Clown Panic

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Our town has no entertainment whatsoever.

We have nothing for anybody to do except for a mall with a roses, a family dollar, and two shoe stores in it.

That's all we have in our town.

There's maybe eight red lights in our whole town.

So, so then, what so what actually happened?

Like, how did you get the idea?

Actually, it was for entertainment for my six-year-old.

It's maybe two weeks before Halloween.

Uh, she's seen all the stuff about them

and she heard that there was some in our town.

So my little girl wanted us to go find one and see if we could get a picture of it and show it to her.

That was the whole reason for the purchase of the costume: to just go take a picture, bring it home, and show it to her.

Not to terrorize anybody, that was what was said, but no, that's not what it was all about.

So, Walmart's full of costumes.

So, I grabbed the one, I go home.

I change clothes.

And I go to just a random stop sign.

I'm going to get out, let my wife snap a picture.

Okay, well, I'm sitting in the car.

A cop's driving by.

He pulls up in front of our car, turns his lights on, gets out, and he goes to take his gun out.

And I'm like, man, I'll go peacefully.

You know, it doesn't have to be like that.

And

it actually got very, very hostile.

Did you think you were up to something like...

I was treated like a murderer.

Was he freaked out about that?

No, he just wanted to be the first cop in Middlesbrough to arrest a clown.

If you close your eyes and picture a clown, what do you see?

What pops into your head first?

Maybe you see someone with a white face and a red nose, big feet, who's always making balloon animals.

Maybe you see Bozo or Ronald McDonald.

Or maybe you see someone dressed up like Jonathan Martin, who you just heard, and who was arrested in 2016 for wearing a scary clown costume in Middlesbrough, Kentucky.

When I think of clowns, I see Twisty, a terrifying white-faced serial killer clown with a rotting jaw who has appeared on multiple seasons of the TV show American Horror Story.

And I'm not even scared of clowns.

In the last few decades, creepy, scary clowns have elbowed benevolent clowns out of the spotlight, at least in pop culture, if not actually in lived experience.

How?

Why?

Do scary clowns even really count as clowns?

Why did an archetype that for hundreds of years made us laugh start to scare the bejesus out of us?

This is Decoder Ring, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Slate's TV critic, Willa Paskin.

Every month we take a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

Today, why did clowns get creepy?

Clowns have been around forever.

Basically, as long as there have been people, there have been other people playing the part of the trickster, the fool, the buffoon, the joker, the freak.

And in America recently, there have been a lot of people playing the part of the scary clown.

Jonathan Martin was arrested during the clown panic of 2016, a rash of scary clown sightings that popped up all over the United States.

Clowns were apparently everywhere, posing for photographs, skulking in the woods, stalking strip malls, menacing children.

Clown sightings of this kind had happened before.

In the early 1980s, first in Boston and then all over the country, people had reported seeing scary, threatening clowns the police officers can never confirm had actually been there.

Like boogeymen or yetis, they didn't seem to be real.

Lauren Coleman is a cryptozoologist and expert in this phenomenon, which he named Phantom Clown Theory.

Clowns that were seen by children mostly, occasionally by teachers, then law enforcement or parents would go after them and they never could be caught.

They were seen

supposedly with their costumes only on the upper part of their body whenever they were completely seen.

And the Kansas City ones were seen with knives in their hands.

You can hear how exasperated Kansas City law enforcement is with this trend in a UPI article from May of 1981 after two girls reported being ordered to get into a yellow van by a man with a knife wearing a clown outfit.

We're getting bunches of calls on both sides.

It's like the Russians are coming.

We cannot ignore any reports that we get as to a yellow van and someone in a clown suit, suit, but I cannot believe that there can be that many clowns in Kansas City with yellow vans.

Phantom clowns have appeared from time to time since then, and not just in the United States.

But 2016 was the biggest scare so far.

Creepy clown sightings are happening across the country, and it's no laughing matter.

All right, happening right now: creepy clown at a bus stop in Pinellas County.

Down to the creepy clown sighting in Largo today, they started in Greenville, South Carolina, and at first it seemed like all the previous incidents.

And they were all supposedly

just like those original ones in 1981.

People were seeing the clowns, and it got to be so ridiculous as far as how many different kinds of clowns were seen and in different situations.

Basically, what happened was that the reports about the Phantom Clowns were so heavily covered by the media and then shared on social media that it started to inspire not-so-phantom clowns, people who were up to mischief, taking photos, doing pranks, trying to scare their friends, making YouTube videos, and worse, calling in bomb threats to schools, wielding knives, committing crimes.

Unlike phantom clowns, these scary clowns were real, and the police could find them.

Which brings me back to Jonathan, the man in the clown suit who was arrested, who you heard at the beginning of this episode.

Tonight, a story we've been talking a lot about.

Creepy clown sightings around the country.

20-year-old Jonathan Martin is now under arrest.

Police say he was caught lurking in the woods near an apartment complex in Kentucky last week.

Jonathan was arrested for disorderly conduct and was also cited for violating a city ordinance by covering his face while in public.

These charges were eventually dismissed, but Jonathan doesn't think they should have been filed in the first place.

According to him, he was just trying to entertain his daughter.

Everybody laughs about it.

Like, I'll be walking around to this day and people's like, hey, you're the clown guy.

I mean, there's nothing better to do in our town except for

arrest people for dumb stuff.

Somebody trying to have fun.

Scary clowns really do frighten people, but one thing that often goes unsaid about them because it's a little inappropriate is that there's something kind of funny about them.

Not necessarily laugh out loud funny, but a perverse, ironic, isn't life strange kind of funny.

There's just something fundamentally absurd about them, and in the case of fandom clowns, something downright kitschy.

Think about Jonathan.

However ill-advised dressing up as a terrifying clown in the middle of a clown panic is, he was just trying to entertain himself and his kid.

Jonathan may be a perversion of the clown, but he was also just clowning around.

There's nothing more for anybody in this town to do than to do something stupid as I did.

I'm not going to call it stupid.

I enjoyed the experience.

I thought it was hilarious.

As it was happening, you did?

Oh, yeah, I laughed.

The whole time I was being arrested, I laughed.

Are scary clowns antithetical to clowning?

Are they the opposite of good clowns?

Or are they something more complicated?

To answer that, we have to look at where clowns come from.

And before we can understand how clowns got creepy, we have to understand how clowns got happy.

There are clowns in almost every culture in the world, way too many for us to explore today.

But the modern American birthday clown traces its lineage and look to 16th century Commedia del Arte, an improvised, popular form of theater that relied on stock characters the audience would already be familiar with.

Some of these stock characters, like the Pirra and the Harlequin, had costumes that clearly influenced modern clowns.

But the perpetually cheerful birthday clown of today would not be recognizable to people in the 16th century.

For one thing, birthday clowns are way, way too happy.

The idea of clowns as happy

is not really historically true.

That's Linda Simon, a professor emerita at Skidmore and the author of a number of books, including The Greatest Shows on Earth, A History of the Circus.

The personality of the clown as unhappy was one part of the old

history of clowns.

So there was always a clown that was going to be kind of beaten up by the world, and then there was the clown that was going to do the beating up.

History's clowns are ambiguous, complicated, sometimes subversive figures.

Clowns can speak truth to power, say things no one else can, like a jester.

They can be poetic and mischievous, like Charlie Chaplin.

They can be sad, like Emmett Kelly's Weary Willie, one of the stars of the Ringling Brothers in the 40s and 50s, who was modeled on a depression-era hobo and wore rags and had a sooty beard.

Clowns can be romantic, ironic, depressed, cruel, sweet, dopey, devilish, and they use different kinds of comedy, from slapstick to satire, to riff on the human condition through humor.

History's most famous clowns had some darkness to them.

There's Jean Gaspard Deboureau, the ultimate Pirot, who in Paris in the 1830s struck and killed a boy on the street who had taunted him.

There's Joseph Grimaldi, who was hugely famous in England in the early 1800s, but was tortured underneath his makeup.

Grimaldi was depressed, his wife and child died in childbirth, and he had to cut his career short after being physically debilitated by the wear and tear of his act.

Grimaldi is best known for popularizing the whiteface clown, developing the look that clowns are still known for today.

And I want to say here that blackface and minstrelsy more generally have a connection to clowning too, at the very least through their use of garish, clown-like makeup.

The relationship between clowns, clowning, comedy, minstrelsy, and race is its own vast, thorny subject.

So I'm just going to observe here that clowning's connection to this tradition is another example of just how complicated clowns are, historically.

They're complicated in fiction, too.

The opera Pagliacci premiered in 1892 in Milan and is set amidst a Commedia del Arte theater troupe.

It climaxes with a character in costume murdering his wife and her lover.

And the audience doesn't know that what it's seeing isn't clowning, isn't part of the show.

Until the clown announces, La comeria et finita, the comedy is over.

La comedia

et finita!

In 1924, there was a silent film, He Who Gets Slapped, in which Lon Cheney stars as a cuckold who runs off to the circus circus and plays a clown whose act is getting slapped, living out his wife's emasculation of him over and over again.

The 1928 movie The Man Who Laughs, based on a Victor Hugo novel, is about a young man unfairly punished with a permanent richtis grin who grows up to star in a carnival freak show.

The Man Who Laughs went on to inspire the look of a particularly famous bad clown, The Joker, who made his debut in Batman No.

1 in 1940.

And then there's Jimmy Stewart, who in Cecil B.

De Mill's 1952 movie The Greatest Show on Earth played Buttons, a sweet, heartsick clown who never takes off his makeup because he's hiding from the police after having mercy-killed his wife.

Oh, buttons.

I'm all ache inside.

When a clown comes barreling towards you on the street, they might mean well, but they're probably going to alarm you.

At least at first anyway.

It's the fact that you don't know what's about to happen, if the clown is going to amuse you or intrude on you, or both.

But that's part of the clown's spark, its freaky vitality.

And this doubleness has always been there.

This is all to say, well into the 20th century, clowns weren't evil or terrifying, but they weren't simply good or happy either.

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And then two things happened that changed public perception of the clown.

First, the circus.

The modern circus was created in the 1770s by the equestrian Philip Astley.

That's why the circus ring is a circle, so horses could keep running around without having to stop.

To increase his audience, Astley filled out his horse show with other acts: tumblers, jugglers, tightrope walkers, freak shows, and clowns, to whom there was a loosh aspect.

Here's Richard Crawford, a consultant for Cirque d'Solee and the founder and director of movement theater studio NYC, which teaches actors clowning techniques.

The theory behind the red nose is that it comes from the large red nose of a drinker or an alcoholic.

And, you know, the sort of baggy costume again comes comes from these guys who probably just patch together their own clothes.

They don't eat too much.

Their clothes don't fit.

As this suggests, early circus clowns, like early circuses, were for adults.

But starting in the late 19th century in America, circus owners realized kids were an untapped revenue stream.

You had not only Barnum, but a lot of circus and presarios wanted just to make money and fill up the stands.

They started marketing it as family entertainment because it would bring in much more money.

If you could have a whole family come to the circus instead of just an adult male or, you know, on date night, a couple, then that would expand your audience.

By the mid-20th century, freak shows had dipped in popularity and the ideal circus had been almost entirely made over as a kids' entertainment.

Here's a clip from a 1949 Encyclopedia Britannica film called Circus Day in Our Town, showing clowns exiting a tent after putting on their makeup and presenting them as a safe, kid-appropriate spectacle.

Now, a circus clown likes to have a full half hour for putting on his face.

Big clowns and little clowns.

They're all different and they're all funny.

And they're happiest when they hear you laugh.

Clowns became even more closely associated with kids in happiness thanks to the second thing that fundamentally altered the American perspective on the clown.

Television.

Bozo the Clown started appearing on local TV in Los Angeles in 1949.

In the late 50s, he was franchised, which meant that local TV stations around the country each had their own show starring their own version of Bozo, making the clown both extremely popular and omnipresent.

He looked slightly different in every series, but he is stereotypically clown-like, with a white face, red clown nose, and a fringe of vertical red hair.

In the early 1960s, Washington, D.C.

area McDonald's saw sales spike 30% after a local franchise sponsored the TV show Bozo's Circus.

In 1963, the branch hired the guy who had played Bozo, who happened to be Willard Scott, the future Today Show Weatherman, to appear in some local TV ads as a new character, Ronald McDonald's.

Hey, Ronald, here I am, kid.

Hey, isn't watching TV fun?

Especially when you got delicious McDonald's hamburgers.

Ronald, you can't be on TV and watch it at the same time.

In 1966, Ronald McDonald, with his red hair, yellow and red jumpsuit, and starry eyes, went national in the first national ad campaign for a fast food chain.

He was so successful that by the 1990s, Ronald McDonald was recognizable to 96% of American children, bested only by Santa Claus.

These clowns of the TV age had more reach and influence than clowns had ever had before, and they came to overshadow clowns performing in more classic venues like the circus.

But TV clowns weren't only clowns.

They were salesmen, mascots, brand leaders.

Here's an ad from the early 60s starring a clown.

Take it from Korrinkles.

That's mean.

The best breakfast under the big top is post sugar rice kerrinkles.

So crinkly, so delicious, so different.

Each grain of rice in sugar rice kerrinkles is kerrinkled with honey and sugar.

It's so good, I krinkle every time I eat it.

To us now, that cereal sounds really unhealthy, and that clown, Krinkles, looks really terrifying.

His makeup is a little cracked, and you can see the glue holding his hairpiece on.

The contrast between that sloppiness and his exuberant voice makes it seem like there's just something off about him.

And yet, at the time, he was deemed a perfectly good pitch fan.

It's kind of amazing every kid who watched that didn't develop a clown phobia.

The fancy word for which is coolphobia, by the way.

By the 1960s, then, the clowns Americans were most familiar with had been oversimplified.

They were contractually, obligatorily sunny.

They had to be inoffensive and cheerful and happy all the time.

All the more complicated aspects of their persona had been suppressed, but like the glue on Krinkle's bald cap, it was there.

You were just supposed to ignore it.

In other words, conditions were ripe for a backlash.

A clown's makeup and look, it was meant to be seen from far away.

It's stage makeup.

The colors are supposed to pop.

The facial expressions are supposed to be visible from a distance.

But TV brings you up close.

And when you're up close, you start to wonder, who is this adult man choosing to wear a clown makeup and hang around kids all day?

And why is he so excited about everything?

The idea of some sort of creature with a permanent smile,

of course, created a shadow effect of fear.

Because that's fake.

It's artificial.

And nobody lives in a space of happiness at all the time.

And so you have to wonder about somebody who has a permanent smile on their face.

You're like, that person's probably crazy.

I'm actually scared of a person who is that happy.

That's Zachary Fine, an actor, director, and teacher who teaches clowning largely to actors at NYU.

And he's described exactly what started to happen.

We began to wonder about all those people with a smile on their face all the time.

Maybe they weren't as harmless as they seemed.

That was certainly the case with a serial killer, John Wayne Gacy.

If there is any single inflection point that shifted the public consciousness about clowns, it's probably Gacy.

John Gacy, a man who liked to put on a clown suit and entertain children.

Now he is charged with one murder and the police have found at last count 27 bodies buried under his house and garage and two more in a nearby river.

Gacy had occasionally dressed up and performed as a clown, known as Pogo, and though he never killed anyone while in costume or lured them in by playing the clown, the detail was so jarring, so salacious, so absurd, it was mentioned in almost every story about him.

He made money on death row by selling portraits of Pogo.

Multiple biographies of him are titled Killer Clown.

In the years right after Gacy, the first phantom clown sightings were reported and creepy clowns started to pop up all over fiction.

In 1982, the Poltergeist came out, in which an evil clown doll terrifyingly comes to life.

And then there was Stephen King's It, in which an ancient monster known as Pennywise, who looks like a clown clown when he's in human form, terrorizes a group of children over many decades.

The book was published in 1986, but the ABC miniseries starring Tim Curry aired in 1990 and almost certainly terrified more people.

I'll kill you all!

I'll try to get crazy and I'll kill you all.

I'm every nightmare you ever had.

I am your worst dream come true.

I'm everything you ever were afraid of.

At this point, creepy clowns began to snowball.

In 1989, the Joker was reborn in a new movie version of Batman, played by Jack Nicholson.

Soon after, there was Krusty the Clown, Homie the Clown, Killer Clowns from Outer Space.

Today, scary clowns are an entertainment cottage industry.

There are tons of B-horror movies with names like Clown Camp Massacre, spelled with 2Ks, Clown Town, and my personal favorite, Clowntergeist.

On YouTube, scary clown videos and pranking clowns are immensely popular.

The channel DM PranksKiller Clowns is nothing but scary clown pranks.

Their titles, which have lots of oddly placed exclamation points, include Killer Clown Scare Prank, Killer Clown Returns Scare Prank, and Killer Clown 3, The Uncle, Scare Prank.

The last one, from 2014, features a scary clown inspired by Pennywise, holding balloons and confronting three people on a quiet road, and them chasing them as they run away.

It has over 117 million views.

This video is pretty disturbing, and the people in it being chased look really scared.

And this gets at one of the things that is easier or more comfortable anyway to ignore about the creepy clown, which is that millions of people really enjoy them.

Scary clowns are a window into the dark side of humor.

Everyone loves to laugh, but not everything that makes us laugh is good, is safe, is nice, is moral.

The pranks are clowns of YouTube and clown panics can be cruel, they can be mean, they can be violent.

They're totally inappropriate.

But for some people, that's what makes them so funny.

117 million people watched that YouTube video.

How many people do you think have engaged this closely with happy clowns recently?

There's nothing comparable for happy clowns.

117 million people are not watching reruns of Bozo.

Scary clowns are dominating happy clowns.

They are playing the part of the bully clown, while happy clowns are getting bullied.

And about this in particular, happy clowns are not happy.

This is the story of the one.

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Like I said at the beginning of this episode, I'm not scared of clowns, but I also don't have much occasion to interact with them.

The only clowns I see regularly, actually, are the scary ones who show up on TV.

But hearing hearing clowns passionately, earnestly make the case for clowning changed how I think about them.

Pamela La Regina is an artist who in the late 70s, after dressing up as a clown for Halloween, realized she had more clowning in her.

She developed a character, Bumbelina, and eventually formed a troop with her neighbors, working sometimes for pay, but more often for free, just to make people laugh, to bring them joy.

In Bumbelina's case, people would often say to her, I love your costume.

And she would always say back, I love yours too.

Because the truth is that we're all wearing costumes.

You know, from Bumbeline's point of view, there's a clown in everyone.

And so it's really about helping people find that special place inside them that

has more humor, that has more empathy, that is more imaginative.

Clowning in sophisticated, relatively highbrow circles is still thriving.

A lot of actors do clown training.

You can see modern clown shows in New York where it's treated like any other form form of theater.

But for working clowns across America, scary clowns have been economically ruinous.

Here's Trisha Manuel, whose clown name is Priscilla Mooseberger.

She was a circus clown at Ringling Brothers in the early 80s and eventually started a costuming company that she still runs.

She also started and runs Mooseberger Clown Arts Camp, a training program for clowns.

2016 was brutal.

A lot of different groups ended up going out of business just because the phone stopped ringing.

Don't come to our nursing home.

Don't come to our hospital.

Don't come to our special Olympics.

Don't come.

Don't come.

It's like, what?

We've been coming for

14 years.

Tricia is a positive person.

She's a clown after all.

And she's planning a clown summit to be more proactive in combating the scary clown phenomenon.

But she knows the scope of the problem.

Over a generation of people have

been been poisoned, if you will.

A culture, a whole group of people thinks we're creepy and scary

until they run into somebody who isn't.

We are fighting discouragement in our industry.

We're watching our way of life, and I don't, financially, some of us, but we're watching our way of life slowly fade away.

And it's like, really?

Trisha thinks there's one other factor that has been just as big a deal as all the movies and TV shows.

The corresponding rise in scary clown costumes.

It used to be much easier to find a happy clown outfit than a scary one.

But now at Walmart and other big box stores around Halloween and on Amazon all year, scary clown costumes almost outnumber regular clown costumes.

And remember that clown prank video with 117 million views?

For a while, the creators had a website where you could go and buy the same clown outfits they were wearing while they pranked people.

One of the consequences of scary clowns and clowns becoming like Bigfoot is that people don't always think of clowns as being played by people.

Tricia has taken to walking around with a business card, to hand to people who come up to her when she's in costume and say things they would never otherwise say to a stranger.

I hate you.

It says what clowns are and what clowns are not.

Real clowns are friendly people in makeup and costume, donate time and resources to charity events, visit nursing homes and hospitals, make people smile and laugh, brighten a weary world, are your friends and family.

And then on the other side of it, a clown is not someone in a scary mask or makeup, someone who wants to frighten or harm you, someone who disrespects your boundaries.

These people are misguided creeps and they scare us too.

Part of the difficulty in combating scary clowns is that some people like to be frightened by clowns.

And one of the places they can do that is at the House of Horrors in Miami.

My name is Michael Cawkins.

I scare the ever-loving hell out of people, or try to.

Michael is 25 years old, and he's been working at the House of Horrors for the last seven years, which pops up in the weeks before Halloween.

He's played a number of characters, a zombie, a vampire, but for the last few years, he's been in charge of a freak show as Jake the Ringmaster Clown, a 141-year-old killer clown with a skin addiction, two brains inside his skull, long dark hair, hair, a white face and red almost bat wings around his eyes, and a little blood at the corner of his mouth.

Can I wait, can I ask you a question?

Can I can I talk to Jake right now?

Oh, you want to talk to the ringmaster?

Oh boy.

Mike didn't much like clowns or being scared as a kid, but he loved the Addams family and the Munsters, and he would use his mom's makeup to dress up as Frankenstein or a pirate.

In high school, he was really into metal and performance in general.

He likes musicals, and he started watching the aforementioned genre of scary prankster clown videos on YouTube.

He got into the band Insane Clown Posse, a horrorcore rap group that uses scary clown makeup and carnival themes as part of its act, and are especially beloved by their devoted fan base.

When he needed to get a job, the House of Horror seemed like a perfect fit.

As Jake, Mike wants to frighten people.

But if you listen to him talk, it's clear he also just really wants to entertain them, to make them laugh.

Are you influenced by anyone?

You sound like Beetlejuice to me.

Is that weird to say?

Is that insulting?

I hope it's not.

God, I've been getting that since 2014 doing the Miami show.

You know, like, okay, yes, I wear black and white stripes.

And then all of a sudden, people are like, oh, hey, look, it's Beetlejuice.

No.

No, it's not.

I don't even know who that is.

Mike's playful.

He's funny.

And people go to see him because they want to encounter his kind of clown.

I can talk, I can talk back to Mike now.

I can talk back to him.

Hi, what's up?

Hey, so do you find that, like, with the so the reaction to you, do people laugh and then they get really scared?

Like, is it a continuum?

It really depends on the people.

I get people who are really into this stuff, and some people laugh, some people are freaked out, some people, like, I just pop up around the corner and just go, hey, what's up?

And they, they, they run out the door.

I'm like, oh, but you just got in here.

His audience may not be the stereotypical audience for a clown show, and he may try to elicit a slightly different set of emotions than is expected, but he's still there to delight, even if that involves a little fear.

It's so amazing because I hadn't, I guess this makes sense, but basically, don't take this wrong way.

You're just like a clown clown.

Like, you're like a scary clown, but you're sort of just doing what clowns do.

It's the freedom that you could do whatever you want.

And if it's horrifying, it's funny.

Mike does not fit the stereotypical scary clown mold.

He's not some violent deviant trying to strike fear in the hearts of unsuspecting children.

Instead, Mike hints at one potential future for clowns and scary clowns alike, where they're not so separate, where the scary clown isn't a menace to good clowns, but an iteration of them.

It can be hard to figure out which came first, which is the chicken and which is the egg, the decline of the birthday clown or the rise of the scary clown.

Did scary clowns come first and put happy clowns out of business?

Or were happy clowns on their way out, along with the circus, and scary clowns bloomed in the void?

Because scary clowns are no, happy clowning can feel pretty old-fashioned.

It's just really antithetical to a lot of our ideas about both comedy and gravitas right now.

We tend to think of the best comedy as a kind of authentic self-expression, a performer's gnarly truth.

And clowns, that's not what they're about.

When you watch a clown, you aren't supposed to see the performer underneath.

You're supposed to see the clown.

The performer is actually hiding in a way behind the makeup and costume, behind the buffoonery.

But the costume, it's gotten totally distracting.

This is one of the reasons so much clown work is now being done by people who don't look like clowns at all.

The stand-up comedian telling jokes, speaking truth to power, calling out members of the audience, mixing satire and potty humor.

She's a kind of clown.

The drag queen, summoning a sense of exaggerated glamour and delight.

She's another kind of clown.

The internet troll, spewing intentionally provocative comments on the internet that make it impossible to tell what's funny and what's awful.

That's a clown too.

When we see a clown costume now, we're often much more interested in the person underneath all that makeup.

And so instead of just interacting with the clown, we're imagining who he or she might really be.

Part of the reason we find clowns so unnerving.

And scary clowns take that unnerving quality and use it to their advantage.

They capitalize on something latent in good clowns and blow it up out into the open.

And for happy clowns, that's awful.

It must be so painful to have devoted your whole life to making people feel good and then to be powerless to stop people from thinking of you as a creep.

To have devoted your whole life to making people laugh and then finding out that lots of people would much rather laugh at something much more disturbing.

But what I hope this episode has demonstrated is that the distance between happy clowns and scary clowns, at least the ones who are trying to amuse people, not hide their criminal intent behind a disguise, isn't quite as vast as it first seems.

The scary clown isn't just a twisted clown.

They're a kind of solution for the clown, a way to make the clown work right now, within the bounds of our more ironic, skeptical, big thrill-seeking moment.

They're not the end of the clown, but the beginning of something new, or more accurately, something old.

The revival revival of a more adult, ambiguous clown.

A clown who's more like us.

Because as Zach, the actor and clown teacher we spoke with earlier pointed out, that's really what we need clowns for anyway.

To show us who we really are in all our complications, not who we wish we were.

That we are ridiculous, beautiful, confused, bumbling, baffled creatures.

And that we are in this extraordinary divine comedy where we still have no idea how to be a human being.

And the clown reflects that in extremis often on stage.

And so we like to laugh because it's not us.

So in some ways, we're like, that's me, but I'm laughing because it doesn't have to be me up there showing people how stupid and ridiculous I am.

Thanks for listening.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willapaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

We want to thank Daniel Royer for recommending this subject.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode.

Thanks in this episode to Benjamin Radford, Isaac Butler, Jim Bredison, Andrew Kahn, Aisha Harris, June Thomas, and everyone else who gave us help along the way.

We'll see you next month.

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