I wasn’t scared of Bozo as a kid. I don’t remember loving him, but I wasn’t scared of him. He was funny. Emmett Kelly was funny and sad, but I assumed kind-hearted. But many people are scared of clowns now. The Smithsonian has a history of scary clowns, saying the seeds were sown long before Gacy’s murders hit the news.
Charles Dickens, shortly after his success with The Pickwick Papers, wrote the memoirs of a clown named Grimaldi, who could joke, “I am GRIM ALL DAY, but I make you laugh at night,” because his tragic background was well known by those who loved his jokes. Linda Rodriguez McRobbie writes:
[Andrew McConnell] Stott credits Dickens with watering the seeds in popular imagination of the scary clown—he’d even go so far as to say Dickens invented the scary clown—by 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 make-up: Says Stott, “It becomes impossible to disassociate the character from the actor.” That Dickens’s version of Grimaldi’s memoirs was massively popular meant that this perception, of something dark and troubled masked by humor, would stick.
I can remember the first time I became aware that some people were afraid of clowns, and frankly I never understood it. I’m not crazy about them, but I’ve generally found them amusing — except for European clowns, who are just weird.
I disliked clowns early on because I was born with a lot of red hair. I never quite understood (and still don’t) what was supposed to be funny about red hair. Years later someone gave my son a Bozo the Clown toy telephone, and first thing Bozo said was, “Do you think my red hair is funny?” I took the battery out of the phone after that.
What an odd thing for Bozo to say? What’s the follow-up line, “I’ll bet the red-headed kids at school think it’s funny too”?
But red is more colorful than black or brown. Some clowns have yellow or blue hair, don’t they? Blue hair would offend old people, so that’s no good. Heh.