I have to admit that, while I’d seen Bill Irwin here and there, I didn’t know him by name until I started watching “Elmo’s World” with my son.
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Interesting fact (not really surprising for me though):
100% of children 4-16 taking part in a study on hospital comfort from Sheffield University say they hate or fear clowns.
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It truly is a bad spot to be in for clowns. I do admit I have a strong dislike of clowns; it has to do with behaviours more than their appearance (and not all clowns do that): I really feel uncomfortable when they are very loud/crazed and insist on dragging you into the interaction. For instance, I love Cirque du Soleil but many of their shows involve a segment where the clowns go into the crowd to tease people. Ever since I was a child, that part of the show made me want to crawl under my seat with dread.
However, I know it’s because I am intensly introverted and over-sensitive to stimuli like touch and noise, so I’m really incompatible with that type of entertainment. I accept that it’s not the clown’s fault.
That said, I love clowns who are more gentle or diminutive in their style, like the typical ‘sad clown’ or Pierrot. Their makeup is usually less garish, their delivery less aggressive and they seem to have more developed character and ‘inner lives’ that one can relate to and feel sympathy for. For instance, there is this popular clown in French Canadian culture called Sol who is a shy, awkward hobo-type clown who makes very funny monologues with word-play. I really enjoy his style. Those clowns seem to be a lot more rare than their boisterous counterpart.
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It’s only a “joke” because people actually feel that way but are embarrassed to admit it, though. Clowns are creepy, and people have always felt ambivalent about them.
Talk about damning with faint praise. The anthrax bacterium does more to “make the world a better place” than the average 100 Youtube posters combined.
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And meanwhile, Trixie Mattel was one of the fan favorites on this season of Rupaul’s Drag Race. Culture is a fickle thing.
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Yea yea yea, we’re all terrified of clowns and terrified of evangelists and terrified of Republicans and live in a state of constant fear and I’m sure none of it is hyperbole.
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Fucking magnets, how do they work?
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Every time someone tells me they dislike clowns I feel sad for the joy that, from my perspective, they’re missing. And I think of a song I hope to have played at my funeral.
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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.
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I don’t see a lot of hyperbole there. “Terrifying” is really just shorthand for “creepy as fuck.”
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I agree completely. I hate it when utterly unoriginal, banal people say “Clowns are scary and creepy!!” when really what they’re trying to say is “I’m actually not an unoriginal, banal person” even though they just uncritically repeated what everyone else says. I have a very sweet picture of my then-4-year-old son and his neighborhood friend at the circus, delighted by a clown who was entertaining them.
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You forgot the ventriloquists.
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Previously:
Yeah, I just quoted myself. Here’s some happy circus music to go along with this post.
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Fun Fact: The original Pierrot killed a homeless child.
From Wikipedia:
One day in 1836, as he was out strolling with his family, he was taunted as a “Pierrot” by a street-boy, with ugly consequences: the boy died from one blow of his heavy cane.
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Welp. I guess you’re never really safe with clowns.
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Holy shit, that’s real? I know the concept from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (Men at Arms in particular), but I never knew that was a real thing. Huh.
