send in the clowns

Coulrophobia: The fear of clowns.

I'm trying to figure out why so many people hate clowns these days.  Is it because they weren't brought up on the Bozo Show?  Geez, I'd watch it every single morning before I went to elementary school.  Bozo wasn't creepy - he was a bit of a smart ass.  Cooky wasn't creepy - he was awesome and just as much a smart ass.  The only one who was creepy was Wizzo the Wizard.  Dooo-dee-doo-dee-doo!  Really?  He was the least clown-like of them all and he was just icky.  I always got a "bad touch" vibe from that one.  (Nothing against Marshall Brodien who played Wizzo - I'm sure he's a very nice man.  But just look at this character...)



 

Wizzo's gonna get ya!



Maybe I'm just not that creeped out by them because I happened to grow up in the 19th Century Circus Capital of America. WooHoo!

Oy.

Clowns and circus stuff were everywhere.  It was commonplace.  Our Octoberfest (or was it Oktoberfest?) celebration didn't have a German beer and pretzel theme, it was clown themed.  Admission buttons featured Festy the Clown and on one day after school every year, we would stand in line for hours in our school gym to have our faces painted like the tiny angelic clowns we were and then they'd let us loose on the fest.  People with coulrophobia would not have lasted long in our town.

 

The huge clown-a-palooza came in the late 80's when the International Clown Hall of Fame opened its doors in town.  I shit you not.  In celebration of this, the town went a little more off of its circus rocker.  It erected not one, but two fiberglass statues in a park on the main street downtown.  One of a giraffe and one of an elephant and - you guessed it - a clown.

 

I know I have many pictures of this thing, but of course I can't find them now.
Pic via wikimedia commons

 

The town also replaced all of its downtown garbage cans with huge, large-mouthed clowns.  Because it's more fun to throw away your garbage with the fear of having your arm bitten off. 

This isn't from our town, but it is identical to the ones we had.

I think it was around this same time, or not long after, that Stephen King's IT hit television screens across the nation and gave us Tim Curry's Pennywise.

Ack!  Okay, me no likey.

Honestly, I didn't watch it until I was an adult, but I can see how this changed clowns for.ev.er.

  Well, him and John Wayne Gacy.

Thankfully the Clown Hall of Fame moved away from town (to an even more circus-centric town in the state) and much of the three-ring hooplah went with it.  Of course, our lovely statues still stand for children to have their pictures taken on.  Otherwise we're virtually clown-free!

So that's my history with clowns.  I suppose not many other people would have the same backstory.

As for the state of clowning today, things are looking pretty grim.  Kids now scream and cry when they see them instead of laughing and wanting to play.  NPR actually did a story on it, based on an article in Smithsonian Magazine, that's pretty interesting.  I recommend catching it here.  I think it goes a little too far back into the history that kids have no clue about, but it's still an interesting take.

Just recently, a mysterious clown had been spotted popping up all over Northampton and scaring the begeezus out of people.  He was just unmasked and talked about the death threats he was getting.  A clown.  Getting death threats.  Keep calm, people!

From the Spot the Northampton Clown Facebook page.

All in all, I'm not a fan of clowns, but I'm not creeped out by them either...well, except for Pennywise.  They're silly, not terribly funny, but they're out to make kids laugh and that's not a bad thing, right?  In the long run, I prefer clowns in makeup over the clowns we have running the government.

Ohhhh...did she just go there?  Yes.  Yes she did...