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Made by a Canadian family company with 25 years joint health experience. Save 25% with promo code audio25, get free shipping, or claim your exclusive $5 coupon at genical.ca.com. So, one of us took a $5 one and see if we can get a picture of it and sell it to her. That was the whole reason for the purchase of the cost turn was to just go take a picture, bring it home and show it to her.
Not too terrorizing about it, that was what was said, but no, that's not what it was all about. So, Walmart's full of costumes. So I grabbed the one, I go home, I change clothes, and I go to just a random stop sign. I'm going to get out, let my last snap a picture.
Okay, well I'm sitting in the car. He pulls up in front of our car, turns his lights on, gets out, and he goes to take his gun out. And I'm like, man, I'll go peacefully, you know, it doesn't have to be like that. And it actually got very, very hostile.
Because he thinks you were up to something like... I was treated like a murderer. Was he freaked out? No, he just wanted to be the first cop in Middlesbrough to arrest a clown.
If you close your eyes and picture a clown, what do you see? What pops into your head first? Maybe you see someone with a white face and a red nose, big feet, who's always making balloon animals. Maybe you see Bozo, a Ronald McDonald.
Or maybe you see someone dressed up like Jonathan Martin, who just heard, and who was arrested in 2016 for wearing a scary clown costume in Middlesbrough, Kentucky. When I think of clowns, I see Twisty, a terrifying white face serial killer clown with a rotting jaw who has appeared on multiple seasons of the TV show American Horror Story. And I'm not even scared of clowns. In the last few decades, creepy, scary clowns have elbowed benevolent clowns out of the spotlight, at least in pop culture and not actually in lived experience.
How? Why? Do scary clowns even really count as clowns? Why did an archetype that for hundreds of years made us laugh, start to scare the bejesus out of us?
This is Decoder Ring, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. I'm Slates TV critic Willapaskin. Every month we take a cultural question, have it, or idea. Crack it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.
Today, why did clowns get creepy? Clowns have been around forever. Basically as long as there have been people, there have been other people playing the part of the trickster, the fool, the buffoon, the joker, the freak. And in America recently, there have been a lot of people playing the part of the scary clown.
Jonathan Martin was arrested during the clown panic of 2016, a rash of scary clown sightings that popped up all over the United States. Clowns were apparently everywhere, posing for photographs, skulking in the woods, stalking strip malls, menacing children. Clown sightings of this kind had happened before. In the early 1980s, first in Boston and then all over the country, people had reported seeing scary, threatening clowns the police officers could never confirm had actually been there.
Like Bogeyman or Yeti's, they didn't seem to be real. Lauren Coleman is a cryptozoologist and expert in this phenomenon, which he named, Phantom Clown Theory. Clowns that were seen by children, mostly, occasionally by teachers, then law enforcement or parents would go after them and they never could be caught, they were seen, supposedly with their costumes, only on the upper part of their body whenever they were completely seen. And the Kansas City ones were seen with knives in their hands.
You can hear how exasperated Kansas City law enforcement is with this trend in a UPI article from May of 1981, after two girls reported being ordered to get into a yellow van by a man with a knife wearing a clown outfit. We're getting bunches of calls on both sides. It's like a Russians are coming. We cannot ignore any reports that we get as to a yellow van and someone in a clown suit, but I cannot believe that there can be that many clowns in Kansas City with yellow vans.
Fifth of clowns have appeared from time to time since then, and not just in the United States, but 2016 was the biggest scare so far. Creepy clown sightings are happening across the country and it's no laughing matter. Alright, happening right now, creepy clown at a bus stop in Pinellas County. Now to the creepy clown sighting in Largo today.
It started in Greenville, South Carolina and at first it seemed like all the previous incidents. And they were all, supposedly, just like those original ones in 1981. People were seeing the clowns and it got to be so ridiculous as far as how many different kinds of clowns were seen in different situations. Basically what happened was that the reports about the Phantom Clowns were so heavily covered by the media and then shared on social media that it started to inspire not so Phantom Clowns.
People who were up to mischief, taking photos, doing pranks, trying to scare their friends, making YouTube videos and worse, calling in bomb threats to schools, wielding knives, committing crimes. Unlike Phantom Clowns, these scary clowns were real and the police could find them. Which brings me back to Jonathan, the man in the clown suit who was arrested, who you heard at the beginning of this episode. Tonight's story we've been talking a lot about creepy clown sightings around the country.
20 year old Jonathan Martin is now under arrest. Police say he was caught lurking in the woods near an apartment complex in Kentucky last week. Jonathan was arrested for disorderly conduct and was also cited for violating a city ordinance by covering his face while in public. These charges were eventually dismissed, but Jonathan doesn't think they should have been filed in the first place.
According to him, he was just trying to entertain his daughter. Everybody laughs about it. I'll be around this day and people say, hey, there's nothing better to do in our town except for arrest people for dumb stuff. Somebody trying to have fun.
Scaring clowns really do frighten people, but one thing that often goes unsaid about them because it's a little inappropriate is that there's something kind of funny about them. Not necessarily laugh out loud funny, but a perverse ironic isn't like strange kind of funny. There's just something fundamentally absurd about them, and in the case of Phantom Clowns, something downright kitschy. Think about Jonathan, however ill-advised dressing up as a terrifying clown in the middle of a clown panic is, he was just trying to entertain himself and his kid.
Jonathan may be a perversion of the clown, but he was also just clowning around. There's nothing more for anybody in this town to do than to do something stupid as I did. I'm not gonna call it stupid. I'm gonna deal with the experience.
I thought it was hilarious. As it was happening, it did? I left. The whole time I was being arrested, I left.
Our scary clowns antithetical to clowning? Are they the opposite of good clowns? Or are they something more complicated? To answer that, we have to look at where clowns come from.
And before we can understand how clowns got creepy, we have to understand how clowns got happy. There are clowns in almost every culture in the world, way too many for us to explore today, but the modern American birthday clown traces this lineage and look to 16th century, Comedia del Arte, and improvised popular form of theater that relied on stock characters the audience would already be familiar with. Some of these stock characters, like the Perot and the Harlequin, had costumes that clearly influenced modern clowns, but the perpetually cheerful birthday clown of today would not be recognizable to people in the 16th century. For one thing, birthday clowns are way, way, way too happy.
The idea of clowns is happy is not really historically true. That's Linda Simon, a professor emeritus at Skidmore, and author of a number of books, including The Greatest Shows on Earth, A History of the Circus. The personality of the clown as unhappy was one part of the old history of clowns, so there was always a clown that was going to be beaten up by the world, and then there was a clown that was going to do the beating up. History's clowns are ambiguous, complicated, sometimes subversive figures.
Clowns can speak truth to power, say things no one else can, like a jester. They can be poetic and mischievous, like Charlie Chaplin. They can be sad, like Emmett Kelly's Weary Willy, one of the stars of the Ringling Brothers in the 40s and 50s, who was modeled on a depression-era hobo and wore rags and had a sude beard. Clowns can be romantic, ironic, depressed, cruel, sweet, dopey, devilish, and they use different kinds of comedy from slapstick to satire to riff on the human condition through humor.
History's most famous clowns had some darkness to them. There's Jean-Gaspar de Burro, the ultimate pyro, who in Paris in 1830s struck and killed a boy on the street who had taunted him. There's Joseph Grimaldi, who was hugely famous in England in the early 1800s, but was tortured underneath his makeup. Grimaldi was depressed, his wife and child died in childbirth, and he had to cut his career short after being physically debilitated by the Wear and Tariff's Act.
Grimaldi is best known for popularizing the White Face Clown, developing the look that clowns are still known for today, and I want to say here that Blackface and Minstrelsy more generally have a connection to clowning, at the very least, through their use of garish clown-like makeup. The relationship between clowns, clowning, comedy, minstrelsy, and race is its own vast, thorny subject. So I'm just going to observe here that clowning's connection to this tradition is another example of just how complicated clowns are, historically. They're complicated in fiction too.
The opera, Paliachi, premiered in 1892 in Milan and is set amidst a Comédéal Arté Theatre. It climaxes with a character in costume, murdering his wife and her lover. And the audience doesn't know that what it's seeing isn't clowning, isn't part of the show. Until the clown announces, La Comédéa Efienita, the comedy is over.
La Comédédéa Efienita! In 1924, there was a silent film, He Who Gets Slapped, in which Lon Chaney starts as a cuckled, who runs off to the circus and plays a clown, who's act is getting slapped, living out his wife's emasculation of him over and over again. The 1928 movie, The Man Who Laughs, based on a Victor Hugo novel, is about a young man unfairly punished with a permanent rictus grin, who grows up to star in a carnival freak show. The man who laughs when onto inspires the look of a particularly famous bad clown, the Joker, who made his debut in Batman No.
1 in 1940. And then there's Jimmy Stewart, who in Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 movie, The Greatest Show on Earth, played buttons, a sweet, heart-set clown who never takes off his makeup because he's hiding from the police after having mercy killed his wife. Now clowns are funny people, honey.
They only love lunch. All men aren't that way. Even if they act like clowns. You've always been honest.
Oh buttons. I'm all acing side. When a clown comes barreling towards you on the street, they might mean well, but they're probably going to alarm you, at least at first anyway. It's the fact that you don't know what's about to happen.
If the clown is going to amuse you or intrude on you, or both. But that's part of the clown's spark, it's freaky vitality, and this doubleness has always been there. This is all to say, well into the 20th century, clowns weren't evil or terrifying, but they weren't simply good or happy either. You may think joint stiffness comes later in life, but people in their 30s and 40s already feel it.
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By nominating. Judge Neal Gorsuch. Mr. President, thank you very much.
As we all live through the chaos of another Donald Trump presidency, it can be easy to lose sight of his most troubling legacy. The U.S. Supreme Court has reshaped the country's legal landscape on abortion, guns, religion, and war. I'm Susan Matthews.
In Slates' new season of Slowburn, we're taking on Trump's first Supreme Court pick. We'll look at the influence that Neil Gorsuch has in this moment. He is the most unpredictable vote on this court, including his surprising pushback against the president who nominated him. Nobody saw the Gorsuch who joined the majority on this.
He is the Justice, most likely to be a true wild card. This is judicial activity. Slowburn, becoming Justice Gorsuch. It's a story that will shape America for years, even lifetimes to come.
Out May 13th, wherever you get your podcasts. And then two things happened that changed public perception of the clown. First, the circus. The modern circus was created in the 1770s by the equestrian Philip Asley.
That's why the circus ring is a circle, so horses keep running around without having to stop. To increase his audience, Asley filled out his horse show with other acts, tumblers, jugglers, tightrope walkers, freak shows, and clowns, to whom there was a luge aspect. Here's Richard Crawford, a consultant for Cirque du Soleil, and the founder and director of Movement Theatre Studio NYC, which teaches actors clowning techniques. The theory behind the red note that it comes from the letter of nose of.
And, you know, the sort of baggy costume again comes from these guys who probably just patched together their own clothes. They don't eat too much. They're clothes don't fit. As this suggests, early circus clowns, like early circus, were for adults.
Starting in the late 19th century in America, circus owners realized kids were an untapped revenue stream. You had not only Barnum, but a lot of circus and presyrios wanted just to make money and fill up the stands. They started marketing it as family entertainment because it would bring in much more money. If you could have a whole family come to the circus instead of just an adult male, or, you know, on date night, a couple, then that would expand your audience.
By the mid 20th century, freak shows had dipped in popularity, and the ideal circus had been almost entirely made over as a kid's entertainment. Here's a clip from a 1949 encyclopedia of Britannica film called Circus Day in Our Town, showing clowns exiting a tent after putting on their makeup, and presenting them as a safe, kid-appropriate spectacle. Now, the circus clown likes to have a full half hour for putting on his face. They clowns and little clowns.
They're all different, and they're all fun. And they're happiest when they hear you like. Clowns became even more closely associated with kids in happiness thanks to the second thing that fundamentally altered the American perspective on the clown. Television.
The clowns started appearing on local TV in Los Angeles in 1949. In the late 50s, he was franchised, which meant that local TV stations around the country each had their own show starring their own version of Bozo, making the clown both extremely popular and omnipresent. He looked slightly different in every series, but he is stereotypically clown-like with a white face, red clown nose, and a fringe of vertical red hair. In the early 1960s, Washington DC area McDonald's saw sales spike 30% after a local franchise sponsored the TV show, Bozo Circus.
In 1963, the branch hired the guy who had played Bozo, who happened to be Willard Scott, the future Today Show weatherman, to appear in some local TV ads as a new character, Ronald McDonald. In 1966, Ronald McDonald, with his red hair, yellow and red jumpsuit, and starry eyes, white national, in the first national ad campaign for a fast food chain. He was so successful that by the 1990s, Ronald McDonald was recognizable to 96% of American children, bested only by Santa Claus. These clowns of the TV age had more reach and influence than clowns had ever had before, and they came to overshadow clown performing in more classic venues, like the circus.
But TV clowns weren't only clowns, they were salesmen, mascots, brand leaders. Here's an ad from the early 60s, starring a clown. To us now, that cereal sounds really unhealthy, and that clown, Kringles, looks really terrifying. His makeup is a little cracked, and you can see the glue holding his hairpiece on.
The contrast between that sloppiness and his exuberant voice makes it seem like there's something awful about him, and yet at the time he was deemed a perfectly good pitchman. It's kind of amazing every kid who watched that didn't develop a clown, Bobia. The fancy word for which is coolrophobia, by the way. By the 1960s then, the clown Americans were most familiar with had been oversimplified.
They were contractually obligatory, sunny. They had to be inoffensive, and cheerful, and happy all the time. All the more complicated aspects of their persona had been suppressed, but like the glue on Kringles bald cap, it was a little bit too bad. In other words, conditions were ripe for a backlash.
A clown's makeup and look, it was meant to be seen from far away. It's stage makeup. The colors are supposed to pop. The facial expressions are supposed to be visible from a distance.
But TV brings you up close, and when you're up close, you start to wonder. Who is an adult man choosing to wear a clown makeup and hang around kids all day, and why is he so excited about everything? The idea of some sort of creature with a permanent smile, of course, created a shadow effect of fear, because that's fake. It's artificial, and nobody lived in a face of happiness, like at all the time.
And so you have to wonder about somebody who has a permanent smile on their face. You're like, that person's probably crazy. I'm actually scared of a person who is that happy. That's Zachary Fine, an actor, director, and teacher who teaches clowning largely to actors at NYU.
And he described exactly what started to happen. We began to wonder about all those people with a smile on their face all the time. Maybe they weren't as harmless as they seemed. That was certainly the case with a serial killer, John Wayne Gacy.
If there's any single inflection point that shifted the public consciousness about clowns, it's probably Gacy. John Gacy, a man who like to put on a clown suit and entertain children. Now he is charged with one murder, and the police have found at last count 27 bodies buried under his house and garage and two more in a nearby river. Gacy had occasionally dressed up and performed as a clown, known as Pogo.
And then we never killed anyone while in costume or lured them in by playing the clown. The detail was so jarring, so salacious, so absurd. It was mentioned in almost every story about him. He made money on death row by selling portraits of Pogo.
Multiple biographies of him are titled Killer Clown. In the years right after Gacy, the first Phantom clown sightings were reported, and creepy clowns started to pop up all over fiction. In 1982, the Polder Guys came out, in which an evil clown doll terrifyingly comes to life. And then there was Stephen King's It, in which an ancient monster known as Pennywise, who looks like a clown when he's in human form, terrorizes a group of children over many decades.
The book was published in 1986 with the ABC miniseries starring Tim Curry, aired in 1990, and almost certainly terrified more people. Penny Wall! I'll try to get crazy. I'll kill you all.
I mean, like, may you ever have a new worst dream come true on everything you ever were afraid of. At this point, creepy clowns began to snowball. In 1989, the Joker was reborn in a new movie version of Batman, played by Jack Nicholson. Soon after there was Crusty the Clown, Homie the Clown, Killer Clowns from outer space, today's scary clowns aren't entertainment cottage industry.
There are tons of B-Hara movies with names like Clown Camp Massacre, Spell of 2Ks, Clown Town, and my personal favorite, Clowntergeist. On YouTube, scary clown videos and pranking clowns are immensely popular. The channel DM Pranks Killer Clowns is nothing but scary clown pranks. Their titles, which have lots of oddly placed exclamation points, include Killer Clown Scare Prank, Killer Clown Returns Scare Prank, and Killer Clown 3, The Uncle Scare Prank.
The last one, from 2014, features a scary clown inspired by Pennywise, holding balloons and confronting three people on a quiet road, and then chasing them as they run away. It has over 117 million views. This video is pretty disturbing, and the people in it being chased look really scared, and this gets at one of the things that is easier or more comfortable anyway to ignore about the creepy clown, which is that millions of people really enjoy them. Scary clowns are a window into the dark side of humor.
Everyone loves to laugh, but not everything that makes us laugh is good, is safe, is nice, is moral. The prankster clowns of YouTube and Clown Panics can be cruel, they can be mean, they can be violent, they're totally inappropriate. But for some people, that's what makes them so funny. 117 million people watch that YouTube video.
How many people do you think have engaged this closely with Happy Clowns recently? There's nothing comparable for Happy Clowns. 117 million people are not watching reruns of Bozo. Scary clowns are dominating Happy Clowns.
They are playing the part of the bully clown while Happy Clowns are getting bullied. And about this in particular, Happy Clowns are not happy. You may think joint stiffness comes later in life, but people in their 30s and 40s already feel it. Why?
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Save 25% with promo code audio25, get free shipping, or claim your exclusive $5 coupon at genical.ca.com. Like I said at the beginning of this episode, I'm not scared of clowns, but I also don't have much occasion to interact with them. The only clowns I see regularly actually are the scary ones who show up on TV. But hearing clowns passionately earnestly make the case for clowning change until I think about them.
Pamela LaRajina is an artist who in the late 70s, after dressing up as a clown for Halloween, realized she had more clowning in her. She developed a character, Bumbleina, and eventually formed a troop with her neighbors, working sometimes for pay, but more often for free, just to make people laugh, to bring them joy. In Bumbleina's case, people would often say to her, I love your costume. And she would always say, I love yours too, because the truth is that we're all wearing costumes.
From Bumbleina's point of view, there's a clown in everyone. And so it's really about helping people find that special place inside them that has more humor, that has more empathy, that is more imaginative. Clowning, insuffisticated, relatively high-brow circles, is still thriving. A lot of actors do clown training.
You can see modern clown shows in New York, where it's treated like any other form of theater. But for working clowns across America, scary clowns have been economically ruinous. Here's Trisha Manuel, whose clown name is Priscilla Mooseburger. She was a circus clown at Ringling Brothers in the early 80s and eventually started a costume company that she still runs.
She also started and runs Mooseburger Clown Arts Camp, a training program for clowns. Two-thousand-fist, 14 years. Trisha is a positive person, she's a clown after all, and she's planning a clown summit to be more proactive in combating the scary clown phenomenon. But she knows the scope of the problem.
Well, people, how is it if you will? A culture, a whole group of people thinks were creepy and scary. Until they're, until they run into somebody who isn't. We are fighting discouragement in our industry.
We're watching our way of life, and I don't financially, some of us, but we're watching our way of life slowly fade away, and it's like, really? Trisha thinks there's one other factor that has been just as big a deal as all the movies and TV shows. The corresponding rise in scary clown costumes. It used to be much easier to find a happy clown outfit than a scary one.
But now at Walmart and other big box stores around Halloween, and on Amazon all year, a scary clown costume is almost outnumber regular clown costumes. And remember that clown prank video with 117 million views? For a while, the creators had a website where you could go and buy the same clown outfits they were wearing while they pranked people. One of the consequences of scary clowns and clowns becoming like Bigfoot is that people don't always think of clowns as being played by people.
Trisha has taken to walking around with a business card to hand to people who come up to her when she's in costume and say things they would never otherwise say to a stranger. I hate you. It says what clowns are and what clowns are not. A regular car meal.
Part of the difficulty in combating scary clowns is that some people like to be frightened by clowns. And one of the places they can do that is at the House of Hars in Miami. My name is Michael Calkins. I scare the ever-loving hell out of people, or try to.
Michael is 25 years old and he's been working at the House of Hars for the last seven years, which pops up in the weeks before Halloween. He's played a number of characters, a zombie of the Empire, but for the last few years he's been in charge of a freak show as Jake the Ringmaster Clown, a 141 year old killer clown with a skin addiction, two brains inside his skull, long dark hair, a white face and red almost bat wings around his eyes, and a little blood at the corner of his mouth. Can I- wait, can I ask you a question? Can I talk to Jake right now?
Oh, you want to talk to the Ringmaster? Oh boy. Yeah. So, you want to talk to me, did you?
Good job. Mike didn't much like clowns or being scared as a kid, but he loves the Adams family and the monsters, and he would use his mom's makeup to dress up as Frankenstein or a pirate. In high school, he was really into metal and performance in general. He likes musicals, and he started watching a four-mentioned genre of scary prankster clown videos on YouTube.
He got into the band Insane Clown Posse, a hardcore rap group that uses scary clown makeup and carnival themes as part of its act, and are especially beloved by their devoted fan base. When he needed to get a job, the House of Hars seemed like a perfect fit. As Jake, Mike wants to frighten people. But if you listen to him talk, it's clear he also just really wants to entertain them, to make them laugh.
Are you influenced by anyone? You sound like Beetlejuice to me, is that weird? Is that insulting? I hope it's not.
God, I've been getting that since 2014, doing the Miami show. You know, like, okay, yes, I wear black and white stripes. People are like, hey, look at his Beetlejuices. No, no, it's not.
I don't even know who that is. Mike's playful. He's funny. And people go to see him because they want to encounter his kind of clown.
I can talk about him like no. Hi. Do you find that the reaction to people laugh and then they get really scared? Like is it a continuum?
It really depends on the people. It really depends on the people. I get people who are really into this stuff. And some people laugh.
Some people are freaked out. Some people just pop up around the corner and just go, Hey, what's up? They run out the door and I'm like, oh, but you just got in here. His audience may not be the stereotypical audience for a clown show.
And he may try to list a slightly different set of emotions than is expected, but he's still there to delight. Even if that involves a little fear. It's so amazing because I had in, I guess that makes sense, but basically don't take this wrong way. You're just like a clown clown.
Like you're like a scary clown, but you're sort of just doing what clowns do. It's the freedom that you could do whatever you want. And if it's horrifying, it's funny. Mike does not fit the stereotypical scary clown mold.
He's not some violent deviant trying to strike fear in the hearts of unsuspecting children. Instead, Mike hints at one potential future for clowns and scary clowns alike, where they're not so separate, where the scary clown isn't a menace to good clowns, but an iteration of them. It can be hard to figure out which came first, which is the chicken and which is the egg, the decline of the birthday clown or the rise of the scary clown. Did scary clowns come first and put happy clowns out of business?
Or were happy clowns on their way out, along with the circus, and scary clowns bloomed in the void? Because scary clowns are no, happy clowning can feel pretty old fashioned. It's just really antithetical to a lot of our ideas about both comedy and gravity toss right now. We tend to think of the best comedy as a kind of authentic self-expression, a performer's gnarly truth.
And clowns, that's not what they're about. When you watch a clown, you aren't supposed to see the performer underneath. You're supposed to see the clown. The performer is actually hiding in a way, behind the makeup and costume, behind the buffoonery.
But the costume, it's gotten totally distracting. This is one of the reasons so much clown work is now being done by people who don't look like clowns at all. The stand-up comedian telling jokes, speaking truth to power, calling out members of the audience, mixing satire and potty humor. The drag queen, summoning a sense of exaggerated glamour and delight.
She's another kind of clown. The internet troll spewing intentionally provocative comments on the internet that make it impossible to tell what's funny and what's awful. That's a clown, too. When we see a clown costume now, we're often much more interested in the person underneath all that makeup.
And so instead of just interacting with the clown, we're imagining who he or she might really be. Part of the reason we find clowns so unnerving. And scary clowns take that unnerving quality and use it to their advantage. They capitalize on something latent in good clowns and blow it up, out into the open.
And for happy clowns, that's awful. It must be so painful to have devoted your whole life to making people feel good and then to be powerless to stop people from thinking of you as a creep. To have devoted your whole life to making people laugh. And then finding out that lots of people would much rather laugh at something much more disturbing.
But what I hope this episode has demonstrated is that the distance between happy clowns and scary clowns, at least the ones who are trying to amuse people, not hide their criminal intent behind the disguise, isn't quite as vast as it first seems. The scary clown isn't just a twisted clown, they're a kind of solution for the clown, a way to make the clown work right now, within the bounds of our more ironic, skeptical, big, thrill-seeking moment. They're not the end of the clown, the beginning of something new, or more accurately, something old. The revival of a more adult and biguous clown.
A clown who's more like us. Because as Zach, the actor and clown teacher we spoke with earlier pointed out, that's really what we need clowns for anyway. To show us who we really are in all our complications, not who we wish we were. That we are ridiculous, beautiful, confused, bumbling, baffled creatures.
And that we are in this extraordinary divine comedy where we still have no idea how to be a human being. And the clown reflects that in extremity, often, on stage. And so we like to laugh because it's not us. So in some ways we're like, that's me, but I'm laughing because it doesn't have to be me up there showing people how stupid and ridiculous I am.
Thanks for listening. This is Decodering. I'm Willa Paskin. You can find me on Twitter at WillaPaskin.
And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at Decodering at Slate.com. We want to thank Daniel Royer for recommending this subject. If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed on Apple Podcasts or ever you get your podcasts, and even better, tell your friends. This podcast was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode.
Thanks in this episode to Benjamin Bradford, Isaac Butler, Jim Bretison, Andrew Kahn, Aisha Harris, June Thomas, and everyone else who gave us help along the way. We'll see you next month.