JIMBO Isn’t Clowing Around When It Comes to Drag

JIMBO the Drag Clown is full of surprises. As in, bounding onto season one of Canada’s Drag Race as an unknown, untried, off-kilter clowning queen who would go on to finish in fourth place. Exiting the show in hilariously ungraceful fashion, the London, Ontario-born performer-designer — James Insell, out of drag — also left CDR with a growing flock of fans who would support the rising star out on the road.

Next competing on the first edition of RuPaul’s Drag Race: UK vs. the World, JIMBO shocked viewers, not by landing in the top on the first two episodes, but by going out in only episode three. Of course, you can’t keep a drag clown down, so, this past year, the irrepressible queen returned to the Drag Race stage on the fiercely competitive eighth cycle of All Stars.

This time, to no one’s surprise, JIMBO aced the competition, earning a record-tying four main challenge wins en route to being crowned the winner and taking home the $200,000 grand prize.

She slayed the challenges and runways by constantly delivering the unexpected, like her demented, baby-doll Shirley Temple in the celebrity impersonation challenge Snatch Game of Love, or her bizarre Casper the ghost, who’s maybe pregnant with a loaf of bologna.

Between laughing their heads off at JIMBO’s antics, the judges and audiences often were left gagging a bit, and so, apparently, was JIMBO. “Clowning is all about shared surprise,” JIMBO said during a video call from the House of JIMBO studio in Victoria, British Columbia.

“That’s about me surprising myself at the same time as an audience, so that there is authentic comedy. It’s not anything that has been contrived, it’s not anything that I’ve thought ahead of time, ‘Oh, this is going to make someone laugh.’ It’s authentically funny because it’s funny in that moment. I love that about clowning, and I love that about taking a risk as a performer. You surprise yourself.”

Just coming off a Caribbean cruise tour with some of her All Stars 8 sisters, JIMBO plans to keep the surprises coming with her debut solo world tour, JIMBO’s Drag Circus. Traveling to 57 cities across North America, before dipping Down Under for a month in Australia, the drag musical comedy extravaganza — conceived by JIMBO and produced by Murray & Peter Present — promises a spectacle of the strange, funny, and fantastic.

“The main inspiration is really about presenting a scale and a story for my fans that fell in love with my story and who I am in the show, and really want a live experience,” says JIMBO. “I want to take those characters that I love doing and that people got a taste of, and I want to give them a little bit more room to have another little story and another longer look at who they are.”

Audiences can, of course, expect the unexpected, as well as a few familiar faces, like Shirley Temple and Casper the Ghost. “We’ve made up this storyline, which is a loose silly storyline of the stolen bologna, and the circus goes sideways,” JIMBO explains. “Then I perform six characters.” The idea, says the performer, is to invite people “into my brain, into my world, and to take them on a weird little ride.”

METRO WEEKLY: Oh my God, I can’t pass up the fact that you have facial hair.

JIMBO: Yeah, I just got home from a cruise. I was out cruising the Caribbean with Kandy Muse, Jessica Wild, and Heidi N Closet. I’m at home preparing to head out on this tour, I haven’t had to get into drag, so I’ve got a bit of scruff.

MW: It looks good. That sounds like a really fun All Stars 8 cast cruise. Where did you go?

JIMBO: We went to St. Martin, St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. It was awesome. We were with a bunch of my family and a ton of fans of drag and of ours. It was so much fun.

MW: In general, what have you been up to since slaying All Stars 8?

JIMBO: I’ve just been touring tons. I’ve toured all around the world. I’ve also been preparing for JIMBO’s Drag Circus, my new one-queen-circus extravaganza that has taken a ton of time and effort of rehearsals and workshopping and writing, and recording the music and preparing the costumes, and building the set and all those things. This has been a huge undertaking, and I’m just so excited to get it all together, and get it on the road in a week from now.

MW: It sounds like such a huge undertaking, and I feel like you could have gotten away with doing less.

JIMBO: I don’t think so!

MW: Why go so big, then?

JIMBO: Well, that’s just how I like it. I’m a storyteller, I’m also a performance artist, and a production designer, I’ve got a background in theater. I wanted to really draw on all of those strengths and on my past, and really weave together all those things I love about performance, which is creating the set and telling the story and inviting people into a world. I’ve written the music with my friend Andrew Fields, so it’s all original music. I’m just really excited to show all these different facets of myself and what I love about drag, and to make people laugh and to do it in a beautiful way.

MW: I read that you worked in theater. Was that before drag or at the same time as drag? You designed the original production of Ride the Cyclone, and I love that show.

JIMBO: Yeah, so Ride the Cyclone was written by Jacob Richmond, and made by our friend’s company, Atomic Vaudeville. My clown teacher, Britt Small, directed it. I did the original production design and the puppeteering for The Amazing Karnak. That was the first big show that I designed. I worked on that one for about five years, and then it went on to have huge success in America.

It was really exciting to be a part of that, and that was my first [time] touring. I toured nationally as a puppeteer for The Amazing Karnak. That was just a really exciting time, and that’s where I fell in love with being on the road.

MW: Were you already doing drag and/or JIMBO at the time?

JIMBO: So JIMBO the Drag Clown was something I started doing, combining my clowning and my drag, probably after Ride the Cyclone, I would say. Ride the Cyclone, I was doing as a puppeteer, and really working as a costume maker and set designer. It’s through that costume-making that I wove that into my drag aesthetic. It was clowning, and my understanding of clowning and performance that really allowed me to take my costuming and my love of drag and feminine beauty and those kinds of things, and start weaving it together into a drag character. That came about over the past ten years.

MW: So when did you get into clowning?

JIMBO: Well, clowning is all about an understanding of performance, and it’s about creating a conversation with your audience, and it’s about being really in the moment and really present and about shared surprise.

I love that immediacy. I love communicating with an audience, I love laughter, and so clowning just really made a lot of sense to me. I also don’t really like rehearsing necessarily, and that was a boundary to me as a performer before — how do you conceive something that’s funny, how do you rehearse something that’s funny, and then how do you present something? Clowning says to throw all of that away, come as who you are in that moment, and just be present and be real and communicate with your audience. It’s about connecting at a human level, and then having a conversation through laughter. What I love about clowning is that connection with an audience. And a conversation through laughter and shared surprise is really fun and exciting to me.

MW: At what age did that come to you? I mean, a lot of people, at younger ages or even grownups are afraid of clowns, I guess you never experienced coulrophobia or anything like that?

JIMBO: No, I love clowns, and I love the creepiness of clowns. I love anything that has an intention of being fun or beautiful, or anything that has that vibe that it should be happy and good, and through the painting or through whatever happens, it goes creepy by accident. There’s something really funny to me about that.

I love that old clown nostalgia that these paintings were hung in people’s homes, and I think many of us had friends or grandparents who had a weird clown painting in their basement and on a wall from the ’70s or whatever. Clowning is an ancient tradition. There were clowns all through history and they’re just a part of society. They allow us to poke fun at social norms and gender norms and political things happening in the world. Clowns really allow us to look at ourselves and laugh.

MW: I want to ask you about Drag Race, in general, and specifically All Stars 8. You had competed twice before, so you know what it is to compete and not win, but you came in and you were not only a front-runner for All Stars 8, you really killed it. Going into it, what was your plan of how to do it differently than you’d done it before?

JIMBO: Well, I’m a perfectionist, I love one-upping myself. I’m a workhorse, I love working. And so each time I went in with what I thought was the winning package in my own mind. I really thought, “Okay, this is it. I’m going to win.” Even on Canada’s Drag Race, I was an unknown queen who was really just flying by the seat of my pants. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was so confident and delusional.

That’s the beauty of drag, a key part of it is that delusion. I was able to just keep going and keep perfecting my craft. And also, I was able to tour around the world and get all kinds of love and support after each one of those shows. That was really instrumental, as a clown, that audience response, and knowing that you’re doing something that people want to see and is encouraging people.

It started out as something really fun for me as an outlet and as an artist, and has become something that inspires people. People thank me for being my authentic self. It allows them to be a little bit weirder and more authentic themselves. I’m so grateful to have an art form and a platform that makes change, as well as makes people laugh. I love working, and I love making money, and I love reinvesting that money into my drag, so that’s basically what I did — each time I competed and I did Drag Race, I took every last resource, connection, thing that I had available, and I put it into my art, into my package. And each time it snowballed and grew until I won.

MW: I think part of your success on the show was, I felt, that you always knew exactly what concepts you were going for in terms of a look or character. Did it feel that way for you? Did you always feel certain of the concept you were presenting?

JIMBO: Well, as a costume designer, especially for film and theater, my job was to create a package and to communicate that package and then execute it with sewers, designers, and to source the materials. Each time I did that, I learned how to do it even better. I was grateful to have that background, that my job was literally to conceive of whole packages of shows for usually a cast or an ensemble of people.

In this case, I was the entire cast in those ways where when you look at a whole package, I want to present all different facets of myself. One of the things about preparing to be on Drag Race I love the most is, “What am I going to prepare? How am I going to present myself? And who am I going to collaborate with in order to make that happen?”

With Drag Race All Stars 8, I was able to collaborate with designers around the world because I was able to afford it and had met all those connections by being an international queen from UK vs. the World. It was a combination of everything I had worked for up until then.

MW: Where did you come up with Shirley Temple for Snatch Game of Love?

JIMBO: Well, Shirley Temple I came up with right before. I was thinking, I love the idea of a child star that never really lets go of that stardom. They get locked in a way that the world knows them, and so they become a little forever child.

MW: Baby Jane.

JIMBO: Yeah, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane — that was a big influence on me as well. That was a character I wanted to do as well. But there’s something tragic and funny about it. There’s also, the thing I love about character work is being really in your body, physicality, and what sounds do they make? I know that children are precocious, and they go through all different emotions, they switch through emotions quickly, and they say whatever they want, and so that lends perfectly to an improv performance where you don’t want to get stuck in any one way. You need to be thinking and reacting quite quickly. Having a point of view with a strong physicality and a way to make funny faces, that was why I chose that character.

MW: Did you have a second choice? Did you have a plan B?

JIMBO: I did not, no. I had a leather jacket and a wig, where I could have been maybe some kind of bad Danny DeVito, but that would’ve been one of those Snatch Games which ends up being nothing like who you’re trying to be, I think, if I had attempted that. [Laughs.]

MW: Now, on the element of surprise, you talked about watching the show back. That experience, what is it like? Because I’ve interviewed a bunch of Drag Race queens, but it’s generally during the run of the show. You’re one of the first times I’m talking to somebody who’s presumably seen their entire season. Were you surprised by anything that you saw that you might not have known happened, or any conversations that you hadn’t been party to and it’s like, “Oh, really?”

JIMBO: Oh, yeah, lots. That’s part of those confessionals. You get to see what someone was really thinking about you or the scenario, and you also get more information about what was happening for somebody or other sides of a story, or you see things that you didn’t even know were happening.

Yeah, watching the show back, I didn’t realize that they had a whole other alliance outside of my alliance with Kandy and Heidi, so that was fun and funny to watch and be like, “Hey, you guys had a whole other alliance, you never even told me about it.”

But also, when you’re there, you don’t really remember a lot of stuff, it’s all happening so fast. Every day you’re filming, and you’re doing this, that, and the other, and then you’re moving on. You’re doing a lot. So when I leave there, I have a hard time remembering what the hell happened and what order and who said what and everything.

When I watch it back with everybody at the watch parties, it’s so fun and exciting because there are things, obviously, you remember being there and doing, but it’s always, you don’t really picture it from that lens. You picture it through your own eyes, obviously, so it’s always so funny to watch the faces and to watch how it all looks when it’s all edited. You always think it’s this one funny thing or that, and then you end up watching the show and that part that you thought was so funny doesn’t even make it in there, and it’s some other thing that you didn’t even really know happened. So yeah, I think that’s the magic of it.

MW: And while it’s airing, are there a flurry of DMs and texts and calls going back and forth between the contestants like, “Okay, girl, be prepared for this on this episode?”

JIMBO: Yeah, I think there’s a bit of that happening. A lot of it happens in the filming period, which is prior to the airing time. In that timeframe, a lot of us deal with whatever had happened in that filming period. And then in the airing period, you revisit all of that stuff, and then the fans add their point of view. It can be intense, it can stir things back up again.

The [group] chat is helpful for that, for people to be able to communicate and go, “Hey, this felt this kind of way,” or, “Oh, I didn’t really realize you thought that or felt that way.” I think that it’s important for everyone to be able to deal with things. It’s intense. Everyone’s putting themselves out there, and they’re all wanting to win, and they want love, and they want acceptance. The fan base is so wild and can get quite intense, and that can make for a really intense time where people really need friends and sisters to talk about the experience.

MW: I think we saw a good example on this current season, which I’m watching. Are you watching the current season?

JIMBO: Yeah, a little bit here and there. I was just, like I said, in the Caribbean and I wasn’t able to watch on the boat.

MW: When Mirage was eliminated and broke down onstage, I think that really touched a lot of viewers and other contestants. When you talk about how exposed you are on a show like that, and that level of emotion and just knowing all the hard work that people put into it, and that it feels like it comes down to just one moment, or a handful of moments, which seems really stressful.

JIMBO: Yeah, it’s high stakes. You can be on top and you can be winning the competition or the episode, and then the next one, you’re in the bottom and you’re out the door and it’s over. So the double-edged sword of being on a competition reality show is you can go any minute, and you got to show your best, and you got to shine your brightest, and you gotta put it all out there every single episode, because you literally never know when you’re going to go. That makes for great TV, and it makes us root for the queens.

Part of my success was having my story end so abruptly on UK vs. the World, and being the underdog on Canada’s Drag Race. People connect with that, people invest in those stories, and that really helped me with having a fan base, and having people root for me was instrumental in my career. So I imagine it will be the same for Mirage. I’m sure she’s going to go out into the world and just get showered in so much love and encouragement and support, which will help her lift and raise herself as well.

MW: You also had a fantastic exit on Canada’s Drag Race, really a great exit. [When eliminated, JIMBO collapsed to her knees, wailing “Whhyyyyy!” Then she crawled off the main stage. It was fabulous.]

JIMBO: Use every minute, you really got to use those minutes of the TV and the camera and make a moment.

MW: Moving on to JIMBO’s Drag Circus. Other than yourself, who is House of JIMBO?

JIMBO: My partner Brady and I are House of JIMBO, and basically we work here in Victoria, and we make merch. And I also work with a whole team of other people, photographers and artists like CatDirty, and my clown teacher, Britt Small, and my music collaborator, Andrew Fields, and my brothers, Jeff and Elliot, and my sister Rebecca, my whole family really supporting and being involved. So House of JIMBO is me, it’s my partner, it’s a community, it’s my brand. It’s shifting and changing all the time.

MW: Did you and your partner meet as artists on some kind of project or something?

JIMBO: Yeah, I used to throw parties and events here in my studio. He came to a New Year’s party, and it was love at first sight.

MW: That’s nice. Actually, looking at your studio, who is the head back there? Who is that? Or what is that?

JIMBO: Which one? The painting?

MW: No, is that a mannequin head or something?

JIMBO: Oh, probably. Oh, there’s my head, maybe my head from All Stars. That was my RuVeal Yourself look. My head is over there.

MW: Oh, wow. Oh, yes. The back of your two-sided person.

JIMBO: Yeah, exactly. That’s maybe what that is. But I also collect mannequins, so there’s a lot of them around here.

MW: I would love somebody to do a documentary on drag queen closets, because they’re fascinating. There’s so much history in them.

JIMBO: There is. This is just half my studio — this is the clean, bright, nice side. On the other side is the chaos costume factory. There are three sewers over there working right now, actually, designing my looks for the tour.

MW: We talked earlier about creepy drag. Your Casper the Bologna Ghost is certifiably creepy, as far as I’m concerned. I guess there should be more scary drag. Are you big into horror drag?

JIMBO: There’s a whole show called Dragula. Have you ever heard of Dragula?

MW: Yeah.

JIMBO: Dragula is a competition all based around horror drag, and I definitely love dark drag. As a clown, it’s about all the feels, it’s about the lights, it’s about the dark, it’s all about the happiness and the scariness. My Casper the Bologna Ghost is a clown and it’s a style of clowning called bouffon clowning, which is all about distorted shapes. As a clown, I like all the feelings. I like taking my audience on a journey. I like people to feel excited. I like people to laugh. I want people to feel a little bit freaked out. You want the full experience, you want all the feels. That’s what I like about drag is that as a drag performer, I have the ability to go in any direction, and at any time of the year. You don’t have to wait for Halloween to be spooky. You can get spooky and creepy and kooky whenever you want.

MW: Maybe there’s a spooky answer to this and I missed it. How did the bologna get in there?

JIMBO: I was part of an improv troupe called Atomic Vaudeville, which is improv comedy and sketch comedy, and they invited me to play a Casper-like character in a spoof of Scooby-Doo, and so that was my version of Casper. I love props, and I love prop work. I think there’s something so bizarre about bologna, it’s this crossover food that’s a meat as well as an item. So there’s something funny about it. And I was taught not to play with my food, but as a clown, you do what you want, and maybe not always what you’re told. And so there’s something irreverent and fun about throwing food and playing with food. And also, bologna is a universal food. I’ve traveled around the world and I found bologna in 23 different countries around the world, thrown it here, there, and everywhere.

MW: I guess everybody finds bologna funny for some reason. I don’t know why.

JIMBO: It’s one of those meats that you either love it or you hate it, or you love to hate it. It’s just a weird processed food that’s also so shiny and soft and perfect.

MW: Another aspect of people’s responses to drag, whether it’s horror drag or regular drag, are the people who are just against drag performance and drag artists in general. Have you encountered, especially as you become more and more international, many of the anti-drag fearmongers, and how do you deal with that?

JIMBO: Yeah. Two Christmases ago, there was a lot of media hype around the fear of drag, and there was definitely a backlash that was felt in the industry, but it was also something that’s fleeting. This past year we went out into all the same places, and there were no protestors there. It really was a product of fearmongering and social media and news media outlets sensationalizing a fictional narrative that just was not happening.

Drag is not a crime, it’s not something bad. It’s about self-expression, and it’s about joy and entertaining people. I think it was made into something it’s not, and used to cause fear in people. Drag is all about performance, laughter, community, expression. It’s also from a queer community where queer people are used to being persecuted, put out of visibility.

We’ve had to really fight to be visible and have spaces and have queer spaces, and to live healthy, normal lives. I think that it’s something that we’re used to as drag queens and as artists and people that are pushing boundaries and changing social norms — that’s the root of drag. It’s a punk rock art form, it’s all about making change and going against social norms.

I think what we’ve done is just continue to be visible, continue to be proud of who we are as queer performers, and continue to inspire people and show them that drag is about fun, joy, and love and not anything to be fearful of.

MW: On the subject of queerness and on the queer spectrum, JIMBO, who famously rocks really big tits from time to time and a really girly figure, what concept of gender does JIMBO represent? For example, what pronouns does JIMBO use?

JIMBO: Well, I go by he out of drag, and I go by she when I’m in drag. I guess I just love being who I am, and expressing myself and having a good time. So that’s what I look like when I do that. I grew up in the ’80s and through the ’90s, and people like Pamela Anderson, Dolly Parton, Joan Rivers are certainly inspirations. That idea of glamour and big hair and nails and big breasts was something that my mom loved. My mom in the ’80s was all about fur coats and diamond rings and big hair and being fabulous and beautiful. That was a big inspiration of mine, being fabulous and sparkly and beautiful and having a fun time, so that’s what I like to do.

MW: Did you grow up in rural Canada, suburbs, city?

JIMBO: I grew up in a city, London, Ontario, and it was a very conservative place. I didn’t really do drag in London. I did drag when I moved out west here to an artistic community.

MW: I guess the last question then, for you, the House of JIMBO, and your artistic community is, what do you envision next beyond this tour?

JIMBO: Well, this tour is my first attempt at a full-scale one-queen show, so my dream is to keep doing this and to keep performing on bigger scales and bigger levels with bigger productions and bigger casts, and to tell stories and transport audiences and to make people laugh, and that’s what I’m going to keep doing. I love making music. I love making costumes. I love making my merch, and having my own brand and line. I’d love to keep making clothing, I’d love to make more music, I’d love to have my own TV show, I’d love to make movies and just keep being an artist, doing what I’m doing.

JIMBO’s Drag Circus comes to D.C. on Friday, March 9, at the Warner Theatre, 513 13th St. NW. Tickets are $35 to $129 premium and $199 VIP seats that also include a Meet & Greet with JIMBO on the main stage before the show.

The tour continues to nearly 50 other stops including Durham, NC (3/10), Orlando (3/15), Atlanta (3/16), Houston (3/20), Los Angeles (3/29), San Francisco (3/30), Tulsa (4/07), Toronto (5/18), Montreal (5/19), and JIMBO’s homebase of Victoria, BC (6/12). For a full schedule, tickets and info, visit www.dragfans.com.

Follow JIMBO on Instagram at @jimbothedragclown and visit www.houseofjimbo.com.