Pics or it didn’t hap-yeeaaaaahh-fuckinchrist!
I’m pretty sure that’s Bozo the Clown, not your average everyday birthday clown. Perhaps it’s even Willard Scott under the paint.
… And now I’m suddenly imagining Pennywise the Dancing Clown gleefully humming “The Summer of '69” as he slaughters someone.
Willard Scott under the paint in 1969 would explain a lot of the clown/zombie crossover.
That’s Vance Colvig, the Bozo in the TV market in LA and not Willard Scott who was much younger and played in the Washington DC market.
Also note that Photoshop was derived from a photo that looks more than a decade earlier than “1969” since only the Californian Bozo, Colvig, carried a cowboy revolver—the gun was dropped in the early 1960s.
Why would a clown bother with a gun when he can deploy psychic weapons that make mere hot lead look like spitballs thrown overhand by a nearsighted wimp?
I didn’t realise that Boing Boing was struggling for content to the extent that it needed to post terrible photoshops from /r/creepy that were noted as fake almost immediately.
Good catch. Here’s the [undated original photo][1], from [this page][2] about Corriganville Movie Ranch. [Wikipedia][3] tells me that Vance Colvig, Jr. played Bozo from 1959 to 1964.
[1]: http://movielocationsplus.com/corrigan/bozo.jpg
 [2]: http://movielocationsplus.com/corrigan/celebs.htm
 [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Colvig
it suggests some kind of profound aesthetic/cognitive shift in human perception in a scant 45 years.
Oh hell yeah… We’ve seen it in just the last 15 years. Changes in societal attitudes, such that one sensibility looks completely alien from our eyes, or we project current sensibility (incorrectly) onto a past time …
Just look at how people track ideas and values seen in movies barely 10, 20, 30 years old. They freak out at something that was completely innocuous back then.
Paradigm shifts are happening all the time.
Feels shopped.
I think he’s cute.
Or she. Might be a she-clown.
I don’t get the whole “clowns are creepy/scary” thing. My only response to clowns, as a child, was in the “um, ok” range. Though, the clown car shtick was entertaining.
As an adult, they seem like an interesting variant on the tradition of fools and jesters.
I instantly knew that it was 'shopped. Thanks for finding the original.
If by “profound shift” you mean the introduction of Photoshop, then yes, that is exactly what this suggests.
Can’t sleep. Clown will eat me.
Kudos go to taro3yen for recognizing Vance Colvig. Having a name to search for made all the difference.
The “profound aesthetic/cognitive shift in human perception” must include accepting an obviously, patently unreal photo as a plausible document of the past.
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