This “No makeup” trope has also gone too far, that is obviously just subtle makeup done to look like his natural face. It’s actually a lot harder to do!
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If they were safe, they wouldn’t be funny.
Then they came for the ventriloquists,
but I did not speak out because nobody really likes ventriloquists anyway.
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I think it’s less the “clown” than the traditional clown makeup that freaks everybody out. Charlie Chaplin, the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, Peter Sellers etc. were all clowns in every meaningful sense of the word.
Not sure who that would leave as a contemporary example though. Sasha Baron Cohen maybe?
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While the clowns are scary trope is kind of a lazy and dismissive way to look at clowning it does have a legit basis. Clowns are (some what purposefully) disconcerting. And a don’t think that’s helped by certain aspects of traditional clowning. The makeup and costuming were intended for traditional theater and circus set ups where they had to visually get the performance across over distance. Which just does not work now that it’s more often a close up, intimate experience. But more than that I think there’s a lot of staid classic clowning bits and skills. So it becomes easier for less talented, or talented but less creative performers to just rely on stock performances . I’d be willing to bet very few people these days have ever watched a talented clown perform in person. All that just highlights the base creepyness. It becomes disconcerting to children especially, and children who’ve had a bad clown experience grow up to fear clowns or be lazily dismissive of them.
I’ve a friend whose a sometime professional clown. He combats the whole thing by being a deliberately creepy and/or darkly tragic clown. But then he mostly does sketch comedy and dramatic theater. When he does perform as a more traditional clown he uses minimal make up and subdued costuming inspired by 80s hack comedians. He usually works with at least one non-clown partner and works in a lot of non- clown skills, performers in etc.
Teller is another example of this most of his persona and performance style Is derived from clown and mime. He works with a partner who speaks for him. And the creepy aspects of the trope is either played for laughs or invisible because it’s in service of something more complex or ambitious.
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Recently, bare-faced at an 11-year-old girl’s birthday party, he teased her about her “boyfriend” — boilerplate Boswick shtick — and then apologized for not checking to see whether her Facebook page listed her relationship status as “It’s complicated.” “The dad’s like, ‘Hey,’ ” Boswick said. “I’m like, Oh, yeah, this joke is coming off weird, oh, wow … With the makeup, half my show is Harpo Marx stuff, chasing grandmothers around and flirting and making jokes. The other day, doing those jokes without makeup, I was half-creepy. A friend of mine said recently, ‘Maybe you’re being lazy with the comedy.’ I said, ‘No, I just feel so much more free with makeup.’
Or maybe his friend is right and it is creepy, lazy comedy.
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I don’t trust anyone who wears a mask.
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We did an informal survey once on a now-long-vanished social network, and concluded that almost every adult who found clowns scary had seen Walt Disney’s Dumbo at a young and impressionable age - indeed, for a couple of them, it was the very first movie they ever saw.
The clowns in Dumbo are pretty scary.
One of them recounted the vivid, almost psychedelic memory of being dragged to the theater by his parents at a tender age, knowing virtually nothing at all about movies or cartoons or animation or anything beforehand
Clowns don’t frighten me, but I didn’t see Dumbo until I was an adult.
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An excellent radio series with this recurring theme was Nebulous.
Professor Nebulous is a world-famous scientist, but becomes incapacitated by horrible memories when his fear of clowns is activated. His parents were both clowns, and have been let down by his aversion to clowning and life of science.
Clowns don’t bother me. People who are really, really into clowns . . . they bother me. (Same as with most people who are really into one thing to the exclusion of all else)
Anyway, Puddles is best clown.
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I’d add this guy to your list:
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