Author Q&A, Parte the Fifthe

Q: Your most recent book "Bad Clowns" explores our cultural love/hate relationship with clowns. What do you think it is about these performers that has spawned such an increasing amount of negative iconography and folklore?

A: Clowns make people uncomfortable for several reasons, among them that they straddle categories and boundaries: We know there’s a real human under all that loud clothing, greasepaint and mask—yet they look and act distinctly inhuman. They can do magic tricks, they have flowers that squirt water, they may carry around a rubber chicken—who does that? Clowns do!

Everything about clowns is exaggerated, from their primary-color clothing palette to their props. They wear shoes and eyeglasses many times too big and may accentuate their thin necks by wearing collars several sizes too large. The exaggeration almost always extends toward the greater extremes for the simple reason that they mostly perform in front of crowds, who need to see and hear their props. So clowns aren’t trying to be scary with their appearance, it’s just a function of how they typically perform.

Of course on a subconscious level any unknown person in disguise who stands near us or interacts with us might freak us out. Masks hide almost all of the non-verbal communication we ordinarily get from others. There’s so much information contained in facial expressions, vocal tones, and so on that help us understand the person who’s in front of us. But a mask quite literally masks all that, and it makes us uneasy.

Clowns may be scary to many people, but they are not inherently threatening the way a coiled rattlesnake or knife-wielding mugger is. The fear of clowns stems from a latent, potential harm, a suspicion that the seemingly silly and harmless pratfalling fool before us may in fact not be so silly, so foolish, or so harmless. Most of us understand that the clown is an act—a fake and fantastical persona adopted for a short time as part of a social event. It can be cute and funny at the time, though we may not want to be around when he decides to stop acting. The clown character, historically and culturally, has always been an ambiguous person—neither good nor bad, but sometimes either or both. The clown is a trickster figure, as is the Devil, of course, so there has always been an element of the unexpected, the scary or threatening in the clown. They will always be with us, good and bad.

You know, it is kind of funny and strange to realize that two of my best-known investigations involve chupacabra and evil clowns. I guess two lines of my obituary are pretty well written at this point, and I’ll always be known in association with vampires and clowns. Could be worse.