Instant Clowning– it has been a dream for generations ever since man learned you could mask pain and homicidal intent behind colorful make-up. But it wasn’t until 1989 when BE A CLOWN! – The Complete Guide to Instant Clowning was published that it became possible to clown at home without an expensive degree. Ha. I’m kidding with humor, of course, which is one of the tools I acquired from this book. So let us get ready to clown and I hope you are ready for more laughter and also that your body will have enough skin to make my clown wings. Ha, more clown humor kidding.
BE A CLOWN! was written by someone named Turk Pipkin which means his only real choices in life were Clown Author or Hobbit. He chose this, which is an unmitigated disaster. My copy was DISCARDED twice from a Canadian elementary school where it was, according to its library card holder, never checked out. When published, the cover had an actual clown nose you could stick to it, which was probably thrown away by a frustrated librarian immediately. This left a rotting patch of adhesive which has been trapping dust for 31 years and makes it look like a clown was left to die in the frost and only most of him came back. “Honk if you love clowns!” he cackles as the remains of his nose mash to chunky gore between his black and missing fingers. You try to scream, but the sound comes out of the creature’s mouth instead. “No! How? Turk Pipkin is dead!” he shrieks in your voice. You look down at your hands and see they are juggling. “No. B-better… to… die,” your voice tells you from the lipless mouth of Turk Pipkin. This is how all clowns are born. This is how you are born, Turk Pipkin.
Again, I’m using humor jokes to create a reaction of laughter, a technique frequently explained in BE A CLOWN!. Let me show you how it works with a Q – U – I – K T – R – I – K called Balance a Ping-Pong Ball on Your Nose. Someone with your clown training is probably ready to go from the title alone, but what if you’ve never heard of joy or showmanship? What if you are a sadness golem wearing the nose of a dead man underneath the nose of a clown? Turk Pipkin didn’t want to bet on you being anything other than the last one, so he wrote his “wacky” book as if it was coffin assembly software for an industrial robot.
Comedy is a tough thing to teach. There is a kind of science to it, but the more clinical you get about it, the less fun it is. It’s like training a gorilla in taekwondo. After years of hard work you can sort of get it to mimic a spin kick, but that gorilla would have been so much tougher if you just explained how it’s possible to kill things with feet and let it go with its instincts.
Speaking of killing, this book never addresses clowns and their need for blood even in a defensive way. Turk Pipkin should have but didn’t write a chapter called “THERE IS NO NEED TO FEAR US.” He never reassures the reader, “Believe me, putting your tongue through a napkin is quite humorous because of the good surprise, and also believe me: most clowns are not murderers.” I mean, he obviously mentions the first part, but not the second.
It’s possible we weren’t all participating in the running joke about scary clowns in 1989. It wasn’t considered a common enough phobia to have its own name until a year or two later when psychologists coined the term “coulrophobia” which means “fear of stilted men” because ancient Greeks had no word for what today’s missing children know as “clowns.” In 1989, these napkin-tonguing entertainers were apparently perceived as harmless. So harmless, in fact, it wasn’t weird at all for a clown to just be holding a knife on page 11 of your Instant Clowning book with no explanation.
There is no story of how early English clown Joseph Grimaldi would carve meats into joyful shapes for children or how he was always ready to open your mail. It’s simply a picture of a vaguely man-shaped thing in a romper holding a knife next to a basket of human ears. That’s the end of the early English clown history lesson. I actually checked the book’s index to see if there was more information about Joseph Grimaldi. There wasn’t. His only appearances in this book are this picture on page 11 and page 11. I don’t know why it’s listed twice, or why one of them is in italics, but I don’t like it. It’s way too goddamn close to this book winking at me.
And while I’m on the subject of creepy clown book indexes, Turk Pipkin thought fingering someone’s palm during a handshake was something you might be looking up.
For a clown, a “Tickling Palm with Finger” handshake is a quick way to let your new friend know you’re going to do some weird sex stuff with their body before you dismember it. Even Turk Pipkin knows this is pretty fucked up. So after he explains how to do it, which isn’t complicated and takes way longer than you might imagine, he tags it with a one-word sentence: “Creepy!” This is a rare moment of self-awareness for Turk Pipkin, who doesn’t often notice the creepiness of invading people’s personal space in monster make-up to perform mechanical comedy routines. And even when he does consider the creepiness of what he does, it seems to be in jest? Here’s a great example: in the section helping you pick “a good clown hat” by making sure it is “any hat that feels good on your head” he warns the reader not to get into The Cabbie’s car, presumably because he’s dangerous. That’s it; that’s the entire bit. It’s a fucking weird book and sometimes it knows it is the point I’m trying to make.
One thing I learned about clowns, aside from how they tongue napkins in a surprising and side-splitting way, is how they like a struggle. In the chapter on AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION, Turk Pipkin shows how to stage a wacky tug-of-war or human centipede (pictured), and the most important advice he gives is to find people who don’t want to participate. There’s no fun, no sport in that. You want them reluctant. “And don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” This fact wasn’t included in the index, but it’s absolutely true that no clown can get an erection unless someone is begging their colorful penis to go flacid.
Again, I am doing comedic joke gags on the idea of clowns being sex criminals and murderers. Like an overly licked napkin or comfortable hat, it is very funny and wins sure laughs, but is there truth to it? Let’s find out by building a test we can take at home. First of all, I think we can all agree anyone explaining satire and parody is a psychopath. And I think you should always be worried if someone’s first instinct when asked to explain something is to pull out a gun. So with these rules established, if I was to show you a page from a clown book explaining satire and parody and immediately doing so with a handgun, you would have to admit something was wrong. Well, checkmate, clown apologists:
What the fucking fuck are the circumstances where someone sees a clown pull out a gun and thinks, “Oh, fun. A comedy marksmanship show at my child’s birthday.” You think there’s a punchline at the end of that worth sticking around for? The punchline is your children are shot. This is the stupidest way to die. When the police find out you didn’t run away when the clown pulled the gun, they write up your death as a suicide. I went into this thinking, “I am a unique voice in the Internet hilarity landscape. I certainly won’t do anything as basic and predictable as make 1300 words worth of murderer jokes about this clowning book,” but are you kidding me with this shit? If you’re telling me Turk Pipkin, the author of BE A CLOWN!, has less than 15 dead people in his freezer, I will tell you to count the parts again and you will say, “Oh shit, he’s right– this is way more than 150 fingers.”