{"id":5434,"date":"2013-08-07T10:02:30","date_gmt":"2013-08-07T14:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=5434"},"modified":"2013-08-07T10:02:30","modified_gmt":"2013-08-07T14:02:30","slug":"the-squeeky-nose-of-nightmares","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=5434","title":{"rendered":"The Squeeky Nose of Nightmares"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, saying the seeds were sown long before Gacy’s murders hit the news.<\/p>\n

Charles Dickens, shortly after his success with The Pickwick Papers, wrote the memoirs of a clown named Grimaldi, who could joke, \u201cI am GRIM ALL DAY, but I make you laugh at night,\u201d because his tragic background was well known by those who loved his jokes. Linda Rodriguez McRobbie writes: <\/p>\n

[Andrew McConnell] 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 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 make-up: 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><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading The Squeeky Nose of Nightmares<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}