the most recent issue of the New Statesman, sent each Saturday. The Culture Edit Our weekly culture newsletter – from books and art to pop culture and memes – sent every Friday. Green Times The New Statesman’s weekly environment email on the politics, business and culture of the climate and nature crises - in your inbox every Thursday. The New Statesman Daily The best of the New Statesman, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. World Review The New Statesman’s global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. Sign up for The New Statesman’s newsletters Tick the boxes of the newsletters you would like to receive. Then he would affect to fall in love with someone and – when, inevitably, she resisted his overtures – he would pretend to bribe her with the wallet he had stolen. (At the famous clown-school that he attended he had perfected an early routine in which he smashed up restaurants.) He would pickpocket a wallet from the crowd. Or he would pretend to juggle plates but instead allow each one to crash to the floor – sorry, not sorry. He would, for example, strand himself on the high wire and simply dangle there with his flags – oddly pointless, ever-present, grinning. He was already highly accomplished at a kind of low moment-to-moment physical comedy and he would seek to engage the public with sudden calamities, tumblings, losing of directions. His breakthrough show, “Mayor”, opened in 2008 and ran for eight exhilarating years. For a moment, he appeared to come from the same place as the public and therefore to be their envoy among the other performers – whom he would proceed to lampoon and ridicule. By entering the ring in this way – and with great clatter and furore – he would subvert the expected order and contrive confusion in the expectation of the audience. He would then clamber through the crowd to a plangent arrangement of the national anthem – a pale-faced jester, candy-floss hair, feigning to fall over, carrying buckets of confetti and his little plastic flags. He was not one of the people, of course but he liked to sit among them, awaiting his moment. And yet, when he started out, he would open his act as if from the public seats. “Boris” became the most famous clown of his time.

And so, when his career ended so abruptly, he was as surprised as anyone. He had at least four masterworks to his name. He had filled the big top over and over and over again. He had put on some of the most spectacular shows of the era. When did the booing start? He was never exactly sure.

Angry giant stepping on people