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It was at the turn of the 19th Century when the British pantomime star Grimaldi honed his alter-ego Joey, a character that was the forerunner to the clown we know today – currently terrorising people around the world in a spiralling ‘clown-demic’. Reports of clowns attempting to lure children into woods in the US state of South Carolina first emerged in August. Since then, there have been sightings of clowns behaving in menacing ways around the world: the social panic has led to a backlash, with arrests, school lockdowns and local officials banning clown costumes at Halloween. McDonald’s has limited Ronald McDonald’s public appearances and a ‘Clown Lives Matter’ march scheduled in Arizona had to be cancelled after organisers received death threats.

The craze has been condemned by professional clowns, who claim it might threaten their livelihood and “risks permanently damaging the reputation of the artform”. Yet clowns have not always been unthreatening children’s entertainers: when Grimaldi transformed himself into Joey, he was tapping into a tradition that stretched back thousands of years.

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It’s a mistake to ask when did clowns go bad – because they were never ‘good’ to begin with – Benjamin Radford

“If you take a broader look at the history of the clown, they have always been an ambiguous figure. Sometimes they’re laughing at themselves, sometimes they’re laughing at you – sometimes they’re the victim, sometimes you’re the victim. It’s a mistake to ask when did clowns go bad – because they were never ‘good’ to begin with,” he says. “You see this in the harlequin character, and of course in Mr Punch – that is a classic evil clown archetype which has been performed in England for more than 300 years. It’s this beloved character who is both funny and evil. That’s an irresistible stew to many people.”


Created in the Italian commedia dell’arte, the Harlequin character took on a different role as pantomime developed in England in the 18th Century (Credit: Shutterstock)

Radford sees echoes today. “Donald Trump has exploited aspects of the evil clown perfectly – he’s a showman, a performer, he insults people and then when called on it, he says ‘I was just joking’ – he does it for attention, as clowns do. Regardless of how you feel about Trump, there are many clear parallels to the evil clown character.”

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This is the tightrope walked by the clown: anarchy contained just enough to allow for laughter

There is humour as well as menace in the ritual. For the main part, each masked man “performs awkward and grotesque steps, as if he were a clumsy white man trying to imitate Indian dancing”. This continues “until all the masked visitors have competed in drawing applause by their obscene names and clowning”. At the arrival of the Boogers, Speck notes, “when the first invader was questioned about his nationality and identity, he resoundingly broke wind and this was greeted by risible applause”.

This is the tightrope walked by the clown: anarchy contained just enough to allow for laughter, a threat that dissolves into an object of ridicule. When that balance tips the wrong way, it’s a quick slide into horror. Philosophy professor David Livingstone Smith believes the mismatch between appearance and action is what makes clowns creepy.


Psychologists have found that people find clowns creepy because they can’t see their real expressions (Credit: Alamy)

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The fears of a clown

This inherent creepiness was taken to an extreme with the idea of the ‘killer clown’: the character that pranksters are currently bringing into streets and alleyways across the globe. Some argue that this began with the arrest of serial killer John Wayne Gacy in 1978. Gacy had dressed as ‘Pogo the Clown’ at children’s parties, and made a series of clown paintings while on death row. He is often touted as the inspiration for Pennywise in Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel It (King has recently spoken out about the ‘killer clown’ trend, saying: “time to cool the clown hysteria – most of ‘em are good, cheer up the kiddies, make people laugh”.)


Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel It featured a killer clown, Pennywise, played by Tim Curry (pictured) in a TV adaptation (Credit: Alamy)

Yet it’s a strand of popular culture that extends back far beyond Pennywise. 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.

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Make ‘em laugh

At the age of 25, Charles Dickens was asked to edit Grimaldi’s memoirs, shortly after the great clown’s death in 1837. Dickens had already written The Pickwick Papers, which featured a character said to be based on Grimaldi’s son: “the glassy eyes, contrasting fearfully with the thick white paint with which the face was besmeared; the grotesquely-ornamented head, trembling with paralysis, and the long skinny hands, rubbed with white chalk – all gave him a hideous and unnatural appearance”.

Stott has written that, through these memoirs, “laughter and misery becomes the balance-beam on which Grimaldi’s existence is constantly weighed as every career triumph is paid for with a proportionate personal agony, and every moment of joy countered by grief.”

It’s the belief that clowns are meant to be harmless that is recent, not the idea that they are unsettling. “There’s an ambiguity about what kind of thing they are,” says Livingstone Smith. “If clowns reconfigured themselves such that the ambiguity was diminished, they wouldn’t be as disturbing.” But arguably, they’d also no longer be clowns.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/

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