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当华美的叶片落尽，生命的脉络才历历可见..
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The History and Psychology of Clowns Being Scary
There’s a word— albeit one not recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary or any psychology manual— for the excessive fear of clowns: Coulrophobia.
Not a lot of people actually suffer from a debilitating phobia of clowns; a lot more people, however, just don’t like them. Do a Google search for “I hate clowns” and the first hit is ihateclowns.com, a forum for clown-haters that also offers vanity @ihateclowns.com emails. One “I Hate Clowns” Facebook page has just under 480,000 likes. Some circuses have held workshops to help visitors get over their fear of clowns by letting them watch performers transform into their clown persona. In Sarasota, Florida, in 2006, communal loathing for clowns took a criminal turn when dozens of fiberglass clown statues—part of a public art exhibition called "Clowning Around Town" and a nod to the city’s history as a winter haven for traveling circuses—were defaced, their limbs broken, heads lopped off, spray-painted; two were abducted and we can only guess at their sad fates.
Even the people who are supposed to like clowns—children—supposedly don’t. In 2008, a widely reported University of Sheffield, England, survey of 250 children between the ages of four and 16 found that most of the children disliked and even feared images of clowns. The BBC’s report on the study featured a child psychologist who broadly declared, “Very few children like clowns. They are unfamiliar and come from a different era. They don't look funny, they just look odd.”
But most clowns aren’t trying to be odd. They’re trying to be silly and sweet, fun personified. So the question is, when did the clown, supposedly a jolly figure of innocuous, kid-friendly entertainment, become so weighed down by fear and sadness? When did clowns become so dark?
Maybe they always have been.
Clowns, as pranksters, jesters, jokers, harlequins, and mythologized tricksters have been around for ages. They appear in most cultures—Pygmy clowns made Egyptian pharaohs laugh in 2500 BCE; in ancient imperial China, a court clown called YuSze was, according to the lore, the only guy who could poke holes in Emperor Qin Shih Huang’s plan to paint the Great Wall of China; Hopi Native Americans had a tradition of clown-like characters who interrupted serious dance rituals with ludicrous antics. Ancient Rome’s clown was a stock fool called the stupidus; the court jesters of medieval Europe were a sanctioned way for people under the feudal thumb to laugh at the guys in charge; and well into the 18th and 19th century, the prevailing clown figure of Western Europe and Britain was the pantomime clown, who was a sort of bumbling buffoon.
But clowns have always had a dark side, says David Kiser, director of talent for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. After all, these were characters who reflected a funhouse mirror back on society; academics note that their comedy was often derived from their voracious appetites for food, sex, and drink, and their manic behavior. “So in one way, the clown has always been an impish spirit… as he’s kind of grown up, he’s always been about fun, but part of that fun has been a bit of mischief,” says Kiser.
“Mischief” is one thing; homicidal urges is certainly another. What’s changed about clowns is how that darkness is manifest, argued Andrew McConnell Stott, Dean of Undergraduate Education and an English professor at the University of Buffalo, SUNY.
Stott is the author of several articles on scary clowns and comedy, as well as The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, a much-lauded 2009 biography of the famous comic pantomime player on the Regency London stage. Grimaldi was the first recognizable ancestor of the modern clown, sort of the Homo erectus of clown evolution. He’s the reason why clowns are still sometimes called “Joeys”; though his clowning was of a theatrical and not circus tradition, Grimaldi is so identified with modern clowns that a church in east London has conducted a Sunday service in his honor every year since 1959, with congregants all dressed in full clown regalia.
In his day, he was hugely visible: It was claimed that a full eighth of London’s population had seen Grimaldi on stage. Grimaldi made the clown the leading character of the pantomime, changing the way he looked and acted. Before him, a clown may have worn make-up, but it was usually just a bit of rouge on the cheeks to heighten the sense of them being florid, funny drunks or rustic yokels. Grimaldi, however, suited up in bizarre, colorful costumes, stark white face paint punctuated by spots of bright red on his cheeks and topped with a blue mohawk. He was a master of physical comedy—he leapt in the air, stood on his head, fought himself in hilarious fisticuffs that had audiences rolling in the aisles—as well as of satire lampooning the absurd fashions of the day, comic impressions, and ribald songs.
But because Grimaldi was such a star, the character he’d invented became closely associated with him. And Grimaldi’s real life was anything but comedy—he’d grown up with a tyrant of a stage father; he was prone to bouts of depression; his first wife died during childbirth; his son was an alcoholic clown who’d drank himself to death by age 31; and Grimaldi’s physical gyrations, the leaps and tumbles and violent slapstick that had made him famous, left him in constant pain and prematurely disabled. As Grimaldi himself joked, “I am GRIM ALL DAY, but I make you laugh at night.” That Grimaldi could make a joke about it highlights how well known his tragic real life was to his audiences.
Enter the young Charles Dickens. After Grimaldi died penniless and an alcoholic in 1837 (the coroner’s verdict: “Died by the visitation of God”), Dickens was charged with editing Grimaldi’s memoirs. Dickens had already hit upon the dissipated, drunken clown theme in his 1836 The Pickwick Papers. In the serialized novel, he describes an off-duty clown—reportedly inspired by Grimaldi’s son—whose inebriation and ghastly, wasted body contrasted with his white face paint and clown costume. Unsurprisingly, Dickens’ version of Grimadli’s life was, well, Dickensian, and, Stott says, imposed a “strict economy”: For every laugh he wrought from his audiences, Grimaldi suffered commensurate pain.
Stott credits Dickens with watering the seeds in popular imagination of the scary clown—he’d even go so far as to say Dickens invented the scary clown—by creating a figure who is literally destroying himself to make his audiences laugh. What Dickens did was to make it difficult to look at a clown without wondering what was going on underneath the make-up: Says Stott, “It becomes impossible to disassociate the character from the actor.” That Dickens’s version of Grimaldi’s memoirs was massively popular meant that this perception, of something dark and troubled masked by humor, would stick.
Meanwhile, on the heels of Grimaldi’s fame in Britain, the major clown figure on the Continent was Jean-Gaspard Deburau’s Pierrot, a clown with white face paint punctuated by red lips and black eyebrows whose silent gesticulations delighted French audiences. Deburau was as well known on the streets of Paris as Grimaldi was in London, recognized even without his make-up. But where Grimaldi was tragic, Deburau was sinister: In 1836, Deburau killed a boy with a blow from his walking stick after the youth shouted insults at him on the street (he was ultimately acquitted of the murder). So the two biggest clowns of the early modern clowning era were troubled men underneath that face-paint.
After Grimaldi and Deburau’s heyday, pantomime and theatrical traditions changed; clowning largely left the theater for the relatively new arena of the circus. The circus got its start in the mid-1760s with British entrepreneur Philip Astley’s equestrian shows, exhibitions of “feats of horsemanship” in a circular arena. These trick riding shows soon began attracting other performers; along with the jugglers, trapeze artists, and acrobats, came clowns. By the mid-19th century, clowns had become a sort of “hybrid Grimaldian personality [that] fit in much more with the sort of general, overall less-nuanced style of clowning in the big top,” explains Stott.
Clowns were comic relief from the thrills and chills of the daring circus acts, an anarchic presence that complimented the precision of the acrobats or horse riders. At the same time, their humor necessarily became broader—the clowns had more space to fill, so their movements and actions needed to be more obvious. But clowning was still very much tinged with dark hilarity: French literary critic Edmond de Goncourt, writing in 1876, says, “[T]he clown’s art is now rather terrifying and full of anxiety and apprehension, their suicidal feats, their monstrous gesticulations and frenzied mimicry reminding one of the courtyard of a lunatic asylum.” Then there’s the 1892 Italian opera, Pagliacci (Clowns), in which the cuckolded main character, an actor of the Grimaldian clown mold, murders his cheating wife on stage during a performance. Clowns were unsettling—and a great source for drama.
England exported the circus and its clowns to America, where the genre blossomed; in late 19th century America, the circus went from a one-ring horse act to a three-ring extravaganza that travelled the country on the railways. Venues and humor changed, but images of troubled, sad, tragic clowns remained—Emmett Kelly, for example, was the most famous of the American “hobo” clowns, the sad-faced men with five o’clock shadows and tattered clothes who never smiled, but who were nonetheless hilarious. Kelly’s “Weary Willie” was born of actual tragedy: The break-up of his marriage and America’s sinking financial situation in the 1930s.
Clowns had a sort of heyday in America with the television age and children’s entertainers like Clarabell the Clown, Howdy Doody’s silent partner, and Bozo the Clown. Bozo, by the mid-1960s, was the beloved host of a hugely popular, internationally syndicated children’s show – there was a 10-year wait for tickets to his show. In 1963, McDonald’s brought out Ronald McDonald, the Hamburger-Happy Clown, who’s been a brand ambassador ever since (although heavy is the head that wears the red wig – in 2011, health activists claimed that he, like Joe Camel did for smoking, was promoting an unhealthy lifestyle for children; McDonald’s didn’t ditch Ronald, but he has been seen playing a lot more soccer).
But this heyday also heralded a real change in what a clown was. Before the early 20th century, there was little expectation that clowns had to be an entirely unadulterated symbol of fun, frivolity, and happiness; pantomime clowns, for example, were characters who had more adult-oriented story lines. But clowns were now almost solely children’s entertainment. Once their made-up persona became more associated with children, and therefore an expectation of innocence, it made whatever the make-up might conceal all the more frightening—creating a tremendous mine for artists, filmmakers, writers and creators of popular culture to gleefully exploit to terrifying effect. Says Stott, “Where there is mystery, it’s supposed there must be evil, so we think, ‘What are you hiding?’”
Most clowns aren’t hiding anything, except maybe a bunch of fake flowers or a balloon animal. But again, just as in Grimaldi and Deburau’s day, it was what a real-life clown was concealing that tipped the public perception of clowns. Because this time, rather than a tragic or even troubled figure under the slap and motley, there was something much darker lurking.
Even as Bozo was cavorting on sets across America, a more sinister clown was plying his craft across the Midwest. John Wayne Gacy’s public face was a friendly, hard-working guy; he was also a registered clown who entertained at community events under the name Pogo. But between 1972 and 1978, he sexually assaulted and killed more than 35 young men in the Chicago area. “You know… clowns can get away with murder,” he told investigating officers, before his arrest.
Gacy didn’t get away with it—he was found guilty of 33 counts of murder and was executed in 1994. But he’d become identified as the “Killer Clown,” a handy sobriquet for newspaper reports that hinged on the unexpectedness of his killing. And bizarrely, Gacy seemed to revel in his clown persona: While in prison, he began painting; many of his paintings were of clowns, some self-portraits of him as Pogo. What was particularly terrifying was that Gacy, a man who’d already been convicted of a sexual assault on a teenage boy in 1968, was given access to children in his guise as an innocuous clown. This fueled America’s already growing fears of “stranger danger” and sexual predation on children, and made clowns a real object of suspicion.
After a real life killer clown shocked America, representations of clowns took a decidedly terrifying turn. Before, films like Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 Oscar-winning The Greatest Show on Earth could toy with the notion of the clown with a tragic past—Jimmy Stewart played Buttons, a circus clown who never removed his make-up and who is later revealed to be a doctor on the lam after “mercy killing” his wife—but now, clowns were really scary.
In 1982, Poltergeist relied on transforming familiar banality—the Californian suburb, a piece of fried chicken, the television—into real terror; but the big moment was when the little boy’s clown doll comes to life and tries to drag him under the bed. In 1986, Stephen King wrote It, in which a terrifying demon attacks children in the guise of Pennywise the Clown; in 1990, the book was made into a TV mini-series. In 1988, B-movie hit Killer Klowns from Outer Space featured alien clowns harboring sharp-toothed grins and murderous intentions. The next year saw Clownhouse, a cult horror film about escaped mental patients masquerading as circus clowns who terrorize a rural town. Between the late 1980s and now – when the Saw franchise’s mascot is a creepy clown-faced puppet -- dozens of films featuring vicious clowns appeared in movie theatres (or, more often, went straight to video), making the clown as reliable a boogeyman as Freddy Kreuger.
Kiser, Ringling’s talent spotter and a former clown himself, acknowledged the damage that scary clown images have done to clowning, though he was inclined to downplay the effect. “It’s like, ‘Oh man, we’re going to have to work hard to overcome that one,’” he says.
But anecdotally at least, negative images of clowns are harming clowning as a profession. Though the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t keep track of professional clowns specifically (they’re lumped in with comedians, magicians, and other miscellaneous performers), in the mid-2000s, articles began popping up in newspapers across the country lamenting the decline of attendees at clown conventions or at clowning workshop courses. Stott believes that the clown has been “evacuated as a figure of fun” (notably, Stott is personally uncomfortable with clowns and says he finds them “strange”); psychologists suggest that negative clown images are replacing positive clown images.
“You don’t really see clowns in those kinds of safe, fun contexts anymore. You see them in movies and they’re scary,” says Dr. Martin Antony, a professor of psychology at Ryerson University in Toronto and author of the Anti-Anxiety Work Book. “Kids are not exposed in that kind of safe fun context as much as they used to be and the images in the media, the negative images, are still there.”
That’s creating a vicious circle of clown fear: More scary images means diminished opportunities to create good associations with clowns, which creates more fear. More fear gives more credence to scary clown images, and more scary clown images end up in circulation. Of course, it’s difficult to say whether there has been a real rise in the number of people who have clown phobias since Gacy and It. A phobia is a fear or anxiety that inhibits a person’s life and clown fears rarely rate as phobias, psychologists say, because one simply isn’t confronted by clowns all that often. But clown fear is, Antony says, exacerbated by clowns’ representation in the media. “We also develop fears from what we read and see in the media… There’s certainly lots of examples of nasty clowns in movies that potentially puts feet on that kind of fear,” he says.
From a psychologist’s perspective, a fear of clowns often starts in childhood; there’s even an entry in the psychologists’ bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM, for a fear of clowns, although it’s under the umbrella category of a pediatric phobia of costumed characters (sports mascots, Mickey Mouse). “It starts normally in children about the age of two, when they get anxiety about being around strangers, too. At that age, children’s minds are still developing, there’s a little bit of a blend and they’re not always able to separate fantasy from reality,” explains Dr. Brenda Wiederhold, a veteran psychologist who runs a phobia and anxiety treatment center in San Diego that uses virtual reality to treat clients.
Most people, she says, grow out of the fear, but not everyone—perhaps as much as 2 percent of the adult population will have a fear of clowns. Adult clown phobics are unsettled by the clown’s face-paint and the inability to read genuine emotion on a clown’s face, as well as the perception that clowns are able to engage in manic behavior, often without consequences.
But really, what a clown fear comes down to, what it’s always come down to, is the person under the make-up. Ringling’s Kiser agreed.
“I think we have all experienced wonderful clowns, but we’ve also all experienced clowns who in their youth or lack of training, they don’t realize it, but they go on the attack,” Kiser says, explaining that they can become too aggressive in trying to make someone laugh. “One of the things that we stress is that you have to know how to judge and respect people’s space.” Clowning, he says, is about communicating, not concealing; good clown make-up is reflective of the individual’s emotions, not a mask to hide behind—making them actually innocent and not scary.
But have bad, sad, troubled clowns done too much damage? There are two different, conflicting visions of the clown’s future.
Stott, for one, sees clowning continuing on its dark path. “I think we’ll find that the kind of dark carnival, scary clown will be the dominant mode, that that figure will continue to persist in many different ways,” he says, pointing to characters like Krusty the Clown on The Simpsons, who’s jaded but funny, or Heath Ledger’s version of The Joker in the Batman reboot, who is a terrifying force of unpredictable anarchy. “In many respects, it’s not an inversion of what we’re used to seeing, it’s just teasing out and amplifying those traits we’ve been seeing for a very long time.” Other writers have suggested that the scary clown as a dependable monster under the bed is almost “nostalgically fearful,” already bankrupted by overuse.
But there’s evidence that, despite the claims of the University of Sheffield study, kids actually do like clowns: Some studies have shown that real clowns have a beneficial affect on the health outcomes of sick children. The January 2013 issue of the Journal of Health Psychology published an Italian study that found that, in a randomized controlled trial, the presence of a therapy clown reduced pre-operative anxiety in children booked for minor surgery. Another Italian study, carried out in 2008 and published in the December 2011 issue of the Natural Medicine Journal found that children hospitalized for respiratory illnesses got better faster after playing with therapeutic clowns.
And Kiser, of course, doesn’t see clowning diminishing in the slightest. But good clowns are always in shortage, and it’s good clowns who keep the art alive. “If the clown is truly a warm and sympathetic and funny heart, inside of a person who is working hard to let that clown out… I think those battles [with clown fears] are so winnable,” he says. “It’s not about attacking, it’s about loving. It’s about approaching from a place of loving and joy and that when you really look at it, you see, that’s it really genuine, it’s not fake.”
有这么一个词——尽管它没有收录在牛津英语词典或任何心理学手册中——它表示对小丑的极端恐惧：小丑恐惧症（Coulrophobia）。
其实对小丑产生战栗般恐惧的人并不是很多，然而有更多人，只是单纯不喜欢小丑。在GOOGLE上搜索“我恨小丑”的话，结果的第一条是我恨小丑网 ihateclowns.com，这是一个讨厌小丑的人聚集的论坛，它还提供了挂名邮件后缀@ihateclowns.com 。在非死不可上，一个“我恨小丑”的主页收到的赞快到48万了。一些马戏团还在工坊中提供相关项目，他们让客人观看表演者如何化妆成为小丑，以帮助客人克服对小丑的恐惧。2006年在佛罗里达的撒拉索塔，一群闲着没事干的家伙们出于对小丑的厌恶，实施了一次犯罪行为——他们损毁了公开展览“环城小丑”中的多座玻璃小丑雕像，并扰乱了向温特黑文城的历史致敬的环游马戏团表演。那些雕像的身体支离破碎，被无情地斩首，还被胡乱地喷漆，甚至有两座雕像被直接拖走，而我们只能站在这里料想它们悲剧的下场。
即便是那些本该喜欢小丑的——孩子们——也恐怕不然。英国谢菲尔德大学在2008年实行了一次被广泛报道的问卷调查，这次调查从250名4~16岁不等的孩子们身上得出了一个结论：大多数孩子不喜欢甚至害怕小丑。BBC关于这个研究专门为一名儿童心理学家制作了专题，他声称“很少有孩子会喜欢小丑，他们只会觉得小丑很诡异，觉得小丑来自另外一个次元，看上去一点儿都不滑稽，反而古怪得很。”
但实际上大多小丑没想表现得这么诡异，他们努力希望别人觉得自己蠢萌又可爱，搞笑又欢脱。那么问题来了：到底是何时起，小丑这样一个对儿童来说理应是无害又欢快的娱乐形象，堕落得充满了恐惧和悲伤？小丑怎么会变得这么阴暗？
也许他们一直都很阴暗。
小丑自古以来就代表着捣蛋鬼、恶作剧者、开玩笑的人、丑角以及神秘狡猾的小人。这些形象出现在各种文明中——公元前2500年侏儒小丑让埃及法老王开怀大笑；在封建时期的中国，根据口头传说，一个叫优旃的宫廷小丑是唯一一个搅和了秦始皇给长城填色的人；美国土著霍皮族有个传统，在重大的舞会中让一个小丑的角色用滑稽的行为来打断典礼；在古罗马，小丑是不起眼的傻瓜，被称为蠢货；中世纪欧洲的宫廷小丑则是一种惩罚方式，用来处置在封建统治下对封建主不敬的人；而到了18和19世纪，在西欧和英国盛行的是哑剧小丑，这种小丑意味着笨手笨脚的滑稽演员。
但小丑总是有阴暗面的。这句话出自天才林林兄弟和巴纳姆及贝利马戏团的导演戴维·基瑟，毕竟，小丑的角色用奇异的方式折射了这个社会。专业人士表示，小丑的喜剧性通常是来自于人们对食物、性、酗酒的贪婪欲望和暴躁的举止。基瑟说：“说白了，小丑的灵魂核心一直都是黑暗的……小丑也算是成年人的形象，他总是很滑稽，但这滑稽总会让人觉得有些恶意。”
纽约州立大学巴福罗学院的本科院长兼英语教授安德鲁·马克奈·斯托特辩称：“恶作剧”是一回事儿，杀人的冲动则完全是另一回事儿了，是阴暗面的表现形式逐渐改变了小丑本身的涵义。
斯托特写了一些关于恐怖小丑和喜剧的文章，同时也创作了《约瑟夫·格里马迪的哑剧人生》（The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi），这是一部在2009年广受好评的传记，写的是一个活在伦敦摄政时期的有名的哑剧喜剧演员。格里马迪算是现代小丑的祖先，可以理解为小丑进化中的直立人阶段吧。就是因为格里马迪的缘故，现在的小丑有时候还被叫做“马戏团小丑”（Joeys），即便他演绎的小丑仅限于在剧院舞台上而非马戏团里。由于种种原因，格里马迪还是被归类于现代小丑，而东伦敦的一座教堂自1959年以来每个星期天，都会召集人们打扮成小丑的模样举办活动以纪念他。
在格里马迪的时代里，他无人不晓：据说整个伦敦市的人都欣赏过他的舞台表演。格里马迪让小丑成了哑剧的灵魂，并一改小丑的形象和特征，在格里马迪之前的小丑化着简陋不堪的妆，说是化妆其实不过是在脸上抹点胭脂来达到小丑鲜艳、滑稽而醉醺醺或者是乡巴佬的形象。然而格里马迪却身着华丽缤纷的戏服，无比雪白的粉妆脸上缀着艳丽的红点，再加上蓝色的夺目莫霍克发型，他是行为喜剧的大师——在空中蹦蹦跳跳、倒立、用幽默的方式自己和自己打架，这一切都让观众们乐呵捧腹大笑——当然还有那极具讽刺性的、那个时代标志性的荒唐时尚、幽默方式和下流的歌谣。
不过正因为格里马迪当时是个超级巨星，他所创造的角色也愈加与他融为一体，格里马迪的现实生活中除了喜剧一无所有——他在暴君般的父亲身边长大，并有抑郁倾向，他的第一任妻子在分娩的时候去世，而他的儿子是个在31岁灌死自己的酒鬼小丑，最终，格里马迪的舞台技巧，那些让他名声大噪的跳跃翻滚的动作和暴力的闹剧，也将他推入了饱受病痛和早年残疾的深渊之中。格里马迪拿自己开玩笑：“我是个在白天忧郁的人（GRIM ALL DAY），但我能在晚上让你笑得肚子疼。”他总是能开着玩笑告诉观众自己悲剧的人生。
接着让我们来看一下查尔斯·狄更斯吧，1837年，格里马迪身无分文、以一个酒鬼的身份离世了（验尸官说：“死是上帝对他的惩罚”）。此时狄更斯担起了整理格里马迪回忆录的重任，他在1836年创作的《匹克威客别传（The Pickwick Papers）》中就已经涉及到了糜烂而醉醺醺的小丑形象，在这本连载小说中，他描绘了一个无所事事的小丑——据说是从格里马迪那儿得到的灵感——小丑的爱酒成痴、虚弱而糟蹋的身体与他白色的脸小丑的妆形成鲜明对比。意料之中，狄更斯笔下格里马迪的人生，呃，很狄更斯，斯托特表示它被刻画得如同“严酷经济”：每当格里马迪让观众笑得开怀，他就会承受等价的痛苦。
斯托特相信是狄更斯孕育了恐怖小丑经典形象的种子——他甚至觉得狄更斯通过创作一个看上去在毁灭自己取悦观众的角色，一手打造了恐怖小丑。狄更斯让人更加好奇在小丑华丽的妆容之下是怎样的真面目，对此斯托特说，“把小丑角色和演员分别看待，已经是不可能的了。”狄更斯版本的格里马迪回忆录被普遍认为阐述了这个想法，即：在幽默的假面下，阴暗与纠结终会爆发。
与此同时，仅次于英国格里马迪的盛名之下，欧洲大陆上还有一个重要的小丑，演绎者名叫让·嘉斯帕·杜布拉。有着一张涂白的脸庞，红色的嘴唇和黑色的眉毛非常醒目，这个小丑以他默然表演受到法国观众的追捧。格里马迪在伦敦人气十足，杜布拉在巴黎的大街小巷也享誉着伯仲之间的盛名，他甚至不用化妆也能被认出来。不同的是格里马迪是个悲剧，而杜布拉是个祸害。1836年，杜布拉用他的拐杖殴打并杀死了一个小男孩，就因为这个孩子在光天化日下冲着他大叫并辱骂（犯下杀人罪的他最终被无罪释放）。所以，欧洲早期现代的两个最巨人的小丑，在舞台之外都是些爱惹麻烦的家伙。
当格里马迪和杜布拉的全盛期在历史长河中隐去之际，哑剧和戏剧表演的规矩开始有所变动，小丑演绎开始脱离剧院舞台，成为了马戏团的全新竞技场。1760年代中期，从英国企业家菲利普·阿斯特里的马术表演和一次圆形竞技场中“精湛马术”表演开始，马戏团拾起了小丑。这些用技巧来骑乘的表演开始不断吸引各种演员，包括杂耍、艺人、和杂技演员转行成了小丑。斯托特说，到19世纪中期为止，小丑成了一种“马戏篷里相对容易胜任、普遍而泛滥、又充满着格里马迪性格特色的表演”。
小丑其实是马戏团的一种喜剧性的解脱，它让马戏团危险得令人毛骨悚然的大胆演出松了一口气，又突出体现了杂技演员和马戏演员的精湛功力。同时，小丑的幽默也不可避免地愈加广泛了——小丑有了更广阔的天空，于是他们的行为举止也理应变得更加鲜明有个性。但即便如此，小丑的演绎还是脱离不了它阴暗气质的幽默：法国文学评论家艾德蒙‧德‧龚古尔在1876年写道：“如今，小丑的艺术已经变得愈加可怕而且充斥着焦虑和恐惧，他们那自杀倾向的举止、怪物一般的姿势和那疯狂的伪装，无时不刻都在告诉我们小丑本质是精神病院小花园里的一员。”然后我们来看看1892年的意大利歌剧《Pagliacci(小丑)》，带了绿帽子的主人公套的是格里马迪小丑的壳子，在舞台演出中谋杀了出轨的妻子。小丑让人浑身不自在——而小丑也是戏剧题材的灵感源泉。
小丑从英国走向了美国，那儿的娱乐生活更为丰富多彩，在19世纪晚期的美国，马戏团从单调的马术表演转型到了多姿的表演盛典，并且在铁路上环游了整个美国。尽管表演场地和幽默形式改变了，小丑那纠结、失落和悲剧的性格色彩却一成不变——举个栗子，艾美特·凯利是美国“流浪汉”小丑中名字最响亮的一个人，这个满面悲伤的男人衣衫褴褛，看上去风尘仆仆没有好好休息过，他从不笑，可他却非常滑稽。其实凯利那“萎靡流浪汉”的人生是个大悲剧：他婚姻破裂，还经历了美国1930s时的金融低迷。
美国的电视机时代实际上可以算是小丑的全盛期，像小丑克拉尔贝尔、霍迪·都迪安静的搭档还有小丑博索等人都是那时候孩子们的欢乐大伙伴。1960s中期之前，博索是一场大型国际化的著名儿童节目的主持人，他备受欢迎——要买他节目的票你得先乖乖等上10年。1963年，麦当劳带给了我们麦当劳蜀黍，一个快乐的汉堡包小丑，从那以后他一直是受瞩目的品牌代言人（尽管他戴着红色假发的脑袋备受压力——2011年，健康行为学家说他就像吸烟的桥·卡梅尔一样，给孩子们树立了不健康生活的坏榜样，当然麦当劳没有抛弃蜀黍，但他之后就改邪归正经常踢足球了）。
然而小丑的全盛期也预示了一次小丑内涵的大改变。在20世纪早期之前，就没有人指望小丑从头到尾都象征着乐趣、轻浮和快乐，举个栗子，哑剧小丑的角色就掺杂了更多成年人的故事。但那时候小丑几乎是孩子们唯一的娱乐人物了，一旦小丑形成的人格和孩子们的羁绊越深、他们被看待得越纯洁善良，它就会不知不觉隐藏那背后更多的阴暗恐怖——这给那些艺术家、电影制作人、作家和流行艺术家带来了值得发掘的宝矿，从中随心所欲地应用在恐怖效果上。斯托特说：“哪儿有秘密，哪儿就该有邪恶，所以我们才一直思考‘你隐瞒了什么？’这个问题。”
大部分小丑并没有隐藏什么，除了一大束假花或者一只动物形状的气球。重要的是，与格里马迪和杜布拉那时候一样，是扮演小丑的演员在现实中隐藏的东西影响了人们对小丑的看法。因为现在这会儿，在五颜六色的妆容和姿态下潜伏的是，比悲剧或麻烦更加黑暗的一面。
在博索笑着享用全美的追捧时，一个更为罪恶的小丑正在中西部穿针引线着。约翰·韦恩·加西的公众形象是友好和勤劳的，他还用颇勾这个艺名作为正式小丑在活动上表演过。然而在1972年和1978的六年间，他在芝加哥强奸并杀害了至少35个年轻的男人。“你知道的……小丑可以逍遥法外。”他在被捕前告诉警官。
加西没能逍遥法外——他背判定33起谋杀罪并在1994年被处决，但他开始拥有了“杀人小丑”的名字，报纸用这个易懂的外号刊登了加西丧心病狂的杀人行为。然而很诡异地，加西好像沉迷于他小丑的角色：他在监狱里开始画画，其中大多都是小丑的画，还有一些他作为小丑颇勾的自画像。最令人毛骨悚然的是，加西这个在1968年就性侵犯了一名18岁男孩的罪人，却能轻而易举用他无辜小丑的形象接近孩子们。这件事给美国本就不断警惕的“陌生人危机”和儿童性侵火上浇油，并且把小丑们都推入了可疑分子的圈里。
在这场活生生的小丑杀手事件冲击了美国之后，小丑就变成了可怕的代表。在此之前，德米尔1952年的奥斯卡得奖电影《地球上最棒的演出》还可以给小丑配上一个黑历史，随意地编排角色——吉米·斯图尔特扮演了一个马戏团小丑巴通，这个小丑从不卸妆，最后发现他以前其实是个让妻子“安乐死”之后畏罪潜逃的医生——但是现在，小丑是真的恐怖了。
1982年，《吵闹鬼（ Poltergeist）》电影中将生活中的平凡事物——加州郊区、一块炸鸡、电视机——都变成了现实的恐怖，但最具冲击性的是电影中小男孩的小丑玩偶复活并试图把他拽进床底下。1986年，斯蒂芬·金创作了《死光/小丑回魂（It）》，一个恐怖的邪恶魔鬼用小丑来伪装自己，侵害孩子们，这本书在1990年被翻拍成同名电视短剧。1988年，小成本电影《外太空杀人小丑（Killer Klowns from Outer Space）》描绘了外星人小丑那阴险牙尖的邪笑和暗藏的杀机。1989年，《小丑屋（Clownhouse）》这部疯狂的恐怖电影写了一群逃出来的精神病人伪装成马戏团小丑，让一个乡下小镇陷入恐怖的危机之中。自1980s到现在为止——这会儿锯子球队的吉祥物成了一个毛骨悚然的小丑玩偶——电影院里不断纷纷出现描绘邪恶小丑的电影（或者说更多的其实是视频），渐渐将小丑这个值得信赖的可爱家伙变成了魔鬼弗雷迪·克鲁格（《猛鬼街》）。基瑟，美国著名马戏团林林家族天才的管理者，同时自己也是个前小丑，他尽管想要尽力改变小丑这种恶的形象，却也承认了小丑本身带来的恐怖。他表示：“对我们来说这就像，‘噢上帝啊，我们得努力多久才能克服这一点啊。’”
不过这些小丑负面形象至少也会给专业的小丑带来伤害。尽管美国劳动统计局没有特别追踪关注职业小丑（他们和喜剧家、魔术师以及其他各方面的演员分类在一起），在2000s中期，报纸上各种文章活跃了起来，表示对于小丑逐渐消失在小丑集会和学习会中这个现象的悲痛。斯托特相信小丑们开始“保持最后快乐的形象，消失在人们的眼前”（斯托特个人尤其讨厌小丑并且觉得他们很诡异），心理学家们认为小丑的负面形象正在取代正面的形象。
“你不会再觉得小丑让你感到安心和有趣，你已经被电影影响而觉得小丑很可怕。”马丁·安东尼博士说，他是多伦多瑞尔森大学的心理学教授，同时也是《抗焦虑手册》的作者。“只要孩子们接触过媒体中的小丑，他们就不会觉得小丑安全可靠又滑稽，那些黑暗面会一直提醒着孩子们。”
于是恐惧小丑的恶性循环就这么形成了，小丑的形象越恐怖，人与小丑之间达成良好相处的机会就越少，然后又会造成更多的恐惧，更加证实了小丑恐怖的形象，很多小丑就这么在恶性循环中淹没了。当然，现在也很难说清楚到底有多少人自从加西事件和《小丑回魂》后患上小丑恐惧症。恐惧症意味着一个人会产生压抑的恐惧或焦虑，然而害怕小丑却很难看做是一种恐惧症，心理学家说，因为一个人不大可能持续经常和小丑碰面。安东尼表示，但害怕小丑的现象，的确是被媒体影响而恶化的，他说：“我们会从书和媒体中发展出现实的恐惧……电影里必然有很多恶心的小丑，潜意识中悄悄把我们的恐惧加强了。”
从心理学家的角度来看，对小丑的恐惧通常是在童年时期开始的，这一点甚至早就被纳入心理学家的圣经《精神紊乱的诊断统计手册（Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders）》或者叫DSM中了，对小丑的恐惧被归类为儿科恐惧症中特定打扮角色恐惧症（体育吉祥物、米老鼠等）的一个子类别里。“通常在一个孩子2岁时候开始，这时候他们被陌生人包围也会觉得焦虑。在这个年龄段，孩子的头脑还在发展，小丑总是化妆很混杂，而孩子还无法区分幻想和现实。”布兰达·韦德霍德博士，一位经营了一家在圣地亚哥使用虚拟现实治疗的恐惧焦虑诊所（ phobia and anxiety treatment center in San Diego）的资深心理学家这么说道。
她说，其实大多数人都会在心中种下恐惧的种子，但不是每个人都会得上恐惧症——成年人中大约有2%的人可能患有小丑恐惧症。成年人的小丑恐惧症来源于对小丑彩妆的不安和对于不能看透小丑脸上情绪的焦虑，同时也是由于他们意识到小丑可能会作出一些不顾后果的疯狂行为。
但说到底，对于小丑的恐惧，这种恐惧的对象最终必然会指向的是：化了妆的人。这一点林林家族的基瑟也认同。
“我觉得我们都见过一些出色的小丑，但我们也都碰到过一些年轻的或者缺乏训练的小丑，他们不会理解别人，他们只会持续表现出粗暴一面不断攻击。”基瑟说，他正在说明有一些小丑会变得具有攻击性以试图逗笑观众。“我们觉得小丑压力最大的一件事就是学会懂得去尊重观众的空间。”他说，小丑是一种交流，而不是欺瞒，优秀的小丑会反映出一个人的真实情感，而不是在挡在情感前面的面具——让他们看上去纯洁而非邪恶的面具。
即使如上所说，那些邪恶的、难过的、爱惹麻烦的小丑真的造成这么多危险吗？对于小丑的未来，有两种看法。
斯托特想的是其中一个，他觉得小丑会继续走向它阴暗的小道，“如果我们想象一场暗黑嘉年华，恐怖小丑就会是它的主角，以各异的形式延续伸展，”他指向一些角色，比如辛普森一家里疲惫却有趣的小丑克鲁斯提，或者希斯·莱杰的蝙蝠侠中放肆的反派势力小丑。“在方方面面，小丑并非我们认为的常态的反面，它只不过整理并放大了我们长时间以来习惯的常态。”也有其他作家认为恐怖小丑作为床下的怪物，已经几乎成为了一种常见而被滥用的“破旧恐怖”了。
但也有证据表明，不像谢菲尔德大学的研究结果一样，其实孩子们喜欢小丑：相关研究表明真实的小丑对生病的孩子的健康能带来益处。2013年1月，心理卫生杂志（Journal of Health Psychology）的调研发现，在一次随机对照试验中，在治疗中，面临一些小手术的孩子们事先接触小丑就能减缓一些焦虑的状态。另外一个2008年意大利的研究，在2011年12月出版的自然医学杂志（Natural Medicine Journal）中发表，因呼吸相关疾病而住院的孩子和帮助治疗的小丑一起玩耍后恢复得更好。
基瑟当然不觉得小丑会走任何一点儿下坡路，但维持小丑生机的优秀小丑却总是不够。“如果小丑有一颗温暖、充满爱心而且很幽默的心，并且他努力表达自己的这一面……那么我觉得，我们能够在斗争中战胜恐怖小丑。”他说，“小丑和恶意攻击没有关系，小丑代表的是爱，是当你看着他的时候，你会觉得自己在慢慢靠近一个充满爱和欢乐的地方，然后你就会发现，这份爱是真情切意，而非虚情假意。”
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