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It’s no secret: Clowns are scary
Published January 20, 2008
Clowns are scary.
This is a universal truth.
With their big shoes, their painted-on smiles, those braying laughs and their ability to squeeze into small cars with a multitude of their devilish brethren, clowns are not the happy things they appear to be. They are nightmarish creatures with unknown motives and horrifying secrets.
Of course, if you grew up laughing at Bozo the Clown and eating McDonald’s hamburgers because of Ronald McDonald’s encouragement, you might think I’m overreacting, but that just means you haven’t been listening to your children.
A British survey conducted by the University of Sheffield quizzed 250 children between the ages of 4 and 16 on the laughing monsters and found that every single child found clowns to be scary. Even the 16-year-olds, and they won’t admit to anything.
So why do children find those demonic juggling, pie-throwing, seltzer water-spraying creatures so frightening? The researchers determined that clowns are “universally disliked” by children, and that some kids find them “unknowable.”
When I was a kid, there were several distinct sources of clown fear in pop culture, from the cheesy sci-fi parody “Killer Klowns from Outer Space,” in which the evil alien clowns kill small-town residents with evil cotton candy and other nefarious tricks, to the television adaptation of Stephen King’s novel “It,” which depicted an ancient, child-devouring entity that often used a clown as a front to lure in children.
The episode of the kid-friendly horror show “Are You Afraid of the Dark” with the evil carnival clown stalking a child scared the mess out of me as a kid and even the clowns in the Disney classic “Dumbo,” while not necessarily evil, were cruel, uncaring people who served as foils for our heroic elephant.
Plus, Batman’s arch-nemesis the Joker was a clown, and he killed people all the time with joy-buzzers and acid-spraying lapel flowers.
The pop-culture co-option of clowns as evil is easy to understand — after all, transforming something seemingly carefree and innocent into a façade for something horrifyingly evil is an old trick for horror movies — but I’m not sure that entirely explains the fear of clowns.
I think clowns, which are seemingly supposed to make us laugh with their friendly antics, frighten children (and more than a few adults, I’m sure) due to their mysterious, frantic nature. After all, you don’t see a clown’s real face, which lies hidden under all that disfiguring makeup, and all that cavorting around they do is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
When people do laugh at clowns, it’s almost always when the clown has suffered pain and hardship at the hands of another. We only laugh at the clown when he cries.
Clowns may not be the worst things a child could face, but perhaps we should avoid these awful creatures in the future, before they destroy us all with a laugh on their face.
Then again, at least they aren’t mimes.
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