One of the Bouffon acts at 3rd Ward’s “Medicine Show.” — Photo by Kevin Armento

The clowns were in town Thursday night at 3rd Ward, in various forms ranging from wigs, to extravagant suits, to animal costumes. The “Bouffon Medicine Show” offered two hours of acts featuring “the grotesque, the manipulative, and the ever-charming,” culminating in a faith-healing bit that — ah, but you’ll have to drop a coin in the cup before you can hear more.

It was rather ambitious of 3rd Ward to put up something like this on a Thursday night in August, even if there were cheap drinks. The small crowd that made it out seemed to enjoy, if not fall head over heels for, this smorgasbord of performers (who, give them their due, worked damn hard for the laughs they got). It takes massive energy to get a crowd going in the sort of town-hall room the artists had to work with: no lights to play with, no backstage. This is not made easier when having to move from act to act, take setup time, wait for music cues — the energy drops off faster than Republican approval ratings.

It’s interesting to watch this American branding of bouffon theater, especially as it garners an audience and awards. A few of the performers in Thursday’s show (Jeff Seal, Audrey Crabtree and Lynn Berg) were a part of the wildly popular parody of the Tennessee Williams classic, “Bouffon Glass Menajoree”, which started in 2006 as part of the New York Clown Theater Festival, and has since played runs varying from the Brick Theatre in Brooklyn, to Minneapolis, to Dublin. They have taken this idea of bouffon — a long theatrical tradition, but coined in its modern form by the French physical theater master Jacques Lecoq — and fully soaked it in Americana: outlandishly big breasts, hillbilly accents, and various other white trash caricatures.

Still, it gets hot in a stuffy room, and this doesn’t help for laughs either. There was a moment during the final act, Ambrose Martos wearing a white mask, and suited in a white costume with a long dinosaur-like tail, when it looked as though surrender was impending. Mr. Martos had poked around as much as he could for a laugh vein in the crowd, but to little avail — they just seemed ready to go to the bar. Then Murphy’s Law kicks in, and the last thing you want to happen inevitably happens: the CD player starts to skip, and his sound guy has to re-start the song three times. Yes, a mask was obscuring much of his face, but you could see the look still: this needs to be over. And by the time the closing announcement was made, and one of the artists offered up a bottle of healing tonic to one of the audience members, I heard him mutter under his breath, “This crowd needs it.”