If I had dedicated my life to something that most people found scary I’d do everything I could to rationalize that the problem lies in my audience and not with me.
It’s easy to blame cynical adults for ruining clowns, but I think that is a simplistic dismissal of the growing distaste for clowns.
I suspect it’s got a lot more to do with all the scary clown tropes that have popped up since the 80s: John Wayne Gacy’s alter ego Pogo the clown, Stephen King’s IT, Violator (the villain from the Spawn comics), the Joker in Batman, the Insane Clown Posse.
Not to mention the fairly dark origins of modern clowning. Arguably the founders of the modern clown tradition are Joseph Grimaldi and John Gaspard Debaru. Both of these men lived very tragic, brutal lives. Grimaldi was born to an abusive alcoholic father, lost his wife to child birth, and his son to alcoholism and himself died as a penniless alcoholic. Debaru actually killed a boy who insulted him in the street. So literally one of the father’s of modern clowning was a child killer.
I think clowning has a bad reputation that it has earned one tragic clown related incident at a time. There are plenty of genuine reasons behind the fear and hatred of clowns.
