SOURCE: "Never Give a Sucker or Yourself an Even Break," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, No. 2, Winter, 1985, pp. 225-237.

In the following essay, Galligan examines Fields's psychohistory, with emphasis on ways that Fields overcame the misery of his childhood and the self-pity that might have arisen from it.

What a shame that someone can't put a bullet through the Pagliacci myth and bury it once and for all. It tells a lie: that though clowns are laughing on the outside they are crying on the inside; that they are wallowing in self-pity. They do not; they dare not. Clowns and all others who would live by the comic vision are obliged to strive to survive—more accurately, to live as themselves until they actually die—and self-pity, warm and sticky sweet as it is, will do anybody in long before the undertaker comes. So forget Pagliacci and...