Clowns

For as far back as I can remember, I’ve always had an affinity for clowns.  I was never one of those children that was scared of clowns.  On the contrary, they fascinated me. 

The outlandish outfits.  The made-up faces.  The notion of the anonymity provided by the made-up faces.  The array of skills they exhibited.  The show. 

Beyond the slapstick and pratfalls and pranks and pies in the face, I also saw potential.  I doubt I even knew what the potential that I saw was, but there were definitely things about clowns that nobody had figured out yet.  Secure doors that the application of a little bit of creativity could unlock. 

Things that maybe I could figure out one day. 

“When I Grow Up…”

There was a sizable stretch of time when the answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was “A clown!”  (Like most children, I claimed a large variety of potential career paths.) 

If you take a look at the history of clowns in culture and society, one of the things that you’ll learn is that long before the existence of the modern circus/birthday party clowns, the position of clown and the position of priest were often held by the same person. 

Which, looking back on it, I find kind of strange.  Early on, I wanted to be a clown.  Later on, I wanted to be a priest.  But at no point did I ever want to be both at the same time.  I was aware of things like Christian clown ministries, but I thought that was just weird.  Two things that did not seem like they should go together to me.  Like an anti-Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. 

To this day I’ve never been to a legitimate circus, but as a child growing up in Mount Angel in the 70s and 80s, every year during Oktoberfest weekend, I (along with most of my friends) were entertained by the Royal Lichtenstein One-Quarter Ring Circus.  Self-billed as “The World’s Smallest Circus”, this group of performers traveled the US ten months out of the year, entertaining crowds with juggling, fire-eating, magic, wire-walking, animal acts, and the antics of the clowns. 

(Their animal acts included trained critters like monkeys, dogs, pigmy goats, ducks, and at one point I remember a magician ‘juggling’ a trio of very annoyed-looking cats.) 

I can’t imagine what else could have ignited my desire to become a clown, so the yearly arrival of the Royal Lichtenstein Circus gets the credit.  Or blame.  Whichever. 

The Slow Preemptive Death of Mike the Clown

The death of my dream of eventual clown-hood began the year that I decided to be a clown for Halloween.  It was a good plan on paper, but after getting into the costume that Mom made me and then having her do my face paint, I set out trick-or-treating…and very quickly learned that I was actually allergic to greasepaint.  That’s not really a lesson that you want to learn the hard way, like I did. 

Even with that initial blow to my future in clowning being as big as it was, I still held out hope.  Until I put serious effort into developing clown skills.  That’s when I started to realize that I simply did not have what it was going to take. 

I absolutely could not learn to juggle.  I honestly had difficulty tossing and catching a single object, let alone trying to keep two or more objects in the air at once. 

I’ve never really been blessed with an abundance of balance.  Which meant that things like walking on stilts, walking a tightrope, riding a unicycle, and similar activities were outside my grasp as well. 

Clowns also need a vast reservoir of stamina.  Another thing I lacked.  Instead of stamina I had asthma, underdeveloped muscles, and an overwhelming urge to rest following activities. 

And then there were the balloon animals.  The aforementioned asthma made blowing up balloons difficult.  But despite years of trying, the first time I managed to successfully tie a balloon shut came when I was already in high school, long after I’d given up on the clown dream.  I never even got as far as learning to twist balloons into critters. 

With no tolerance for greasepaint and no demonstrable clown skills, I slowly came to accept that being a clown was simply not in my future.  And I should instead focus on a different potential career.  Like becoming a parapsychologist.  Or the Maytag Repairman. 

Knick-Knacks, Artwork, and Other Ornamentation

I never actively collected clowns as a child, but there always seemed to be some sort of clown stuff in my possession.  I recall having some clown toys in the playroom of the first house I remember living in. 

When Mom was a child, she used to love paper dolls, but Grandma would never buy them for her.  I therefore was given several sets of paper dolls, mainly because Mom could.  I had a set of Bert and Ernie dolls with all sorts of clothing that I remember playing with a lot.  But there were also clown paper dolls. 

I definitely remember coloring in some clowns in a coloring book at one point.  (I was a Crayola crayon fiend in my youth.  Every now and then I’ll contemplate buying a big box of crayons and a couple of coloring books, but then I remember that I’ve got arthritis in my left hand, and both hands shake when I try to do detail work.) 

When I was older, there was some clown art, too.  I had a framed print of Robert Owen’s “Pando’s Box”.  I also had a reproduction of Arthur Sarnoff’s “Ringo the Clown” in a thick wooden frame that hid a music-box mechanism that played “Send in the Clowns” when you cranked the red wooden knob on the front of the painting directly over (and thereby replacing) Ringo’s big red nose. 

“Pando’s Box” and “Ringo the Clown”

There were several years where Mom worked as a representative for Home Interiors and Gifts, which sold decorating accessories (fake flowers, candles, wall sconces, porcelain figures, framed prints of paintings and so on) through party plan events. 

During this time, Mom decided that I needed a better looking class of stuff on my walls.  So she went about putting together the components of two wall groupings for me.  One was bison themed (I got a Home Interiors framed bison print and ‘matching’ porcelain statue for Christmas one year), and the other one, using “Pando’s Box” and “Ringo the Clown” was clown themed. 

The two clown figurines that she got me for the grouping were not Home Interiors.  They were realistic as opposed to cartoonish, and stood about a foot to a foot and a half tall. 

Both groupings lacked only the shelves that she wanted them to have, which she promised she’d get me.  (She never got them for me.) 

I have the bison picture here in the apartment. The “Pando’s Box” print and bison statue are in my brother’s basement.  The clown figurines are either there, or no longer counted among my possessions.  And I remember placing “Ringo the Clown” into a discard box last time I was working in the basement.  If it’s still there next time I go over, I’ll probably reclaim it. 

Cavalcade of Characters

Okay, since the blog is entitled Writer’s Blo(g/ck), I should probably talk about writing at some point.  When I was starting to outline this post, I said to myself, “I’ve got a couple of clown characters, I should mention those.” 

Then I started making a list.  Which made me discover/realize that ‘a couple’ was a massive underestimation.  I was astonished at just how many clowns were in my stories/unwritten stories/role-playing game material. 

And I’m fairly certain that the characters I’m about to discuss aren’t all of them.  Just the ones that I can easily remember. 

I suspect that my earliest clown character was Bobo.  Bobo’s real name was Bohabatimbah, and he was a centuries old vampire alchemist who had created this concoction that when spread evenly over its skin, would protect a vampire from the effects of the sun.  Said concoction was pure white, and as time went on and the modern clown became popular, Bobo added additional colors to his face and used Bobo the Clown as his cover identity.  Bobo was really one of the vampire leaders, and commended a sizable army of his kind (vamps, not clowns). I don’t really recall any plot surrounding the character, just the character himself.  He would have been created when I was in the fourth or fifth grade.  (While Bobo might have been my first clown character, he certainly wasn’t my first vampire.)

Thus far, I think that my largest complete work of fiction has been my 1990 novel “Driftwood”.  I discussed this in my Autobibliography post back in March.  The novel was about a spaceship crew lost in a far-flung and unknown section of space, much like Star Trek—Voyager (only “Driftwood” came first by nearly five years). 

Anyway, the crew member that was in charge of security was a woman named Sugah Martin, whose great grandparents were clowns, and had undergone an experimental procedure to permanently alter their skin to clown colors and patterns.  Not realizing that the treatment would affect their DNA, and cause all of their descendants to also be white-skinned with clown faces. 

Sugah hated the fact that she looked like a clown, and became a fighter and went into security work in an effort to distance herself from her appearance.  There were hints in the novel that she self-harmed.  She was a character born out of the question, “Is there a difference between being a clown and looking like a clown?” 

I had a couple of other characters that were second-generation clowns, but it wasn’t sci-fi and they weren’t born that way.  They were a set of twins (one boy, one girl), and their parents weren’t just clowns, but the type of clowns that would name their twin children Emmet and Kelly and expect them to carry on the family tradition. 

Their parents were both already professional clowns when they met, and after they married they took on new faces to commemorate their new lives.  Once the twins were old enough to get into clowning, the parents gave the children their old faces for continuing the legacy.  Emmet and Kelly were side characters in a story that I was never able to get the plot to gel for.  I always figured that I’d eventually find another project to put them in, but… you know, writer’s block and all. 

I had several clown characters as either heroes or villains in superhero stories.  Cavalcade (named for my personal collective noun for clowns) had the powers to duplicate himself (like Jamie Madrox the Multiple Man from the X-Men mythos).  Only Cavalcade was a clown, so he turned from one clown into a whole cavalcade of them. 

I briefly contemplated giving Cavalcade a mech-suit designed to look like it had transformed from a classic clown car, so that he could create duplicates of himself that would just literally pour out of the comparatively undersized vehicle.  But I think I talked myself out of it after deciding that the concept was weirder than what I was going for. 

I talked about “The Crimefighter’s Heist” in my Three Projects post last month.  One of the things that the heroes do before the heist is adopt alternate ‘villain’ identities to use during the heist, and one of those is Lovable Clown, who basically dresses in clownified BDSM gear.  I really wanted to write her story. 

I know that there were other clown heroes and villains in my many unwritten superhero projects intended for either novels or comics, but I have my doubts that I’ll remember all of them before I declare this post ‘finished’. 

There’s a project called “The Prophesy of Kazrabourde” I intend to blog about sometime soon (definitely before the end of the year).  It’s a big sprawling epic about an interdimensional cold war with what might possibly be a ridiculously huge cast of characters.  One of those characters, working on the team that’s opposing the protagonist ensemble is Burlinghouse the Clown. 

Burlinghouse is a space-aged jack-of-all-trades with a talent for instilling fear in the enemy.  He’s really a nice guy, he just happens to be great at scaring the absolute crap out of people.  His personality was largely based on the backstage and interview persona of pro-wrestler Rob Van Dam during his period with the WWE.  (Yes, I used to be a wrestling fan.  Deal with it.) 

I can’t forget the clowns of the Straumgate Cavalcade that I talked about in my Pathfinder for One post.  But Banter, Mischief, and Jinx the Juggler weren’t the only clowns I had in my role-playing games.  In my original campaign world, one of the deities was the god of clowns, and I started designing a temple for him, but it never got very far.  I wanted to DM a game where an all-clown party went on a quest to find it. 

And then there was the fan fiction… I don’t think I ever had clowns in my Doctor Who stuff, but there were definitely clown characters in both my Max Headroom (a cyberpunk version of the classic clown-hosted children’s show), and the Real Ghostbusters (ghost clowns!) stories.  I also had a clown anti-hero in Batman’s Gotham City who felt it was his purpose to deal with people who were giving clowns a bad name.  Starting, of course, with the Joker. 

But the biggest clown-oriented story I wanted to tell was in a world where clowning originally evolved out of sorcery, and dealt with modern-day clowns of that tradition trying to beat evil forces in a race to uncover long lost artifacts. 

I had wanted to get a full trilogy out of this idea.  The first book had them seeking the Black Egg, which was an egg-shaped and sized black stone that turned you into a clown (white skin, painted face, etc) if you touched it with your bare skin.  No idea what the second book would have been.  But the third book would have been the quest for the ultimate artifact: The Coulronomicon. 

I am nothing if not filled with weird ideas. 

Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist the Clown began with my desire to wear a costume to OryCon (Portland’s annual sci-fi convention).  I wanted to wear something significant, but didn’t want to cosplay as someone else’s intellectual property. 

I’ve never considered anyone wearing a clown mask to be a clown.  A clown’s face is makeup on skin.  Some dude in a clown mask is just some dude in a clown mask.  However, when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to wear to the convention, I was able to summon up just enough hypocrisy to realize that a clown mask might be a suitable work around for my greasepaint allergy. 

I had a lot of ideas about Zeitgeist’s look before we finally went with what we ended up with.  Originally he was supposed to be traditional clown on one side of his face, and photonegative clown on the other.  I wanted him to embody every aspect of being a clown that I could fit into him, along with the opposite of that.  A synthesis of clown and anti-clown. 

In between coming up with the initial concept and going forward with the character’s physical creation, he shifted from High Concept Clown to just Slightly Weird Clown.  I tasked my Aunt Mary with making me an oversized tuxedo.  And she did an awesome job making it, and especially making it not only fit me but also appear baggy on my already oversized body. 

For the mask I bought a couple of rolls of white duct tape, and got a pattern for a duct tape bondage helmet from my good close personal friend the Internet.  Then I recruited my brother, and we spent the better part of an evening working on it.  Me sitting still on a kitchen chair, him layering strips of duct tape over a bag around my head.  Then he cut it up the back until I was able to remove my head from it.  The rest of the facial details were added with colored Sharpie. 

The next step was installing grommets into the mask along either side of where he had cut it open, so that we could secure it to my head with a purple bootlace.  Voila! Non-allergenic clown face. 

With so much of me being clownified, I didn’t want to take my boring old cane along with me to the con… but I also didn’t want to be constantly falling over.  So the next object created was a staff-like mobility device made from scraps left over from when my brother and Mallz had built themselves weapons for boffer-fighting. 

It, too, was covered in duct tape.  First fully encased in standard grey, and then decorated with alternating stripes of red, white, and blue. 

I fully clowned up before getting into the car the morning we left for the convention.  And when I strolled into the hotel lobby the very first thing I was told was, “You can’t wear that in here.” 

It turns out that the hotel had recently decided not to allow anyone to wear a full-head mask in any public area of the property for security reasons.  All that hard work for nothing.  I was not happy. 

I appeared as Zeitgeist the Clown one more time, at a party in Portland.  Only this time the fairly cumbersome mask was replaced with a cloth version of the clown face, with details added on in fabric paint.  That was the last time I went full-clown. 

I didn’t ditch the name, however.  I’d already set up an email account for Zeitgeist in case I needed to give someone at the con an email address for myself.  And when my original email address was overrun with spam, I started using Zeitgeist’s address as my new main. 

And then I eventually started using Zeitgeist the Clown as a penname for a new blog project.  But I’ve already told that story in my post on Pseudonyms.  So let’s move on. 

LEGO Clowns

Well, so far in this post there’s been some autobiographical information, some writing content… seems to me like it’s time to talk about LEGO. Might as well hit as many of my blogging basics as I can. 

Only for today’s post, MOC isn’t going to mean My Own Creation, but rather My Own Clownification.  Because there are clowns in LEGO, and I have plans for them. 

The very first series of the LEGO Collectable Minifigures back in 2010 included the Circus Clown.  I believe that this was the first appearance of a clown as a LEGO minifigure.  (The DUPLO line had clown figures, decades earlier, but not the LEGO System line.)  I was very excited when I saw pictures of that guy.  Unfortunately for me, the first Collectable Minifigure package I was ever able to touch in a store was from the third series, long after the first two had sold out. 

Fortunately for me, that Christmas Santa was looking out for me.  (Or my sister.  One or the other.)  Because in my stocking were two packs of series one minifigures.  No idea where she was able to get them from.  And when I opened them, the gods of randomization smiled down upon me because one of those two figures was the Circus Clown. 

There are probably a dozen or so different clown minifigures now, and that’s not counting any of the Joker or Harley Quinn minifigs.  I’ve managed to obtain some of those, but there are still a handful of clown figs on my Bricklink wanted lists that I keep putting off buying.  And the longer I put them off, the more expensive they get.  Going to have to pull the trigger on some of those soon. 

Several years ago when I was doing the LEGO blog, I had a (theoretically) weekly feature called FigBarf Friday.  And one Friday, my subject was Clowns.  I had disassembled all of my available clown figures, and used their parts (among many others) to create a fairly sizable group of custom clowns. 

The Circus of Clowns & the Prunepants Gang

 

Big Show Rodeo Clowns & the Jesters

 

The Clownettes & the Weirdos

These clowns are most likely in a plastic shoebox somewhere in the LEGO room. And I need to find them, because some of them, along with some new clowns, are going to be inhabiting a MOC I’m hoping to build for Bricks Cascade in May of 2023.  Not going to say what it is until I’ve built a prototype and make sure that it will work the way I’m envisioning it.  But it’s going to be awesome. 

Oh, and I’ve got ideas for other MOCs as well.  I’ve been building a miniland scale clown figure in my head for about a week now.  Once I get it completely figured out I’ll order the parts for him off of Bricklink. 

I’ve also wanted (for quite a few years now) to build a vehicle that would be a transport for clowns.  Not the traditional one-joke clown car, but a much longer conveyance that is part motor vehicle and part runaway string of rollercoaster cars.  (It makes sense in my head, and I’ve convinced myself that I’ll be able to build it so that it makes sense to people looking at the finished product.) 

And with my recent exploration into LEGO mech suits, can a clown-based mech really be very far behind?

Coulrophobia and the Evil Clown

Today, the traditional clown is nearly an endangered species.  Very few young people are going into clowning.  And the old clowns are retiring.  The skills and traditions are no longer being passed down. 

The circuses are shutting down.  A lot of hospitals no longer welcome clowns into the children’s wards, as the kids are frightened by them.  The clown is no longer the king of birthday party entertainment. 

The reason for this is simple.  Hollywood has more power than the clowns of the world.  And Hollywood has decided that the most marketable clown is the evil clown.  The scary clown.  The demonic clown. 

To the storytellers of Hollywood, the spread of coulrophobia (the fear of clowns) is money in the bank.  The most common use of the clown is no longer to entertain the children, but instead to frighten… everyone. 

So right now, clowns are faced with a weird choice.  Fade away.  Or evolve into something different.  I’ve seen reports online of experimental clowns performing without makeup.  The same basic performance, but without the face that Hollywood has worked so hard to install the fear of in people.  Will that work?  Only time will tell. 

In ten years’ time, is the evil clown archetype going to be the only type of clown that exists? 

Global pandemic, Republicans trying to strip away the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community. And now the alignment of the clown population is shifting from good to evil. 

This is a very weird time.