Woe be to the audience member who attempts to take a flash photograph from the front row of a David Shiner show. When that happened in the opening minutes of clown master Shiner's CSU Summer Arts performance at Fresno State on Saturday, the temptation to impose public humiliation on the offender was just too great to pass up. Shiner, a lanky fellow with an almost liquid flow to his stage movements and a razor-sharp ability to convey exaggerated emotions with a few wrinkles of his expressive face, was immediately all over the guy: rolling his eyes in mock outrage, miming a machine gun, taking an imaginary camera and stomping it into the ground, even dropping to all fours and doing his "doggie duty" on the offending device.

It was very funny stuff. Especially because -- and I'm sure every audience member was thinking the same thing -- it wasn't me.

Clowns terrify some people. After watching Shiner's smooth and expertly paced show at a packed John Wright Theatre, I'm thinking that at least some of that childhood terror comes from a fear of being plucked from the audience.

Think about it: The audience-performer relationship is usually an iron-clad contract. You sit there and watch quietly, and the performer does all the work. You're allowed to enter the world being created up there on stage, but only as an observer. If you're the reserved kind, you have no worries about suddenly being swept into the spotlight.

But clowns are famous for audience participation. Every time the house lights went up as Shiner ventured into the audience, you could feel the tension level perk up. No one was sleeping in this crowd, that's for sure.

Shiner brings an amazing resume to Summer Arts. Besides years of professional clowning -- including a stint on the big-league streets of Paris -- he toured with major European circuses. Then he hit it big with Cirque du Soleil. (In fact, he just directed the new production of "KOOZA.") Along the way he found time to become a Broadway star as well, partnering with Bill Irwin in "Full Moon" and originating the role of the Cat in the Hat in "Seussical."

On Saturday he was joined by two colleagues: Summer Arts pianist and international performer Guy Livingston, who tinkled out a delightful stream of tunes, and City College percussion instructor Joe Lizama, who played the straight man role with ease.

Shiner performed a series of sketches that included the obligatory "magic trick" of pulling a stuffed rabbit out of a hat. (Then he choked it, barbecued it and ate it.) He demonstrated some wonderful moments of mime. (My favorite was a routine with an open umbrella that really made you think for a moment that he was about to swept away by the wind.) He welcomed a guest performer, Stefan Haves, who did an amazing little bit of contortion in which his lower back became a "face," complete with two inked-on eyes.

But most of all, Shiner grabbed people from the audience and turned them into stars. It's interesting that in a question-and-answer session following the show, Shiner talked about how empathetic he is. You really have to like people and understand them to be a good clown, he said. Yet he doesn't really come across as very warm on stage. There's a hint of menace underneath, which is probably one of the requirements for being a good clown. If you're too much of a chump, you can't take command of a performance. This is a guy who got beat up in Paris for trying to break in to someone else's territory (a bad German magician, he recalls) and isn't afraid of a good scrap.

In the last elaborate audience-participation bit in the show, Shiner plucked four people from the audience for a routine called "Cinema." One of those who got picked was none other than the amiable Joe Diaz, associate dean of Fresno State's College of Arts and Humanities, who got into his assigned role as a silent film clapper with such good-natured enthusiasm -- shimmying across the stage, wagging his fingers in all the right ways, pretending to spit on the floor -- that I wouldn't be surprised if we found him in a cameo role someday for the theater department.

The vast majority of folks who get picked for his audience-participation bits love it, Shiner told the audience afterward, and it certainly seemed that way with the Fresno State show. The laughter and applause was as raucous as I've ever heard it in the John Wright Theatre. And what made everything absolutely perfect was that I didn't get picked.