Oct

8

Send Out The Clowns.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 8, 2008 |

For a long time whenever I’d hear someone say they were afraid of or even just a little unnerved by clowns, I’d think, “Why? What’s so scary about clowns?” There’s even a specific phobia, coulrophobia, that’s fear of clowns. Well, when clowns get naked, that’s definitely a scary thing. A group of clowns, recent graduates of the San Francisco Clown Conservatory (I can’t help thinking of David Hyde-Pierce saying, “I’ll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way”) have done a nude clown calendar, stripping off everything but their big red noses. I have to give them credit: they’re doing it for a good cause, to raise money for Multiple Sclerosis research. That’s a good thing even if the idea is more than a little frightening. The clown who organized it, Chad Benjamin Potter (pictured at right from the Naked Clown Calendar web siteclown.jpg), said, “Our goal was to create this sort of craziness in your mind…When you think naked clowns, that’s something else entirely.” It certainly creates a lot of craziness in my mind. Clowns, to me, embrace the chaotic; they are representations of the trickster character from folklore. And yet the people I know who are bothered by clowns are usually the ones who have no trouble embracing the chaotic—who love it, in fact. It’s a contradiction I think I began to understand better after my own close encounter with clowns—after I became a clown myself.

A few years ago a friend of mine starred in an independent film called Encounter. It was about a guy who sees a UFO and becomes a town joke. He talked to the director and got me a role in it. I appeared in it as a clown. And I wasn’t just any clown. I was an angry clown sitting in a bar complaining about his own life and saying, “This isn’t just some costume I take on and off.” It was pretty dark comedy, but, even though it was just a cameo, I took the role very seriously. I read everything I could find about clowns and their history, and spent a lot of time thinking about this clown I was supposed to be. Who was this guy? What would drive someone to live life as a clown, to walk around with a painted-on happy face while putting a gun in his mouth every night? I started looking in a pretty serious way at Krusty The Clown, and the cult film Killer Klowns From Outer Space. The deeper I got into clowns the more they creeped me out.

clown1.jpgMaybe it’s because there’s something duplicitous about clowns. Are you scared of clowns, and, if so, is it because they seem like they’re trying too hard to be fun? Maybe that’s what it is: all that effort implies that they’re hiding something. And it seems like they’re really hiding something even when they bare it all.


Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. Baino on October 8, 2008 5:14 pm

    Not a fan of traditional clowns I must say, perhaps reading Stephen King’s “IT” killed it for me or the fact that my only experience with one was intefering with my personal space, forcing me to comply with his silly games when I just wanted to walk past and get on with business. Having said that, I do like the ‘cleverness’ of say, Cirque du Soliel clowning, done without the red noses et al. As for naked clowns wearing nothing but their face paint . . I’d rather see a Fire Fighter in nothing but his helmet!

  2. Christopher on October 8, 2008 6:19 pm

    Thanks for reminding me about IT–I can’t believe I’d forgotten that one. Not only was the book creepy, but who could forget Tim Curry as the clown?
    And firefighters are fine, but they’ve been done. You can find half a dozen firefighter calenders every year. But clowns…well, let’s hope they’re at least not honking their horns.

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind

<< Post Navigation >>

« « Book ‘Em: Quiet, Unassuming, Ordinary… | Aftermath. » »