Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I don’t know exactly when clowns crossed the line from funny to creepy, but I fear that the rate of devolution has accelerated during my lifetime and with the generation after mine.
To test my theory, I recently did an informal survey gauging how friends and family reacted to the word “clown.” Many negative reactions came from the younger folks, but there were plenty from my generation too.
I don’t remember it being that way in the past. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, our local Utah newspapers told positive stories about clowns named Josco or Koko or Ruffles visiting a hospital or a school to cheer up little children.
Other stories celebrated National Clown Week early each August. In 1971 one such newspaper writer even noted, “Everybody loves the funny fellow with the big red nose and a pair of size 42 shoes that never seems to quit.”
I did not see any stories about scary or creepy clowns until about 1978, when Illinois police arrested John Gacy for murdering 33 young men and boys. Gacy sometimes gained the trust of his victims by using his falsely-benign reputation as an entertainer called Pogo the clown.
Things got worse for clowns in 1986, when Stephen King published the bestselling novel It. The book—later made into movies and a TV miniseries—tells about a murderous dancing clown named Pennywise who terrorizes young people from inside a sewer drain.
American clown paranoia arguably hit a peak in 2016 when there were alleged sightings of killer or criminal clowns in a half dozen states. It turns out that clowns have had both good and bad reputations for a long time.
Clown history dates back to the Egyptian pharaohs and the imperial Chinese dynasties, according to a 2013 article in Smithsonian magazine. Smithsonian explains how some of that legacy was dark.
For example, it was the writer Charles Dickens who developed the scary “dissipated, drunken clown theme” in his 1836 book The Pickwick Papers. Dickens’ novel described an off-duty clown whose inebriation and ghastly, wasted body contrasted with his white face paint and clown costume.
A BBC news report mentions a similar dark strain involving clowns dating back over a century, but this time in music:
“Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera Pagliacci (which means ‘clowns’ in Italian) features a clown who discovers his wife is cheating on him, and murders her on stage. In one of the opera’s arias, the clown laments that his job is to make the audience laugh, even if he is crying inside – he later sings ‘Se il viso è pallido, è di vergogna’: ‘if my face is white, it is for shame’. French playwright Catulle Mendes claimed Leoncavallo stole the plot from his 1887 play La Femme de Tabarin, in which a clown also murders his cheating wife on stage: as she is dying, she smears her husband’s lips with her blood.”
There are other popular culture examples of troubled clowns too.
In 1952, Cecil B. DeMille’s Oscar-winning movie The Greatest Show on Earth depicted a clown (played by Jimmy Stewart) who never removed his make-up because he was on the run after killing his wife, albeit for reasons of mercy. The 1982 movie Poltergeist included a terrifying scene when a little boy’s clown doll comes to life and tries to drag him under the bed.
Psychologists say that clown-related anxiety (also called coulrophobia) often flows from worries about deindividuation, a state in which one’s identity is hidden (e.g., by clown makeup). Studies show that people concealing their identity often engage in anti-social and even destructive behavior and thus are feared.
Despite all this bad publicity, clowns are resilient creatures, at least in my personal experience. When I came of age in the 1960s, clowns were enjoying a wave of popularity.
It was the dawn of the television age and benevolent entertainers like Clarabell the Clown (Howdy Doody’s silent partner) and Bozo the Clown flooded the airwaves. A few years later McDonald’s introduced the world to Ronald McDonald.
My mother really liked clowns, and even had a Halloween clown costume which, although amusing me, once scared the heck out of our then two-year-old daughter Erin. (To be fair, at that age Erin also disliked the very large Easter Bunny who’d visit the grocery store each spring.)
A little later, however, a still very young Erin decorated a large portion of her body with magic markers. When I asked why she did it, she reported that she wanted to be like a clown. I found it hard to argue with the logic of that answer.
Our family went to the circus several times and the big tent clowns always made me laugh. P.T. Barnum was right when he said, “Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung.”
We did not go to the rodeo nearly as often as the circus, but when we did, those clowns made me laugh too. And even us neophytes could see how those courageous rodeo clowns saved the hides of many a bull rider.
As a kid, I also liked both Harpo Marx and a local favorite named the “Deeburger Clown.”
Marx, of the famous Marx Brothers movies, never spoke and dressed a bit like a clown, wearing a wig and overcoat (but no white face make up). He acted clown-like and had to earn his laughs with props or with crazy exaggerated movements.
The Deeburger Clown promoted the Dee’s Drive Inn restaurants in Utah when I was young. Dee’s served up tasty burgers and fries and had an equally delicious marketing jingle (“Let’s go to Dee’s, let’s all go to Dee’s…”), but its clown still was my favorite part of the operation.
Owner Dee Anderson commissioned Young Electric Sign Company (creators of many famous Vegas neon signs) to design the colorful marquee in 1968. Anderson wanted to honor the carnival where he had his first successful food gig.
Our Deeburger Clown in Ogden—perched high on a sign overlooking the city’s main street—rocked back and forth while his nose rotated. He held four bright balloons and never failed to make me smile, even when we were just driving by.
Clown culture even helped form our language. The “class clown” nickname was not awarded based on creepiness. In theater “sending in the clowns” means trying to salvage a show with some humor when things are going badly onstage.
Even today, my favorite moment at any Las Vegas show I’ve seen was at the water circus called O, staged at the Bellagio. Between high wire acts, the clever physical comedy of the Cirque du Soleil clowns left me in absolute stitches.
Thus, my informal study of clown perception tells me that the love (or hate) of clowns probably lies in the eyes of the beholder, and depends on individual family experiences as well as cultural touchstones. One of our children does not mind clowns, but the other two seem a bit more wary.
We’ll see what happens with the grandkids. So far, they like our ancient but still functional Jack-in-a-box with the clown that pops out.
But then again, they have not heard of Stephen King yet.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
