Rodeo clown Keith Isley still making them laugh at Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo

By Will Jarvis July 13, 2016 | updated 10 years ago

Rodeo clown Keith Isley gets ready in his trailer Wednesday, July 13, 2016, before the first night of the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo at the Norris-Penrose Event Center in Colorado Springs. (The Gazette, Christian Murdock)

The black socks used to fly across the Isley family’s living room floor, and as momma was beside herself thinking mice had invaded the house, young Keith would laugh and toss another.

Back then, Keith Isley would do most anything for a laugh. He served as the class clown in school, played tricks on his family and lived to entertain – or scare.

What would his former classmates expect him to grow up to be?

“Idiot,” he said with a laugh, sitting in his trailer outside the Norris-Penrose Event Center early this week.

Instead, Isley grew up to be one of the country’s most accomplished rodeo clowns and will be at the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo this week for the second time in his 40-plus-year career. The rodeo veteran performs for a living as he travels the country from show to show, making people laugh in his baggy jeans and face paint.

In his hometown of Reidsville, N.C., humor came easily. He was comfortable and confident. He knew everyone in his 26-person graduating class, and the son of a tobacco farmer could toss out jokes quicker than a bull could toss a cowboy.

Today, the 58-year-old isn’t the same prankster. He still cracks jokes. (“My parents would have probably been happier with me selling drugs than doing rodeo.”) He can still turn it on when necessary, but he’s more reserved. He knows when to be funny and when he can relax.

“It’s like he’s got so many faces,” said Melanie Isley, his wife of 26 years. “At home (in Goldston, N.C.) he’s the farmer and the rancher, not the clown.”

As he’s aged and matured and won numerous national rodeo awards, the humor has buried itself behind a thick coat of white and red makeup, only to be revealed once the man transforms into the clown.

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First, Isley admires himself in the mirror for a few moments. For a 58-year-old who’s spent his life dodging bulls and horses, he looks surprisingly young.

He opens a can of Albolene cold cream and spreads it across his face as a light base – “not too thick, though.” Next is the white paint. Right eye. Left eye. Chin and mouth. Red paint – two crosses, one on each cheek. Then the nose.

Black eyeliner and a light dusting of baby powder seals it all up.

Keith Isley the traveling man is now Keith Isley the clown. He doesn’t have a performing nickname. The makeup shields him just fine.

“I can pretty much do it in the dark,” he said.

When he started out in rodeo, Isley wanted to ride bulls. “I wasn’t very good at it,” he said, shaking his head.

So he started bullfighting in his early teens, protecting the cowboys once they’d fallen off the horses and bulls. At 16 years old, with the main rodeo clown injured, Isley had to fill in. He hasn’t stopped since.

The act hasn’t been kind on his body over the years. As the accolades have piled up, so have the injuries. Torn-up knees. A broken ankle. Shattered ribs and teeth.

But far worse than any physical ailment is Isley’s horror of speaking in front of crowds. Scared him to death. Still does.

Public speaking is the rodeo clown’s greatest fear. Makeup is the solution.

“I’m hiding behind it,” he said, as true today as when he was 16. “Nobody knows who I am.”

He still struggles with public speaking sans makeup. A few years back, a group wanted Isley to give an hour-long keynote speech at a convention. Reluctantly, he agreed, and in the weeks leading up, nervous fits awoke him in the middle of the night.

“The day of this convention, you could just about hear the water dripping off my hands I was so nervous,” he said.

He got up on that stage and talked for over an hour. Something inside him just took over.

That’s Keith Isley in a nutshell. Once he’s on, he’s on. Everything disappears but the entertainer – with or without makeup – and the audience.

Wednesday night at the Norris-Penrose, underneath a thick coat of face paint, Isley joked and laughed and announced his candidacy for president of the United States to a roaring crowd.

Fulfillment is found in those few fleeting moments, when every eye is on the clown and his routine. He got that in Pendleton, Ore., while performing for 17,000 attentive fans – just Isley and his dog.

He got it in 1999 at Belle Fourche, S.D., when even the cowboys stopped what they were doing to watch the man in makeup trick ride a horse.

“You had these people in the palm of your hand,” Isley said. “When you can do that with an act, that says something about the performer there. It’s like hitting a home run with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth.”

Part of the act is for the audience. Part is for his own satisfaction. He always told young clowns that professionality is key.

“After talking to him, I cleaned up my wardrobe,” said Dalton Morris, a 21-year-old rodeo clown who looks up to Isley. “I made sure my face paint was on point every time.”

Isley won his first Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association’s Specialty Act of the Year award in 1999 and holds nine of those titles to his name, but the emotional toll has worn him down.

“The end is near,” he said. “I know about when it is, but I haven’t told nobody.”

Wednesday night the clown joked to announcer Boyd Polhamus.

“You can be replaced,” Isley told him. “Heck, I can be replaced.”

Soon, that may happen. He’ll be able to go home and stay there year-round. No public speaking. No makeup. Just Isley and his wife.

And maybe a few black socks flying across the living room floor.