So I see this cute ad about this kid who’s scared of clowns, and it got me thinking. I lay down for a while, and it stopped, but it lingered.
My own broth of a boy, the Err Apparent, was mortally afraid of clowns. First found out when I took him to the Shrine Circus, the clowns came out, and he was instantly terrified, as if a blood drenched Shiva with a belt of baby skulls was clilmbing over the rail to Git Him. I’ve been scared, I know what it looks like, he was halfway to shitless. Never seen a clown in his life, one look, and we are prowling behind the bleachers while I peek ever once in a while to make sure there were no clowns. Elephants, great, lions, no prob, funny clown AAAArrrroooooga! AAAArroooooga!
So it got me wondering: how common is this? I’m sure many of us have made the Big Blunder, so we make up an abberant slice of demographic pie. How many of our kids suffer from bozophobia? Are there other similarities? Was I wrong to make him beg in the street for money to pay me back for the ticket?
(Hey! He was a real cute kid, had the $20 in a matter of minutes…No big deal!)
I’ve never liked clowns; I don’t know if it’s because I may have seen that Stephen King movie at a young age–with the psychotic clown-come-to-life (IT I think?) or because they’re just intrinsically creepy.
I don’t have a pathological response to them (like the OP’s poor kid!) but I don’t like them at all and I don’t find them remotely appealing. Ever. Whether they’re live, or stuffed, or ceramic, or whatever. Creepy!
I have a similar feeling–albeit not as strong–towards the old Victorian-type dolls with the big vacant eyes and porcelain faces.
Thanks to John Wayne Gacy, Stephen King’s Pennywise, and Bart Simpson’s “Can’t sleep. Clown will eat me,” clowns have gotten a really bad rep they will never get rid of. Of course, it wasn’t too great to begin with.
I was never afraid of them. Maybe I wasn’t exposed to them at a young enough age to be afraid. All I remember is adults dressing up in stupid costumes to impress me didn’t impress me. Hello, I know you’re just a stupid adult trying to fool me.
Not terrified of them, nor are my kids, but they’re not something we ‘like.’
But as to the OP, we were at a parade last year, and a 12-13 year old boy I know (who is terribly normal) was standing next to us. We he spied a relatively non-threatening clown coming our way, his face drained of blood, and he was terrified. He tripped over himself trying to get away. At first I thought he was playing it up, but that look of mortal terror couldn’t be faked.
Do most people fear clowns in full makeup more than clowns with little or no makeup? My WAG is that it’s the distortion that’s scary. The human form slightly twisted into something unhuman, but not animal like, either - the bulbous red nose, the pancake white, the bigger than life hair and feet. Heck, if little kids are scared of BEARDS (and many are), no wonder they’re scared of clowns!
A clown is the ultimate “not part of my tribe” which triggers anxiety. It’s a not oft’ spoken about thing, but white babies and toddlers are often afraid of black people, and black babies and toddlers of white people, if they are born into segregated areas. A clown is even further “off”, if you will, than someone with markedly different skin. Off = danger to that primitive lizard brain we have.
What I don’t have a hypothesis for is why clowns STAY scary. Most of us are no longer afraid of beards by age 2, and don’t panic when someone of another race approaches by age 3 or 4. We learn that different doesn’t mean bad, to one degree or another. But clowns are still scary to many adults, and I don’t have a good guess as to why.
*Maybe *because when we, the toddler, are crying in fear about a clown, our parent is generally laughing and acting weird and not taking us seriously? That’s got to add to the disturbance in the force.
I was a kid terrified of clowns, and I still really, really do not like them as an adult.
At the time, there was no way I could communicate what the problem was. After many years of reflection I think it really was the distortion of the human form, particularly the face. The fact I had very poor vision as a child, to the point where I had trouble with faces anyway, only further exacerbated the problem.
There have been two occasions in my adult life where friends (one of whom use to be a professional clown for Ringling) when friends suggest a clown visit to cheer me up. Fortunately, in both cases, my husband nixed the idea before I was ever aware of it. The professional clown that was a friend of ours did remark that he had frequently encountered the clown-phobia and, particularly with children, he’d back off and retreat immediately. He really did NOT like parents who tried to jolly a terrified child out of their fears or try to force the child to “confront” their fear or anything of the sort. He wanted to make people happy, not scared, and having been a parent himself he knew that below a certain age scared kids are just scared, you can’t reason them out of it.
Oddly enough, the only places I like to see clowns are horror movies, where, to me, they fit in very well.
Come on already, people! This is a frequent theme that is trotted out here without cause or provocation. Clowns are not evil and kids really do love them. They are kind, jolly people whose sole purpose in life is to bring joy to others. They are our friends and want only to make us happy. They……they…
Forget it, I can’t keep lying like that. Clowns are evil, frightening beings who are nourished on the psychic energy derived from children’s terror. They haunt our nightmares and want to steal our souls, leaving behind our empty bodies with eyes wide open and glazed from the final horror of looking into their greasepainted faces before they destroy our minds.
What he said. I think though that the existence of this valley shifts a little bit from person to person, and clowns are close enough to the leading edge of the upslope that they run the gamut from kind and joyful souls full of mirth and laughter to evil soul-sucking scary-as-shit quasi-humans capable of tearing off and consuming quivering gobbets of bloody flesh from your still-breathing body with their long, needle-like teeth while you watch in paralyzed terror.
