Clowns

First of all, sorry about not being able to post last week. My internet access has been limited and i was not able to write something up :(

Anyway I was going to write about something like school or movies are whatnot, but as I was walking home from school today I though to myself, 'you know what would be cool to write about? Clowns.' and so here I am.

I'm sure we have all seen clowns as they are ideally portrayed, with their giant multicoloured wigs and their face paint and goofy walks. I went to a circus when I was like 10, and I still remember seeing the clowns there and genuinely thinking that these guys were actually pretty amusing.

So now that I'm slightly older and have a slightly broader view of the world, I want to understand why clowns are so entertaining and yet so creepy at the same time. Why little needs to be done for a jovial jester to become a horrid harlequin has always been a mystery to me.

So I thought back to when I had been at that circus. What had I like about the clowns? what made them funny? Well for starters they were performing slapstick and generally attempting to do something and failing in the most exaggerated way possible. Is the process of watching other people fail what makes us so amused by them? I thought about that in the context of modern television too, and I realized that the antics of these clowns, like silent film stars such as charlie chaplin, were so compelling because the characters were made to be cartoons. They get makeup put on their face to make them look almost alien and unlike any normal person. As characters they are removed from reality and completely 1 dimensional, so nobody could relate to them and therefore nobody felt their pain at failing to get up that ladder or to paint that wall correctly. By making these characters harmless and cartoony, people dont really feel any shame for them and as such can enjoy their misery to its fullest (but that still leaves the question fo why people enjoy others misery; schadenfreude perhaps?).

And I think this is why they can be so creepy. Because as we grow up and begin to think about these things (who are these people? why do they keep falling on that oil slick? do they have hopes and dreams as well?), we realize that these characters whom people have created are actually pretty irregular, almost crazy. The face-paint becomes more unnerving, the floppy movements and constant trying of the same thing becomes more of a sign of insanity, and we slowly realize that the concept of a clown is that of a highly disfunctional and mentally childish person.

The last thing that I think allows clowns to become so creepy to us is that they are fundamentally a part of childhood. Regardless of whether we've actually seen them, clowns are embedded into the consciousness of our society, and as such we feel for them nonetheless. It seems that we as a society hold our childhood a sacred, and that is why having it violated fears us so greatly. If you look at creepy and scary stories, a lot of them come from taking a childhood object and making it into a monster (eg gremlins, chuckie). It seems that the fact that we took comfort in those things as kids make it all the more scary when they turn out to be watching us as we sleep.

so yeah, just my thoughts. What do you guys think makes clowns so scary?

anyway my reccomendation for this week is adventuretime. Its this completely innocent and yet awesome in its enthusiasm show about two heroes who adventure and get into fun mishaps. Think spongebob but just better and more self-aware.

DFTBA :D