Think of it: Within living memory, a clown named Clarabell was one of the most beloved personalities on television. Buffalo Bob would never have had a clown on Howdy Doody if he thought it would terrorize children. That's not what clowns did. They were fun-loving masters of goofiness, living cartoons, silly men who could act like children.
And now they're this.
I think a lot of kids now have never even known a time when clowns were fun. They've always been a source of grinning, inhuman, hellish evil.
How did this happen so fast?
Well, popular entertainment tends to turn things upside down for dramatic and ironic effect. The rock-ribbed lawmen of early movies became corrupt weasels or hypocrites or useless or out-and-out villains of later movies purely because that's was what we had been trained to not expect -- until we got to the point where the moment a sheriff shows up on film you can start booing. Tiny women were common victims, and now if you are a movie thug and enter a room with eight of your thug buddies to capture the tiny woman, you can expect her to kick your collective ass in under a minute of screen time. Clowns were innocent fun for children, which is exactly why they had to be turned into the most terrifying creatures in our culture. (They've tried to do it to Santa Claus too, but he has a better lobby.)
To be fair, though, the clowns did a bit of that in their own day. They turned plenty of totems of dignity into targets for derision. One well-known example is what they did to Czech composer Julius Fučík's best-known composition. His march known as "Entrance of the Gladiators" was named because of his interest in Roman history, and was imagined as music to which the mighty death-dealing fighters would be summoned for the crowd. The circus chose it because it was pompous, not silly, and now no one can hear that "Deet deet deedle deedle deet deet deet deet" without thinking: Clowns.
Which reminds me that the history of clowning was not all just good clean fun. In fact, if this article in the Smithsonian on the history of clowns is accurate, and theirs usually are, it's amazing they got sanitized into children's entertainment at any period. I sum up what happened in the same way that fairy tales became fodder for children's books, and later, Disney movies. As J. R. R. Tolkien explained:
Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of the children which decides this. Children as a class—except in a common lack of experience they are not one—neither like fairy-stories more, nor understand them better than adults do; and no more than they like many other things. They are young and growing, and normally have keen appetites, so the fairy-stories as a rule go down well enough. But in fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste for them; and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant.
I think exactly the same thing happened with clowns. Adults found them to be old-fashioned and unsophisticated in an era that liked to fancy itself modern and smart, so clowning was downgraded to children's entertainment, even though children's love of clowns was probably overrated. And, like the dark movie versions of fairy tales we're seeing now, the clowns came back as mature entertainment in the only non-sexual adult way we seem to understand anymore -- violent and gory.
So in a way I guess what goes around comes around, or something.
Meh. The problem is that nothing is allowed to be fun anymore, let alone innocent.
Poor clowns. Makes me want to hit someone with a pie.
No comments:
Post a Comment