ALEX CHADWICK, host:
This is DAY TO DAY from NPR News. I'm Alex Chadwick.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
And I'm Madeleine Brand. Perhaps you think you have a way with kids. Well, Emily Yoffe used to think she did. So Emily, better known to our regular listeners as The Human Guinea Pig for the online magazine Slate, decided to put her child friendliness to the ultimate test. She signed on as the entertainment at a three-year-old's birthday party. And here to recount her harrowing tale is Emily Yoffe herself, battered but not broken. Hi, Emily.
Ms. EMILY YOFFE (Writer, Slate): Hi.
BRAND: What on Earth made you want to go before that audience?
Ms. YOFFE: You know, they're little dopes. You just fall down and act silly, how hard could it be?
BRAND: Right, but you actually prepared for this, I understand.
Ms. YOFFE: Oh, I did research. I did research. I went and saw the performances of two of the best known Washington D.C. children's entertainers, Broccoli the Clown and the Great Zucchini. And so I went to see both of them, took copious notes, and decided to steal the most boffo bits and I'd have an act.
BRAND: And what were you, the Great Cauliflower?
Ms. YOFFE: I was the Amazing Macaroni. And my 10-year-old daughter, who I'd dragged along to see these performances, decided she wanted to participate in this as my assistant, so we were the Amazing Macaroni and Cheese.
BRAND: Ah. So you get to the party, you've got your routine. Having a preschooler myself, I know you can't go wrong with a good fart joke, so, you know, how hard could it be?
Ms. YOFFE: Well, I'd talk to these guys, these entertainers and Broccoli told me, you know, get on their level, hit yourself in the bum bum, hit yourself in the face, toilet paper, underwear. So I had all that stuff. We opened by saying, hey kids, we forgot our hats, and we took out underwear and put it on our heads, expecting, you know, all we have to do is show the diaper, suck on the pacifier. Dead silence.
There was the toilet paper roll thing. Now, Broccoli had done this, this absolutely screams, falling down, kids crying it's so funny. You call a kid up from the audience, I tried to call the birthday boy, he ran away at that point. I got his older sister, five-year-old sister, to come up and stand next to me. You have the kid put her two index fingers out and then you go in your bag, pull out a role of toilet paper and put the role of toilet paper on her fingers. What could be funnier?
BRAND: That's hilarious.
Ms. YOFFE: Dead silence.
BRAND: Yeah.
Ms. YOFFE: Bafflement, embarrassment, horror. That's when, you know, I lowered myself to eating the toilet paper.
BRAND: Meanwhile, the other adults, what are they doing?
Ms. YOFFE: As the kids are getting more and more silent, I'm hearing more and more laughter from the adults. But it's not really laughter of enjoyment, it's more that kind of caustic laughter. When John Kerry puts on his wind surfing outfit, it's the kind of laughter Republicans make, or when George Bush calls himself The Decider, Democrats laugh that way. So that's what the laughter was like.
BRAND: Not a friendly audience?
Ms. YOFFE: No. And then actually - Zucchini had told me there's one fail-safe. If everything is going downhill, have a cassette player, do freeze dance with them. So after about five minutes of my act I went to freeze dance. As the birthday boy's grandmother said to me later, That was my absolute favorite part of your act, because you couldn't get them to dance, so every time you yelled freeze, they were already frozen.
BRAND: Frozen in horror. So you no longer think you're good with kids?
Ms. YOFFE: Well, now I realize you can't do a silly crazy act and be mommy. You have to kind of de-sex yourself. Zucchini just performs in his street clothes and he doesn't do the whole clown thing, and so I said I'm going to just adopt that gestalt. My material is so good, I'm not going to dress up as a clown.
My whole thing was screaming, Mommy, here's a mommy! And frankly, Madeleine, these kids are a little sexist, because - I think it's true. A mommy with a diaper on her head is not a funny mommy, it's a mommy about to be carted off to the funny farm.
BRAND: Emily Yoffe is The Human Guinea Pig for the online magazine Slate. Thank you Emily.
Ms. YOFFE: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.