ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, August 26, 1996 TAG: 9608270005
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TODD CAMP FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM
Their faces are caked with a thick layer of pale, skull-colored makeup and decorated with fabricated smiles so as to disguise their real expressions - most likely a leering, vulpine grin.
So who wouldn't love a clown?
Lots of people, that's who. The arrival of the circus should bring smiles to the faces of fans of ``The Greatest Show on Earth.'' The smell of peanuts. The roar of lions. The spectacle of death-defying high-wire antics.
But for some folks, the circus brings shudders. Thoughts turn to the image of a tiny car belching an endless stream of grinning, honking, dancing, juggling, giggling, happy ``clowns.'' In seconds, they're everywhere. Smiling their secret smiles behind a mask of colored paint ... and then the children begin to scream.
OK, so maybe it's not ``that'' bad, but folks who nurse a strong dislike or even intense fear of these jovial fellows may see things differently. Clownaphobes are about as common as lefties, but a thorough search for a name for the fear of clowns came up empty. (Bozophobia?) A search for sufferers was more successful. Though children would seem the more likely victims of ``clownaphobia,'' many youngsters carry that fear into adulthood.
``I really have two big fears, and that's needles and clowns,'' says Fort Worth litigator Marcus Del-Rio. ``I got over my fear of needles, I had to; but I went through my house and got rid of every clown in the place. I don't like clowns at parties. I won't see a movie with clowns in it. If I was locked alone in a room with a clown, I think I would go insane or at least crawl off into a corner and hide.''
So what makes a perfectly reasonable 20-year-old man get the willies over a cheerful fellow with a painted smile and a colorful get-up?
``It's the fact that it's somebody mysterious that I don't know under all that makeup and all that dressing. They see me as I am, when my defenses are low, so they have the upper hand. You don't know what they're going to do and that's frightening.
``It's like walking down a dark alley and then seeing somebody's shadow. They can see you, but all you see is their shadow. But I think clowns are more frightening, because they're supposed to be funny.''
Penn Jillette, the more vocal member of the comic magic team of Penn & Teller, admits he's not afraid of clowns, he just hates 'em. This after reluctantly admitting to having graduated from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in 1973.
``I've been asked about it before, and I've always denied it,'' Jillette said. ``I don't know why I'm givin' it to you, but there you are.''
As for why he hates clowns, Jillette pulls no punches.
``They've become an anachronism,'' he says. ``It's like wearing a baseball cap backward and walking around with your underwear showing. Today that means something, but 100 years from now it will just be seen as eccentric behavior that's bothersome.''
His acerbic skewering saved most of its vitriol for the decline of modern clowning.
``Today's clowns are just awful,'' he says. ``Good people don't work at it anymore. If you work as a clown today, you're automatically lousy. All the good ones are in rock 'n' roll bands or are movie actors. There are nothing but losers working in the field, without exception.''
Randy Brake would probably take exception to that. As a visiting clown with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Brake said an adult dislike of clowns probably stemmed from a childhood fear of them, though he confessed that he rarely runs into clown haters.
``If I see 200 people in a day, maybe only one will say that they don't like clowns,'' Brake says. ``I'll say, `Hello!' and they'll go `Oh, I hate clowns. I hate 'em.' So you know what I do? I chase 'em.''
But hate is one thing and fear is quite another. And when you're discussing fear, who knows what scares you more than horror writer Stephen King? King thought so highly (or is it lowly?) of the circus performers, that when it came time to give form to one of his greatest villains, a force he described as the ultimate evil, King chose a red-haired, painted-faced menace: Pennywise the Dancing Clown. King kicked off his magnum opus ``It'' with Pennywise dismembering a child playing in a rain-filled gutter after a spring shower.
Actor Tim Curry brought the wicked clown to life in the ABC miniseries that ensued, but while King was writing ``It,'' he also incorporated an evil, grinning visage in his directorial debut ``Maximum Overdrive.'' Mounted on the front of one of the film's murderous tractor-trailers is the hideous face of a green, clownlike goblin.
Other writers have made frightening good use of them as well. Author Clive Barker tackled clownaphobia in a short story in his ``Books of Blood'' series. The tale centers on a college professor whose unorthodox experiments in fear come back to haunt him in the form of an ax-wielding clown.
``Psycho'' author Robert Bloch attributes what he describes as ``the essence of true horror'' to a comment by Lon Chaney Sr.
In a 1960 interview, Bloch quoted Chaney as saying, ``A clown is funny in the circus ring, but what would be the normal reaction to opening a door at midnight and finding the same clown, standing there in the moonlight?''
From Chaney to Gacy: Yeesh! Talk about the willies. Well, it didn't take long for Hollywood to tap into the ability for clowns to give us the creeps. Chaney himself played a masochistic clown in the memorable 1924 film ``He Who Gets Slapped.'' Peter Lorre made for a sympathetic but still rather intimidating clown in the 1959 big top adventure, ``The Big Circus.''
But bad clowns began to take on two personas on the big screen, either as mysterious monsters in horrific offerings such as ``Poltergeist'' (1982), ``Clownhouse'' (1988) or ``Killer Klowns from Outer Space'' (1988), or down-on-their-luck losers in shows such as ``Shakes the Clown'' (1992), ``Quick Change'' (1990) and ``Funland'' (1989).
Filmmaker Tim Burton has incorporated wicked clowns into most of his movies, whether it was the bike-napping nightmares of ``Pee-wee's Big Adventure,'' the twisted carnival creations of ``Beetlejuice,'' the menacing Joker and his mime thugs in ``Batman,'' the kidnapping crime crew known as the Red Triangle Circus Gang of ``Batman Returns'' or the ``clown with the tear-away face who's here in a flash and gone without a trace'' from ``Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas.''
The little screen has had its share of bad bozos, whether it's the animated antics of `The Simpsons,' '' Krusty the Clown or sitcom characters such as Crazy Joe Davola, an abusive Pagliacci clown who torments Jerry on ``Seinfeld,'' or the alcoholic Chuckles the Clown on ``The Mary Tyler Moore Show,'' who met his maker after being crushed by an elephant while dressed as a peanut.
But few TV clowns can match Brian Dennehy's chilling performance as the murderous John Wayne Gacy in ``To Catch a Killer,'' particularly when he tells a snooping cop who confronts him at a kids' party, ``Mr. Policeman, don't you know a clown can get away with murder?''
LENGTH: Long : 119 linesby CNB