We'll begin today's video with a disclaimer: this video, which is about the fear of clowns,
is going to contain examples of and pictures of clowns.
You have been warned.
When’s the last time you saw a clown in person?
Did you enjoy the experience?
Perhaps you have the what some call coulrophobia, an intense and excessive fear of clowns.
But where does it come from?
There’s a lot of speculation here, much of which hinges on history and psychology.
Let’s look at the history, first.
Jesters, clowns and other ‘silly’ entertainers are an ancient tradition.
These ancestors of clowns were worlds away from our modern buffoons.
But they still had the basics down – garish clothing and, more importantly, the manic
ability to do or say taboo things without consequence.
The prototypes of contemporary clowns are generally thought to be Joseph Grimaldi and
Jean-Gaspard Deburau, both of whom had pretty unpleasant lives off stage.
Grimaldi died penniless, one more in a long lineage of alcoholics, whereas Deburau killed
a boy in the street.
Anyway, this contrast became even more pronounced in the modern day.
When the notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy was finally apprehended, and the public
saw numerous photos of his clown persona, and he even famously said “a clown can get
away with anything.”
Since that time, the public perception of clowns has changed in the West.
People don’t seem to associate clowns with mere tomfoolery.
Instead, we see a duality of sorts, right?
A bland veneer of joviality covering something unknown and sinister.
Today, some of fiction’s greatest villains are evil clowns.
There’s Pennywise from IT, the Joker from Batman of course, and the Killer Klowns from
Outer Space.
So from a folkloric or cultural perspective, society has altered our perception of clowns.
But what about that second part?
What about the psychology?
Author Linda Rodriguez McRobbie believes people have a fundamental discomfort with clowns
because their facial expressions just can't be trusted.
There's an unfaltering, painted smile breeds distrust in an audience.
And we can’t talk about this sort of psychology without also mentioning Freud’s concept
of the “uncanny valley,” the idea that when something seems simultaneously familiar
yet oddly unfamiliar it produces intense and profound revulsion.
This is the same reason (theoretically) people get creeped out by lifelike robots with their
ever-so-slightly-off facial expressions.
Most people grow out of this fear as they age, but a minority of the population carries
it into adulthood.
The concept of scary clowns has picked up steam in recent decades, and coulrophobia
itself isn’t a term that arrives from psychology – while it describes a real phenomenon,
it popped up on the internet as recently as the early 2000s (with claims dating back to
the 80s).
So, in some ways, this could be a fad.
But if so, it’s a fad built on solid, psychological and cultural roots.
The concept of the evil clown exists now, and isn’t going away anytime soon, which
is a bit of a shame.
Clowning’s gotten a bad rap, and a largely unfair one, at that.
So what do you think?
Can clowns be trusted?
What’s another weird thing that scares you?
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