{"id":72998,"date":"2014-06-23T15:42:25","date_gmt":"2014-06-23T19:42:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=72998"},"modified":"2014-06-23T17:03:27","modified_gmt":"2014-06-23T21:03:27","slug":"the-vestigial-clown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/06\/23\/the-vestigial-clown\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vestigial Clown"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"1948_Hans_Breinlinger_-_Clown_mit_Spiegel\"<\/a>

Detail from Hans Breinlinger\u2019s The Clown<\/i>, 1948.<\/p><\/div>\n

Yesterday, a friend and I entered into a great debate. It started with my question:<\/p>\n

\u201cDoes the clown exist who could make you laugh?\u201d<\/p>\n

He said yes; he thought that clown who does the act with snow off Union Square would make him laugh. (The show is lauded for its masterful clown-craft and its evocation of childlike wonder.)<\/p>\n

\u201cOkay,\u201d I said, \u201chas<\/em> a clown ever made you laugh?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course not,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Does anyone expect to be amused by clowns in this day and age? We all know that clowns are creepy, clowns are scary, clowns are lame\u2014but that understanding has always been predicated on the understanding that, like dolls, clowns are supposed to be<\/em> happy, fun, innocent. Thus, when a clown goes psychotic, it is doubly terrifying. Or it was thirty years ago, at least. Now, in a world of John Wayne Gacy and It<\/em> and Insane Clown Posse and Diddy\u2019s coulrophobia-driven \u201cno clowns\u201d rider, we expect<\/em> clowns to be sinister.<\/p>\n

Take this recent survey of kids in children\u2019s hospitals, a historical clown stronghold:<\/p>\n

\n

More than 250 children aged between four and sixteen were asked for their opinions\u2014and every single one said they disliked clowns as part of hospital decor.<\/p>\n

Even some of the older children said they found clowns scary, Nursing Standard<\/em> magazine reported.<\/p>\n

The youngsters were questioned by the University of Sheffield for the Space to Care study aimed at improving hospital design for children.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs adults we make assumptions about what works for children,\u201d said Penny Curtis, a senior lecturer in research at the university.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them frightening and unknowable.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

We are clearly witnessing the last gasp of the clown as a phenomenon, as opposed to the clown as a signifier. Clowns, in other words, seem doomed to become the new mimes. When was the last time you saw a real-life, earnest mime in the wild\u2014as a performer as opposed to a punch line? And yet, presumably, any small child can identify a mime.<\/p>\n

The scary clown isn\u2019t a new idea\u2014in 1892\u2019s Pagliacci<\/em>, after all, the title character murders his wife in full commedia dell\u2019arte regalia. The historian Andrew McConnell Stott, who wrote a biography of the pioneering whiteface clown Joseph Grimaldi, actually credits Charles Dickens with creating the trope. According to an article last year in Smithsonian<\/em><\/a>,<\/p>\n

\n

Grimaldi\u2019s real life was anything but comedy\u2014he\u2019d grown up with a tyrant of a stage father; he was prone to bouts of depression; his first wife died during childbirth; his son was an alcoholic clown who\u2019d drank himself to death by age 31; and Grimaldi\u2019s physical gyrations, the leaps and tumbles and violent slapstick that had made him famous, left him in constant pain and prematurely disabled. As Grimaldi himself joked, \u201cI am GRIM ALL DAY, but I make you laugh at night.\u201d That Grimaldi could make a joke about it highlights how well known his tragic real life was to his audiences.<\/p>\n

Enter the young Charles Dickens. After Grimaldi died penniless and an alcoholic in 1837 (the coroner\u2019s verdict: \u201cDied by the visitation of God\u201d), Dickens was charged with editing Grimaldi\u2019s memoirs. Dickens had already hit upon the dissipated, drunken clown theme in his 1836 The Pickwick Papers<\/em>. In the serialized novel, he describes an off-duty clown\u2014reportedly inspired by Grimaldi\u2019s son\u2014whose inebriation and ghastly, wasted body contrasted with his white face paint and clown costume. Unsurprisingly, Dickens\u2019s version of Grimaldi\u2019s life was, well, Dickensian, and, Stott says, imposed a \u201cstrict economy\u201d: For every laugh he wrought from his audiences, Grimaldi suffered commensurate pain.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Stott credits Dickens with watering the seeds in popular imagination of the scary clown\u2014he\u2019d even go so far as to say Dickens invented<\/em> the scary clown\u2014by creating a figure who is literally destroying himself to make his audiences laugh. What Dickens did was to make it difficult to look at a clown without wondering what was going on underneath the makeup: says Stott, \u201cIt becomes impossible to disassociate the character from the actor.\u201d That Dickens\u2019s version of Grimaldi\u2019s memoirs was massively popular meant that this perception, of something dark and troubled masked by humor, would stick.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The truly jolly clown, in fact, was a more modern figure. Certainly, he had no heyday like the early days of TV, when the clown-hosted children\u2019s show was ubiquitous. A figure both fun and authoritative, the clown\u2014in what now feels like a historical anomaly\u2014surely served as a needed liaison to the grownup world. Now\u2014as in most ages past\u2014children view strange, saturnalian grownups with suspicion. It\u2019s amazing that Ronald McDonald has held on, a friendly emissary from a different world.<\/p>\n

It makes sense that the clown\u2019s star should wane somewhat. After all, many of the societal roles of the clown\u2014those of emotional outlet, societal commentary, transference\u2014are now enacted by any number of other media. We have movies, we have TV, we have standup; comedy is so integrated into the fabric of modern life that the idea of a dedicated clown feels as anachronistic as that of a sin-eater.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not qualified to get into the historical implications of clowning, but I do know this: it\u2019s fascinating to live in a time when everything is shifting before our eyes. These shifts aren\u2019t novel anymore, as life-changing technology must have been for our great-grandparents. They\u2019re not scary, as the upheaval of the sixties would have been to an older generation, or indeed so exciting as that same period was for my parents. But we\u2019re now hyperaware of every shift: we may be inured to the pace of change, but we monitor it closely.<\/p>\n

Over the weekend, my dad mentioned that in the clown-mad 1950s, his parents came back from a trip to Venice with a bunch of glass clowns. Now, such a souvenir would seem not just creepy, but tacky, too. Mine is probably one of the last generations to have much to do with jolly clowns; I remember a short-lived cartoon called Little Clowns of Happy Town<\/em> in the 1980s. I\u2019m dating myself; writing in the Guardian<\/em> in 2012, Stuart Kelly referred to the scary-clown trope as \u201calmost nostalgically fearful\u201d\u2014a delicious contradiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, a friend and I entered into a great debate. It started with my question: \u201cDoes the clown exist who could make you laugh?\u201d He said yes; he thought that clown who does the act with snow off Union Square would make him laugh. (The show is lauded for its masterful clown-craft and its evocation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[1203,189,8408,14380,14382,411,8970,14381,5566],"class_list":["post-72998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-charles-dickens","tag-children","tag-clowns","tag-fear","tag-grimaldi","tag-humor","tag-mimes","tag-pagliacci","tag-the-pickwick-papers"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Vestigial Clown<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on the waning of clowning and its ever-changing trope.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/06\/23\/the-vestigial-clown\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Vestigial Clown by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 23, 2014 \u2013 Yesterday, a friend and I entered into a great debate. 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