What Question do you ask a Mirror

"Hey, don't get mad at me! I only pointed out your chains, I didn't put them on you."
"Who did, then?"
"Isn't it obvious?"
-Bartlesmear the Clown and PlayDoh

maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

what do you think?

Irony Defeated

"Who's more foolish? The Fool or the Fool who fools the Fool?"
-Twitch the Clown

"Fool me once... shame, shame on me... Fool me twice... you can't get fooled again."
-The Clown of the Moment

Irony, thought dead since a brief resurgence in metatelevision, has finally and truly transcended its descent into popular, pop-cultural sarcasm into something... other.

Irony develops from our perception of the opposition between an apparent meaning and its intended meaning. Taoist Irony.

Sarcasm develops from our perception of deliberate misuse of a term for its opposite to insult, deride or amuse. Sarcasm is more pointed than Irony.

Paradox develops from our perception of unresolved coexisting, extreme opposites, otherwise believed impossible.

Antinomy develops from our perception of resolved coexisting, extreme opposites, otherwise believed impossible.

[above defitions from The Big Book of Big Words by Y. Laphe]

"I don't know what's funny, but I know a joke when I hear one."
-TickMock the Clown

-PentWhistl

All Hail Hurlers of the Pie

"better a little egg on one's face,
than to face the gelid ladle."
-Gutterslice the Clown

Now, what's the harm in a little pie?

Quite a bit, according to the reaction of Ralph Klein.

A line from the film The Godfather seems relevant to this reaction:

"She threw it...just to make me look ridiculous! And a man in my position can't afford to be made to look ridiculous!" -Jack Woltz

Seems like someone's on to something.

[honk honk]

-PentWhistle

Myth of the Gateway

"What's that crystal you're on?"
"Sucrose."
"Far out!"
-Overheard at the Killer Cereal Convention

It has been written and said time and again that marijuana is the gateway drug - that it in and of itself isn't particularly harmful, however, it leads to those illicit narcotics which are. It is the first step in a downward spiral.

And sugar?

How is it that sugar isn't lauded as the gateway drug of all time? How many children are pacified with small doses of the crystal we treat like a treat?

"There are far many more of those than can be counted on fingers and toes."
-Anonymous Botch

Why don't we treat cannbis like this?

Cream pie projectiles just wouldn't be the same without it.

-PentWhistle

Clowns vs Snake-Oil Salesmen

who's fooling who?

Both Clowns and Snake-Oil Salesmen share a long history in our collective culture. The difference is that Clowns have continued to live by their handfulls of synonymous appelations (not to be confused with their Appalachians), such as fool, trickster, harlequin, troubadour, and so on.

The snake-oil salesman has diversified, becoming Pressmen, Marketeers and Public Relations tale spinners. How they have evolved, into specific niches of redirection and misleading. Where, oh, where are our champions to liberate us from fallacious flogging of flip-tops and fashionable finery?

Look at the screen before you. Do you see your own reflection? Do you see past that mirrored surface, into the virtual worlds beyond?

What use snake-oil? Is it but petroleum by any other name? Thunderous lizards, snakes and alligators, pressed roughly into so much crudeness. Snake-oil and lizard-oil - good for what ails you. And like snake venom, how often the cure resembles the dis-ease.

The Marketeer convinces you that the undesired effects of the oil are but "side" effects, and like the circus sideshow, are kept out of plain sight. A Clown convinces you of nothing, their lies aren't pretense - all of their words are considered misleading, silly, fictional.

The Marketeer tries to convince you of their own legitimacy, whereas the Clown undermines all legitimacy. Illegitimate legacies in their wake, the Clown can but laugh at claims that lethal Clostridium botulinum toxins are the secretions to youthful appearance.

so, which is more youthful: the laughter of a Clown, or needles of numbing interjection?

-PentWhistle

Circus Sideshow and Communication of the Weird

the Wayward Fates and why not believing in them won't help you
-Wagglestrop the Clown

Clowns and the Circus, the Big Top, the Carnival (or Carnivale) are a strange equation.

The Clowns inhabit the big top, commuting by sardine-can motorcar, unicycle, or cannon, to express the joyous frivolity of the infantile Bacchanal, a relief from the pains of the world, a respite from adult responsibility.

For outside the Big Top, outside the charmed world of wonderment at daredevils, death-defiers, and magic tricks lies the sideshow). This freakish display inhabits the Mid-way, halfway between Hell and Home, perhaps.

The Sideshow is an opportunity for the unworldly to get their view of the mysteries of the world, otherwise shrouded behind veils of secrecy, propriety, and embarasment. Such wonder at the unique, the manifestation of the unseen obscene, has lost its sublime nature to the mundanities of science.

Thus does the Penguin Boy becomes the thalidamide baby, the Pinhead becomes the microcephalic, the Siamese Twins become conjoined, the Alligator Man becomes ichthyotic. The sublime wonder at these folks becomes the mundane suffering of victims of spiralling biological fortune.

Where are the Gods of the Circus of yesterday? Are they but relics in museums of medical curiosity? Are they among us, people as any other people, a freak among freaks. For fear not, oh worldly one, we are most certainly freaks. Even our oddities are a confirmation of our humanity.

Has the language of science replaced the poetry of perception? Cold, imposed impartiality replacing passionate engagement?

"Only" and "Just" become the most dismissive of introductions. "It's only just a conjoined twin."

Where is our outrage at the bleeding of our passions?

-PentWhistle

Why are Children supposed to like Clowns?

who's laughing last, now?
-Jostlestone the Clown

More children appear to dislike clowns than like clowns, as much as that can be said of anything. At parties, when clowns have been hired as entertainment, the potential for awkwardness increases. Adults in masks, hiding their faces, are often cause for alarm. Why should all the colour be cause for distinction? Wigs and gloves?

It's a recipe for anonymity, which has been known to lead to all sorts of Hearts of Darkness.

Mayhap the adults, ever responsible for providing such entertainment, seem to find the clown a birthday mainstay, as much as the tradition of the cake, candles and singing the forbidden song.

Much more cultish in these terms. No wonder children respond to these underlying themes of anti-socialism at a time of coming together. Jugglers, manipulators, illusionists, they warp perception, and impose images upon the collected imagination.

After long exposure, adults have fallen under their charm, their chromatic mesmerism. Children sense an unease originating from the sight of a stream of clowns pouring out of a tiny car at the bigtop.

Or facing down bulls.

They are supernatural. They play with moods, teasing laughter, or sealing it in.

Clowns are ever hiding something.

What's not to love?
-Pentwhistle

How to Recognise an Evil Clown

A Thesaurus for the sore us.
-Wavesward the Clown

Evil Clowns can often be difficult to detect, as they are well-skilled in the arts of misdirection, redirection, confusion, entropic encouragement, mesmerism, masking, concealing, make-upping, making up, and up-making.

They don't refer to themselves as Evil Clowns, and may often be discovered to answer to similar appelations, such as: Dastardly Devylls, Destructive Daemons, Imperious Imps, Terrible Tricksters, Fey Fairies, Sinister Sprites, Stark Spirits, Troubling Troubadours, Lying Laplandish Laplanders.

Evil Clowns will laugh at everything and anything, any thing and every thing.

If you invite them to parties, they'll part "i"s and "e"s and no one will remember which comes after the "C." But there's no "c" in party.

The distinction between a regular clown and an Evil Clown is subtle, for a clown who is evil is not necessarily and Evil Clown.

To wit.

A clown who is evil seeks to uphold assumptions, playing to expectations.

An Evil Clown seeks to undermine assumptions, playing on expectations, while possibly breaking someone's brain.

A clown seeks to evoke what's comedic, an Evil Clown seeks to evoke what's tragic. Both laugh.

A clown would never close their bit with a joke like the following:

"There's times when all it takes is an old-fashioned live-burial in concrete to quiet those voices in your head."
-Anonymous.

Isn't that just too grievin' rich?
-PentWhistle

How to be an Evil Clown

Twisted advice from an unscrupulous Clown

Today, the Equinox, we rest on the great fulcrum of time. Tomorrow, the tilt into the darkness. How do you plan to ride the way down?

Here's a thought

Become an Evil Clown!

Lesson 1

One:
Be born Evil, and become a Clown. Generally frowned upon by almost all members of society, with the odd exception that make this a rule of thumb. John Wayne Gacy for example.

Two:
Allow your currently non-Evil non-Clown self to become possessed by the spirit of a trickster god of some pantheon or the other. Andy Kaufman, without a doubt.

Three:
Study hard and become a psychoanalyst. Dress in full Evil Clown regalia for sessions. Ex; Carl Jung (although, his interpretation of "Evil Clown regalia" is somewhat understated).

Four:
Talk incessantly about a broad range of inflammatory subjects until you get an obvious, overt reaction from someone. Make a note of which buttons belong to whom. Once you've got a good number of buttons, a dozen or so, start playing whack-the-gopher. Metaphorically, of course. Ex; Acerbic talk-radio hosts.

Five:
Smile knowingly at everyone you pass. Ex; The Buddha.

Six:
etc...

--
Lesson 2

The punchline of every joke relies on antinomy, and you can't have antinomy without anti-om-ny.

what's the difference between a joke and a riddle? Here's an illustrative example:

what's the difference between a chuckle, snicker, laugh, giggle, guffaw, titter, and chortle?

see?

-PentWhistle

Laugh Into the Darkness

Is Irony truly dead?

Today is the last day longer than night for a spell. Into the darkness, and shadows to dwell, huddled around the dying fires, dwindling until the fell pine logs ignite in the depths of the day's darkest, longest night.

The whistle slides still.

See the sublime in the vile, the alive, the evil, and laugh, laugh, laugh. See the reason to laugh at the curled shape of a human body, maybe breathing, maybe not, lying foetally, ignored by passers-by struggling to look away, or look forward. What's not to laugh about?

The festivals of fire, cities world wide celebrate, with fireworks displays, magnificent to behold, as toxic heavy metals are shot through the sky, burning, raining down over the water below. Plenty more bottles of where that came from.What's not to laugh? Celebration by poisonous rain of fire? It's grievin' hilarious!

Citizens consume huge amounts of gasoilne driving military vehicles on city streets, for which their fellow citizens fight on foreign soil, in need of military vehicles. Gasoilne is less expensive than water, but plenty more barrels of oil and pints of blood where that came from.

Hahahahahahaha. Oh, grief me, that's too rich.

Introducing more poisons into the food chain. Mmmm, mmmm, pesticides and genetically mish-mashed something or other sure are tasty, especially when combined with stress and distress, turning poultry into product. Mmmm, mmm, tasty terroryaki.

HaaaaaaHaaaaaaHaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!

! Indeed, it's either laugh or scream, or fall through the cracks in between.

Is irony truly dead? Not at all. It now lives in life as well as our imagination. What's not to laugh about?

- PentWhistle the Clown

Evil Clowns, Jokes and Riddles

"the turn is just the thing, to return conscience to the king."
- Rattlestick the Clown

The role of Evil Clown as Trickster and Joker is already well-established, and although incarnations exist elsewhere, the face of the Evil Clown seems to be a phenomenon particular to the Americas.

As tellers of jokes and riddles, one of many skills, clowns in general and Evil Clowns in particular have developed a sense of the turn. The setup establishes expectation, and the punchline undermines it, causing an emotional reaction, if turned well, or well turned.

The reaction can be anything from revulsion at the disgusting, laughter at the amusing, admiration at the witty, gormlessness at the abstruse, or anger at the unexpectedly personal.

Robert Heinlein describes the nature of laughter in "Stranger in a Strange Land" in which the protagonist, Michael Valentine Smith, a human raised in Martian culture, finally groks why humans laugh.

"Mike through his head back and laughed - and went on laughing, uncontrollably. He gasped for breath, started to tremble and sink to the floor, still laughing."

then he explains it as

"' I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts... because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting.'"

then

"'Of course it wasn't funny; it was tragic. That's why I had to laugh...suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I've seen and heard and read about in the time I've been with my own people - and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing.'"

from "Stranger in a Strange Land" Berkely Medallion Books, NY, 1961 p299

I think that the clown makes us laugh. Whether the hurt comes out as laughter or screams, its a harsh purgation of spirit, and in these foul days of lost compassion, can its reemergence be so unexpected?

May all your tragedies be melodrama.

HP Lovecraft wrote of an Evil Clown

and Nyarlathotep was his name.

Nyarlathotep, the messenger and soul of the gods, servant of Azathoth, lord of all things who gibbers madly at the centre of the universe, attended by dancers, drummers, flutists playing chaotic tunes beyond time.

Nyarlathotep appears more frequently as a referent than a character in HP Lovecraft's fiction.

He appears in the dreams of Walter Gilman in "The Dreams in the Witch-house" and "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," and is mentioned in a number of others.

Although much about this character remains occluded, his trickery, in terms of a trickster figure, can lead to death, or more commonly, insanity. In symbolic terms, the death represents an annihilation of self, as opposed to a more traditional view of the death of a perspective and renewal of self. For traditionalists, Nyarlathotep's humour is dark indeed, in the context of the fiction in which he appears. For those anticipating enlightenment with rebirth, he serves them annihilation, and with that, crushes hope. The insanity belongs to those who will not surrender to annihilation. They retain their egos, their conscious selves, at the expense of its smooth, healthy function. For those those anticipating retaining their minds, they do, however, in a much altered state: madness!

evil tricks indeed. And what lessons from this Nyarlathotepic apocalypse? The past, in terms of expectation of the narrative's symbology, has been annihilated as has the future, in terms of hope of remaining complacent without recourse. Different than revising history or positing speculations, an annihilation erases it completely. The familiarity of our expectations collapses, leaving only the present, the now, the eternally changing, and it is dark. And it is unpleasant to behold our own cruelties, yet, how else are we to transform them into something else?

What's so Evil about Evil Clowns

addressing the evil clown phenomenon

the evil clown isn't so much evil as unpleasant. This unpleasantness owes to the evil clown's tendency to play tricks that force one to come to terms with one's issues. To whit, the egocentric loudmouth demanding attention from all the assembled gets his pants yanked down. Evil, maybe. Unpleasant? Definitely.

The evil clown stirs the pot, lest we become too comfortable with our self-negligence, and surrender to acclimatisation to our unhealthily fulfilled desires.

The evil clown presents our nemesis, and serves a summons for poetic justice. The actions of the evil clown are not intended to be cruel, although it may certainly appear so, the difference hard to distinguish on occasion, but to undermine ill-conceits with blunt, squeaky hammers.

The evil clown serves up single-serve apocalypse, as our world collapses around us, forcing us to reconstruct.

The cruel clown is something altogether different.

The evil clown makes us uncomfortable, as uncomfortable as considering the deepest darkest depths of the ocean at midnight, and how far one could plummet before all hope of resurfacing were lost, and how much further to go then...

So, why then has the evil clown resurfaced at this particular time and place? We see it all about us, for some time, growing in its audience as the media of transmission expand. The Joker laughs at cruelties the world over, and has for decades.

Why do we need him? Why has he come among us? What message has the Joker wrapped up in a twisted turn of his crimson grin?

Trickster as Evil Clowns - stories

from "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," by Joseph Campbell ch 1.4 The World Navel (p. 44)

...an anecdote from Yorubaland (West Africa), which is told of the trickster-divinity Edshu.

One day, this odd god came walking along a path between two fields. "He beheld in either field a farmer at work and proposed to play the two a turn. He donned a hat that was on the one side red but on the other white, green before and black behind [these being the colors of the four World Directions: i.e., Edshu was a personification of the Center, the 'axis mundi,' or the World Navel]; so that when the two friendly farmers had gone home to their village and the one had said to the other, 'did you see that old fellow go by today in the white hat?' the other replied, 'Why the hat was red.' To which the first retorted, 'It was not; it was white.' 'But it was red,' insisted the friend, 'I saw it with my own two eyes,' 'Well, you must be blind,' declared the first. 'You must be drunk,' rejoined the other. And so the argument developed and the two came to blows. When they began to knife each other, they were brought by neighbors before the headman for judgment. Edshu was among the crowd at the trial, adn when the headman sat at a loss to know where the justice lay, the old trickster revealed himself, made known his prank, and showed the hat. 'The two could not help but quarrel,' he said. 'I wanted it that way. Spreading strife is my greatest joy.'"

footnote: Leo Frobenius, 'Und Afrika sprach.... (Berlin: Vita, Deutsches Verlagshaus, 1912), pp. 243-245.

Compare to Prose Edda, "Skaldskaparmal" I ("Scandinavian Classics," Vol. V, New York 1929, p.96).
Exodus 32:27: "Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his compassion, and every man his neighbor."

back to J Campbell, p 46
"Yet the hardness is balanced by an assurance that all that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain. thus the tales are both pitiless and terrorless -- suffused with the joy of a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered, battling egos that are born and die in time."

Clown Quotes

research material into Evil Clowns in mythology

"A Clown figure working in continuous opposition to the well-wishing creator very often appears in myth and folk tale, as accounting for the ills and difficulties of existence this side of the veil."

Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell, Princeton University Press 1949, p292

"Behind this foolishness, it is possible to see that the one cause yields within th eframe of the world dual effects -- good and evil. The story is not as naive as it appears."

Ibid, p293

"Universal too is the casting of the antagonist, the representative of evil, in the role of the clown. Devils - both the lust thickheads and the sharp, clever deceivers - are always clowns. Though they may triumph in the world of space and time, both they and their work simply disappear when the perspective shifts to the transcendental. They are the mistakers of shadow for substance: they symbolize the inevitable imperfections of the realm of shadow, and so long as we remain this side the veil cannot be done away."

Ibid, p. 294

"Breaking free from cosmogonic associations, the negative, clown-devil aspect of the demiurgic power has become a great favorite in the tales told for amusement. A vivid example is Coyote of the American plains. Reynard the Fox is a European incarnation of this figure."

Ibid, p. 294 footnote: "Harva, op.cit.,pp. 114-115, quoting W. Radloff "Proben der Volkslitertur de turkischen Stamme Sud-Siberiens (St. Petersburg, 1866-70), Vol. I, p. 285