Features

editor@theotherpress.ca

The Other Press will pay $50 for a feature story of approximately 1,500 words. Please email Editor in Chief
J.J. McCullough with your proposal at editor@theotherpress.ca. Offer good once per semester per student.

 

 

Do you suffer from Coulrophobia?
A brief history of our fear of clowns

By Zerah Lurie, The Ubyssey (University of British Columbia)

VANCOUVER (CUP)— Come on, admit it. It’s easy
to say mean things about clowns. With their goofy big
feet, weird red noses and sometimes peculiar outfits
clowns are an easy target. But whether it’s to laugh,
taunt, or fear depends on the individual.

Everyone seems to have an uneasiness towards
clowns. But it’s not uncommon to hate or even to
fear clowns. Jack Handy, author of Deep Thoughts
on Saturday Night Live, gives his story: “To me,
clowns aren’t funny. In fact, they’re kind of scary. I’ve
wondered where this started and I think it goes back
to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my
dad.”

Who knows what’s behind a clown’s white-painted
face. And it’s not just the make-up that can scare
people away, clowns also represent anarchy and are
personifications of the irrational.

This brings us to the dichotomy of clowns. In one
sense, clowns are seen as white-faced fools
that many people dislike or distrust. In
another sense, clowns act as entertainers
and social provocateurs that play an
important role in society.

The hatred of clowns is so bad these
days that the www.ihateclowns.com |
website is the first hit in a Google search F™
for “clowns,” and gets between 500 and
1000 visitors a day. The website also
sells ihateclown merchandise including
t-shirts with anti-clown slogans such as
“Can't sleep, clowns will eat me,” from
The Simpsons. Rodney Blackwell, the |
site’s creator and designer, says that he
isn’t actually afraid of clowns because that |
would give them too much power; instead
he likes to say, “I just don’t like them.”

Blackwell thinks his dislike of clowns
stems from seeing The Wiz, a movie with
clowns as well as Michael Jackson, too
many times as a child. What he knows of
clowns comes from the movies and he’s
decided that he doesn’t like what he’s
seen. Blackwell feels that there are a lot of |
people out there who hate clowns and likes
to think of his website as a sanctuary for the
anti-clown community. According to him, in a perfect
world, all the clowns would be placed on a deserted
island, as they used to do with lepers.

It’s true, the press is ripe with negative clown
imagery.

A popular character on the sketch comedy show In
Living Color had Damon Wayans dressed up as Homey
D. Clown, an abrasive and uncaring clown who, when
asked to perform a stereotypical clown gag, uttered his
trademark, “Homey don’t play that,” and hit people
over the head.

But Homey is only the tip of the iceberg. The shock-
rock band Insane Clown Posse dress up as wretched,
evil-looking clowns while Stephen King’s novel, JT,
features Pennywise the Clown murdering little children.
My personal favourite is the cult horror film Killer
Klowns from Outer Space, in which evil alien clowns
come to small-town America and use mutant popcorn
and cotton candy to harvest the town’s inhabitants—to
eat that is. The movie’s tagline: In space, no one can
hear ice cream.

Blackwell feels that “in general, clowns as a people
are bad.” But when asked, Constable Sarah Bloom
of the Vancouver police could not recall any crimes
committed by clowns in Vancouver. Staff Sgt Barry
Hickman of the University RCMP said flat out, “There
is no reason to fear clowns at UBC.”

10

Are there rational reasons to fear or hate clowns?
David Jacobi, a post-doctoral student of psychiatry at
UBC, acknowledges that clowns can indeed be scary.
“Through a child’s eyes, clowns can be very
threatening,” Jacobi says, noting that a childhood fear
of clowns could turn into a discomfort with clowns
once that child reaches adulthood. Jacobi, who works
at the anxiety disorders unit at UBC, says that no
one in the psychiatry department has seen a patient
with a fear of clowns, adding that “the fear of clowns
is not something we see in clinical practice.” But he
cautions that this does not mean people aren’t afraid of
clowns. The fear of clowns may be like other specific
types of fears—such as the fear of heights or the fear
of spiders—in that they are pretty common, but since
they don’t interfere with day to day functioning, people
don’t often seek medical attention.

The fear of clowns is called Coulrophobia, a word

 

coined in recent years because of a high interest in the
subject. If you type in “fear of clowns” on Google, the
second hit is The Phobia Clinic, an online clinic where
people can call and receive help with their phobias.
Using methods based on neuro-linguistic programming,
which involves reprogramming how the brain reacts to
certain stimuli (like clowns for instance), The Phobia
Clinic promises to cure you of your fear of clowns
within 24 hours of therapy, guaranteed.

Charging $1,000, most of The Phobia Clinic’s
business comes from the fear of public speaking,
something Seymour Signet, the president and founder
of the clinic, says can interfere with how you run your
life. But Signet adds, “We have had zero clients with a
fear of clowns so far.”

Signet says there is only one fear—fear itself.
“Everyone knows that it’s ridiculous to be afraid of
clowns. We might as well make fun of the fear but not
the person having the fear.” To the individual person,
says Signet, the fear is very real.

“The way we feel about anything has to do with
the way our mind is storing it,” says Signet, who is not
a doctor or a psychologist. According to him, when we
see a clown our first reaction might not be fear. Instead,
our brain will simply ask itself, ‘Oh, I see a clown,
how should I react?’ But if we had a negative clown
experience in our past, the brain would tell us to be

afraid.

In order to cure people of their fears, The Phobia Clinic
uses methods such as anchoring, where a positive
emotion is brought in to associate with a negative
stimulus. There is also Time Line TherapyTM, which
is “a way of assisting people in letting go of negative
emotions to past experiences,” says Signet. Jacobi
suggested that the fear of clowns would typically be
treated through gradual exposure to clownery until the
patient becomes habituated. He specifically warns that
“what often maintains fears is avoidance.”

Once Blackwell’s local paper took the exposure
approach and put him in a room with a clown to see
how he’d react. “I did once meet a clown,” he says.
“Got to know the person behind the makeup. I thought
they were nice but still couldn’t understand why they
chose to wear the clown makeup.”

While Rodney admits there is something about the
clown mask that he doesn’t trust, he says the
major reason that he doesn’t like clowns is
that “they don’t understand what’s funny or
where the limits are.”

But real clowns, it seems, don’t want

to bother people. Lisa Voth, a theatre student
at SFU who has taken several clown theory
courses, related that when she clowned at
the Vancouver Folk Festival, she purposely
avoided people who didn’t want to interact
with her.
“T think there is a responsibility on the part
of a clown to develop a relationship and feel
where the person you are interacting with
is.”

Marcel Lebrun, a performing arts
and music teacher at an elementary school
in North Vancouver, has no formal clown
training, unlike Voth. Lebrun works part-
time as Twister the Clown, performing at
_ everything from birthday parties to school
. assemblies. Twister can do everything you
would expect a clown to do such as juggle,
ride a unicycle and twist balloons. Lebrun
also feels that an important part of clowning
is learning how to deal with people and
respecting their space.

“Whenever I encounter kids that are afraid of me, I

pretend I’m afraid of them,” he says, adding that getting
in the child’s face is the wrong thing to do.
Taking clowning very seriously, Lebrun sees himself
as an entertainer first. “Bringing professionalism to
clowning is one of the most important parts of it,” he
adds.

Some of Twister’s professional rules are that he
always goes to parties already dressed, never eats and
even tries not to go to the bathroom.

Yet, even with his professionalism, Lebrun admits
that he has been affected by all the negative imagery
surrounding clowns in the media. “Krusty breaks all
the rules of the professional clown,” says Lebrun, who
has been very sensitive to how people approach clowns
and has created Twister’s image in response to it. “One
of the reasons I’m moving away from the traditional
clowns is because of the stigma associated with them.”

Twister the Clown is an example of an auguste
clown, which instead of the classic white-face clown,
uses more flesh-tone make-up. Auguste clowns are
the least intelligent of the clowns (even though that
is not saying much) and tend to be the zaniest, which
as Lebrun describes it, involves a lot of slap stick and
falling down. Typically, everything an auguste clown
does blows up in his face.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 11