“He’s got clown stabbers!” Hartt shrieks, ducking behind the barrel.

The crowd hoots and catcalls, unconcerned.

It’s another night on the job for rodeo clown Hartt, whose professional moniker, “Colt .45,” is splashed across his spangled and fringed outfit. His I-just-walked-in-here nonchalance in the arena belies the decade-long grind that’s gained him industry accolades, and now he’s poised to take his clowning career as far as American rodeo will allow.

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

A start in rodeo

Hartt, 41, grew up in Hoboken, a town of 480 people just east of Waycross, where he and his cousins learned to ride and rope. He began competing in junior rodeos in South Georgia and North Florida around age 9. But when he fell off a steer in a peewee version of bull riding, his mother, school teacher Beth Ann Thomas, drew the line.

“When he came off, he fell up under the steer … we had to do a rush to the hospital — ambulance — all of that,” she recalled. “That’s when I told him that until he could afford his own insurance, he wasn’t going to be riding steers anymore.”

Thomas and Hartt’s stepfather, John Thomas, encouraged Hartt to pursue team roping instead, and he displayed a prodigious talent. The problem was, as his mother remembers it, he had trouble committing to it.

Despite four trips to the prestigious National High School Rodeo Finals, Hartt waffled on team roping and almost declined the full-ride rodeo scholarship he got to Southern Arkansas University, Thomas said. He did go, but it was a short ride: Hartt lost the scholarship when his grades slipped. He enlisted in the Navy at 21, landing on the nuclear-powered USS George Washington (CVN 73). As an aviation boatswain’s mate, he sent purified fuel to jets on the carrier.

Thomas hoped her boy would settle into a career in the Navy and retire with benefits. But when he came out after four years, she and her husband encouraged Hartt to get a steady job and make rodeo “a separate thing on the weekends.”

Hartt tried. Work at a manufacturing facility followed a two-year associate’s degree and a machine tool diploma, but he chafed at the constraints of a life he knew wasn’t for him.

Credit: Christine Hoesl

Credit: Christine Hoesl

Bull savvy

Without a financial backer, Hartt couldn’t compete with his team roping friends.

His mind turned to clowning as it had many times before. The magnetism of these rodeo performers had followed him from the time he was a young child. He remembered making a beeline for the clowns at the rodeos his family had attended, and he’d dreamed of clowning on the Navy carrier.

“He’s the star of that show. He’s admirable. He’s brave, but he’s silly and crazy. He can dance. He’s that guy — he’s the party animal tough guy out there,” Hartt said. “He’s the superhero in big pants.”

There are no formal requirements for the job, but Hartt wasn’t ready to dive right in. He knew clowns sometimes did double duty as bullfighters, the person who distracts the bull as the first line of defense when cowboys fell or jumped off during the bull riding event.

For four years, Hartt demonstrated his grit and earned the respect of his rodeo contemporaries by learning to distract hyped-up bulls as a bullfighter. He also attended a specialized clinic that taught him skills he still uses today.

“It should be called bull dancing instead of bullfighting,” he said. “Because the only one getting hurt is you … You really want to dance away clean and just make sure that you shoot the spot between you and the bull rider, and you pull that bull’s attention.”

His mother was disquieted over this choice.

“The bullfighting I did not like. It’s dangerous. He took small hits along the way,” she said. “I think he realized how risky that was.”

Early in the bullfighting leg of his career, Hartt met a young barrel racer named Taylor Thornton at a rodeo. The two bonded on a midnight Waffle House run, and a year later they were engaged with a baby on the way. A couple of years and many rodeos later, a bull hurled Hartt into a fence, signaling that his days as a bullfighter were numbered.

“I had blood running down my face … I saw my little girl’s and my wife’s faces. It just sucked the color out of them,” he said.

It was soon after that he got serious about clowning.

Credit: Courtesy of Colt Hartt

Credit: Courtesy of Colt Hartt

Rodeo basics

Rodeo athletes compete in association circuits, many of which run year-round. Events like barrel racing, team roping, breakaway roping and bull riding bring in weekend warriors chasing prize money alongside professionals vying for sponsorships. Associations range in size and prestige from regional to national and international. Rodeos in Georgia often take place in rural map dots or bigger small towns like Rome and Carrollton. Venues range from temporary, rough-plowed arenas to covered facilities that can seat thousands.

Unlike the athletes, clowns, announcers and judges work for rodeo contractors that produce the events, and they’re guaranteed a paycheck, which means clowning can be a steady living. Performers just starting out with gigs at junior and high school rodeo events might pull in $500 a night, while their more seasoned counterparts at much bigger organizations might bring in a couple thousand over a weekend.

Hartt’s main responsibility is to engage a crowd on and off over the course of a rodeo. At any given time, he might be throwing T-shirts into the stands or standing on top of his barrel cracking one-liners into a microphone or horsing around to snatches of hip-hop or country he’s chosen for the rodeo staff to play. And there’s a slot just for him at the mid-point of a rodeo where he presents a pre-rehearsed act impersonating characters like a rodeo queen or geriatric grandmother. It’s been a fitting outlet for a self-described “class clown.”

During the bull riding event, clowns are positioned toward the middle of the arena. It’s farther away from the bucking chutes Hartt once manned up close as a bullfighter, but he sometimes still has to duck inside his padded barrel to protect himself from a charging bull. Even then, he’s vulnerable; a bull horn grazed his head recently. Another time, he broke his wrist.

Rodeo announcer Jaime Osbrink, who frequently works alongside Hartt, has seen his friend grind through extremes: Working with the broken wrist, keeping his energy up in mud, torrential downpours and wind. Hartt’s irrepressible zeal is there regardless, Osbrink said.

“It’s always like that,” he said, “It’s a purity that resonates back, and I think his last name is perfect. He’s got the biggest heart that I know of anybody.”

Credit: Courtesy of Colt Hartt

Credit: Courtesy of Colt Hartt

Grinding through

A decade into clowning, Hartt works 40 to 50 rodeos a year, employing his trademark one-liners, sarcasm and G-rated comedy. Rodeo announcers are a frequent target — they’re the emcees of these events and the only other people with a microphone besides the clowns, so the repartee goes both ways. The spotlight might find Hartt easing over the arena fencing, lightly harassing the announcer or bantering with the crowd, white face paint and red clown nose in place. His outfits are over the top: star-spangled blazers, loud suspenders, oversized black spectacles, maybe a wig. During his act mid-rodeo, his tiny Appaloosa gelding, Magic Mike, sometimes joins him for different bits.

In the early days, his jobs were contained to the Southeast, but he’s branched out now to events in more far-flung places: New York, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico. Hartt writes all his own material, and he makes sure to switch acts out when he revisits venues. He’s always working on new material, often popping his laptop open as he’s traveling between gigs so he can test out music and put together audio programs to hand to rodeo organizers where he’s performing. He also designs his own outfits — checkers for an event in NASCAR mecca Talladega; shamrocks for a St. Patrick’s Day event; and red, white and blue as a nod to his veteran status.

“It’s all the time. You’ve just got a clown mentality,” he said of the creative process.

A big part of Hartt’s success can be attributed to his wife, Thornton, 30. Now a mother to two daughters, ages 7 and 10, she is in charge of a lot of the logistics, and her commitment matches Hartt’s.

“I drive us everywhere,” she said. “I make sure that he’s got everything that he needs as far as outfits (and that) his microphone’s still good.”

The couple typically leaves their home in Patterson on Thursday afternoons after they drop their daughters with Thornton’s mother, who lives next door. But lately, the girls have been joining them on the road and have even started participating in their dad’s acts.

They travel with Magic Mike in a horse trailer that has living quarters including space for them to sleep, shower and prepare food. During Hartt’s performances Thornton helps with things like taking Mike back to the trailer after skits.

Although she acknowledges the relative safety of clowning, Hartt’s mother still hates seeing him take hits in the arena. She realizes her son is doing something he loves, though, and she believes his ambition to climb to the top ranks in rodeo is doable. The only challenge she sees is balancing family with a job that can be all-encompassing. Her only real regret is that she didn’t know about Hartt’s love of clowning sooner.

“He’s been determined to do it despite getting a late start,” she said. “We would’ve spent the money on him getting started earlier, but it just took a while to figure out.”

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

Reaching for the top

Despite the physicality of rodeo clowning, there’s not an established shelf life for rodeo clowns, and Hartt doesn’t plan to set it down anytime soon. He cited one of his idols, rodeo legend Lecile Harris, who worked into his 80s.

He does want to build on his event promotion and production skillset, though. A bull-riding event he puts on in Patterson is gaining traction now with proceeds benefitting St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.

But right now, Hartt is focused on taking his clowning skills to bigger rodeo associations while still maintaining ties with the smaller ones that have helped build his career. He clowns lots of International Professional Rodeo Association events, and he holds certifications with several other organizations. He’s working toward one with the prestigious Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. Its 10-day National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas in December is a glittering affair for the most elite Western competitors, and Hartt has the clowning position in his sights.

“I don’t know if every clown thinks it’s really reachable,” he said. “I kind of feel like it’s reachable for me.”

He’s done some televised bookings, and he wouldn’t mind more. He worked the Ultimate Bullfighting World Finals in Fort Worth, Texas, last year, and his fellow IBRA members voted him into the top five clowns for that organization four years running.

Osbrink thinks it’s a matter of time before Hartt’s in the stratosphere.

“I think when they find him on the other side of the Mississippi, his journey is going to explode to a whole other level,” he said. “He’s starting to get those calls … Honestly, he is that good.”

It’s a far cry from the days when Hartt was getting his first taste of the spotlight at a friend’s event, dressed in a homemade outfit and clutching a borrowed microphone.

Now he’s working events like the recent WildThing Championship Bullriding in Gallup, New Mexico, that he estimates brought 10,000 audience members to the stands. Describing the experience, he said, “I flew out there. Clowned it, killed it, crushed it.”

And he left with an invitation to return next year and the promise of a “bad to the bone” turquoise-studded belt buckle.

“You know you’re doing good,” he said, “when they call you back.”

RODEO EVENT

Flat Shoals Bull Riding. With Colt Hartt. Gates open 6 p.m., competition starts at 8 p.m. Nov. 24-25. Rain or shine. $20 cash only. QC Arena, 1017 Flat Shoals Road, Gay. facebook.com/profile.php?id=100089465533694