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Something sinister is lurking in the brush around the Shemwood Crossing Apartments in Greenville, South Carolina. Children there have reported clowns trying to entice them into the woods in order to take them to a cabin, where, the kids believe, a colony of clowns has made its home. In separate incidents, a woman claimed that a clown stood at the window and stared at her menacingly as she did her laundry in a local laundromat. Meanwhile, a 14-year-old boy was chased by a knife-wielding clown in Columbus, Ohio. Police are investigating all these complaints, but to date no arrests have been made.
This alarming series of events recalls a rash of similar incidents two years ago. At that time, clowns were said to be peering into people’s houses, following them on the streets, and otherwise intimidating the citizens of Bakersfield, CA, Albuquerque, NM, and other towns and cities. No one was charged then either, which begs the question – were these genuine sightings, or instances of mass hysteria fueled by urban myth?
There’s a further anomaly. Even as incidences of antisocial clowns are spiking, the clowning profession itself is in decline. Membership of the World Clown Association, for example, the country’s largest trade association for clowns, has dropped by almost 30% in the past decade. Young people are simply not interested in becoming clowns according to Clowns of America International President Glen Kohlberger, who said “What happens is they go on to high school and college and clowning isn’t cool anymore.” Cyrus Zavieh, president of the New York City Clown Alley, agreed. “American kids these days are thinking about different careers altogether,” he said, evidently unaware that nobody has really thought of clowning as a career since the close of the Elizabethan era.
The clowning profession is struggling, while nuisance clowns are on the rise. It’s hard not to see these phenomena as connected. This is not to say that indigent and underemployed clowns have literally turned to crime in order to make ends meet, but rather that the popular imagination is more inclined to view clowns as threatening the further they go out of style.
Since earliest times, clowns have been outsiders, figures on the fringes of society, keepers of the essential knowledge of life’s absurdity, closest always to death. Even in the twentieth century, the two greatest clowns, Otto Griebling and Emmett Kelly, were economic outcasts, hobos. Kelly’s “Weary Willie”, unshaven and dressed in rags, was a figure straight from the dust bowl, Woody Guthrie in slap and motley. In the industrial age of the big top circus, these men still had a place in the mainstream. Today's clowns do not. The point at which clowns transitioned from figures associated with laughter and play to fear and horror is difficult to locate precisely, but it took an irrevocable step forward with the figure of Pennywise the Dancing Clown in Stephen King’s It (1986). Pennywise is a demonic evil manifested in clown form, but in portraying him that way, King connected the growing obsolescence of clowns to terror in a manner suggesting that Pennywise’s murderous psychosis is driven by resentment at being abandoned by society. This idea of good feelings gone bad, of fun curdling into fear, is so oft-repeated that there’s even a term for it – “dark carnival.” We see it in the disused fairground or abandoned circus that serves as a backdrop to crime or horror narratives (the rusting infrastructure of old-fashioned fun) or in the sad and fading career of Krusty the Clown, a clown who is perpetually bankrupt, depressed and morally compromised.
Clowns threaten us because we no longer have a use for them. They are unwanted cast-offs, the remnants of an age we have outgrown, banished exiles who reappear occasionally to glare at us accusingly – “once you loved us.” Consider this the next time you are menaced by a clown - he is as concerned about his place in the world and well-being as you are about yours.
