You're Wrong About - Killer Clowns

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

For our 100th episode, American Hysteria host Chelsey Weber-Smith visits our campfire to tell us about the time America was besieged by a killer clown panic ... and then the time it happened all over again. Digressions include Jon Stewart, "The Blair Witch Project" and John Wayne Gacy. Sarah coyly references the Hartford circus fire several times but no one seems to notice.”If you want to skip the 100th-episode stuff, the Clown Content begins around 10:15.Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchLinks! American Hysteria on the web: https://www.chelseywebersmith.com/americanhysteria& on Instagram: @americanhysteriapodcast & on Twitter: @amerhysteria Chelsey's "Phantom Clowns" episode:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-hysteria/id1441348407https://open.spotify.com/show/4VjkwFSQpgnHwugtqJwSxDSupport the show

I think Millennial Sexuality was very influenced by Tim Curry. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we made an episode and then we made another episode and then we kept making episodes and this is our hundredth episode. Oh my goodness! I'm very proud of us. I had vague ideas I was going to bake a cake for this moment but nope, just sitting here drinking a Diet Coke in my closet. But that's kind of like a cake though. I think Congress could agree that it's a cake. The same way ketchup is a vegetable. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic.

And if you want to support the show and get cute bonus episodes, we're on Patreon at patreon.com slash you're wrong about and lots of other places and I'm going to cut this little intro short because we have stuff to discuss. I mean really just the one thing because like we made it this far and just I'm I don't know I just wanted to take a moment to commemorate that. You know that I'm very interested in like marking occasions. I love holiday episodes. I love anniversary episodes. I love hundredth episode,versary episodes. I was not aware that this was our hundredth episode actually but then you told me and you said that we should record a special little intro to this episode. So this is what we're doing. This is here we are and here

we are. Yeah I mean this might prove contentious because what I did was I went I started the first episode and then I counted everything we've done that isn't putting like an episode where we were guests on another show or something like that into the feed or re-releasing something. So this is the hundredth instance of us releasing entirely new material. That is absolutely absurd that we've done this many episodes of the show. I never thought we were going to do this many. I don't think I had thoughts about it specifically. I just felt like you were clearly confused for wanting to do this project with me and I was like let's see how long this lasts before he figured out what a mistake he's made and it's been almost three years. And I still hadn't realized it.

I have something to discuss today Sarah. I've called you here for a reason. You figured out that I've been tricking you into thinking that you like my work. Oh well. So what are your hundredth episode thoughts? I mean I feel like we have grown a lot and yet I also feel like I am excited for what we're going to learn in the next 100 episodes that we do and I guess I just wanted to share that feeling. You know I feel like we had one idea or a vague idea of the kind of show we wanted to make when we started doing this and that that sort of evolved over time and that you know to me the funniest thing about how this all started was that like we never or at least I never imagined that it was going to be funny. Like that was never a call that

we had right. Like did you have thoughts about that? I mean the early episodes are so different than the episodes now. The way we do research is different. A buddy of mine the other day was asking me if I could share my notes for the Going Postal episode which I think was our second episode with him and I sent him the document and it was nine pages long. Like all my notes were nine pages which is like the cutest shit. Which you know out of context is a reasonable number of pages. But yeah how many pages of research do you have for your Tuskegee episodes Mike? It was 131 pages for the Tuskegee episodes and usually it's like 75 to 80 pages of notes now for an episode. So we've just gotten more ambitious. It feels like the sort of the stakes are higher because we

there's people listening now. I mean we thought we were doing this for like our moms. We were doing it for our moms for a few months there and like what a different time. I know and now people listen and people who have people who we have mentioned on the show have gotten in touch with us and people who are experts in the subjects that we discuss have gotten in touch with us. Like it really feels like a completely different level of responsibility to do a show that people are actually listening to. Which is actually really great. It's a great accountability mechanism for when we're researching the show. But it also just makes me like acutely aware of this when I'm doing the research that I really don't want to fuck up basic stuff. Which

does not stop me from fucking up basic stuff to be clear. But I try really really really hard not to get stuff wrong because I know that people who are real experts are listening. Except when you mention sports which you do not give a damn about. Which I refuse to do research on. I refuse to learn. I mean it's funny because I feel like I have gotten less anxious over time in a way that's totally counterintuitive. Oh yeah. Because when we started off and no one was listening I was working very much in the mode of an essayist which is where you're like okay I'm going to have a thought my tender little fragile thought and then I will nurture it like a seedling in this little

yogurt cup. So like when we started doing episodes it was like the most horrible feeling to let something out into the world when I hadn't been working on it for like a year of my life. Because I was like I have no idea if this is worth sharing. Like and I realize like how weird I had gotten about my work. Because yeah because I didn't think of myself as a perfectionist before and then I was put in a position where I had to like release an episode you know where I had done my due diligence. I had done my best. I had done a ton of research. Like I felt secure in the work I was doing but I also did have to accept in a dynamic way that like it would never be perfect. And like there would be mistakes and there would be misinformation that would seep in

and you don't like stop forever. This is kind of a theme in so many of our episodes. The idea of what kind of harm can journalists do if they're not conscious of the powers that they wield. And it was like this hurricane of like my own very personal and like self-obsessed hang-ups and perfectionism directed at myself had teamed up with this idea of like anything less than perfection. Well tear families apart and put people in prison. It's nice now because now you have no editorial standards whatsoever. It's been really nice watching that transition happen. Yes shush. No but I mean what's as you know what's happened is that like you have had to like drag me like a terrified dog like through the process of like returning to work as a place where you feel

a great sense of responsibility and you understand the seriousness of what you're doing. There is something between slipshod hurried work and absolute perfection and like there is a place for us in it. You're never going to feel 100% secure in anything you release into the world but like if you are working with a partner who keeps you accountable and who you trust then I don't know I'm pretty happy with that. I hope you find that partner someday. Oh shut up. I wish that for you would be it would be great. I feel like you're like Paul Hollywood being like it's a bit treakly. I don't know if that's how he talks. I know he's British. That's a show. Do you want to talk about the next 100 episodes? Yeah. Yes. What are our plans and goals?

Plans and goals. I want to do more stuff talking about how classic horror characters came to be. I want to talk more about problems with the justice system. We've been talking about doing stuff on junk science and forensics for a while and I shied away from that because of all the reasons you just talked about. Yeah because I'm not worthy. I want to keep doing book clubs. I feel like that was something that we started doing out of necessity in quarantine times because it was just like hard to have the brain space to like research episodes like normal for a while and then that was something that people liked and that we really liked doing. We also have some maligned women left that we need to talk about. Really? We didn't get through everybody.

We also, I know there's cases that are important to both of us that we haven't covered yet. We both really want to do a series on the HIV epidemic. We want to talk about the Iraq war. We need to talk about John Benet Ramsey and the Menendez brothers and Lea Holden Loeb and the McDonald's hot coffee case and Britney Spears. We get probably three or four extremely good ideas from our listeners every week. Another one of my anxieties about doing the show is that I used to think that we were going to run out of topics after like three months and what the experience of doing the show has taught me is that like we may never run out of topics. There's always going to be something else that the media got wrong unfortunately. Yeah no we won't. We're just

going to keep doing this show until we look like the night at the end of Indiana Jones and the last crusade and then we're going to like give the show to some younger archaeologists. Yes so stay tuned for that for our desiccated husks and all of this is an intro to our 100th episode which is about Killer Clowns with a wonderful guest. Yeah I feel like this episode is like a nice topper for our 100th episode versus Recake because it's about a moral panic. It is about issues that are about as serious as you can get and it's also really ridiculous. And it's also about the friends we made along the way because this show brought Chelsea to us right? Yeah and this is in the same way that it's bizarre that we've never done a Menendez Brothers episode

to this point. It's amazing that it took us 100 episodes to do a crossover with our beloved sibling show American Hysteria and its host Chelsea Webersmith who is about to tell us about Killer Clowns. So enjoy and we will see you for the next 100. Yeah meet you back here at our 200th episode special. I will make a cake for that. I probably will. Today we have a special guest and a special topic. Yes we do. Hi I'm Chelsea Webersmith and I do a podcast called American Hysteria where we cover moral panics, conspiracy theories, urban legends and American fantastical thinking. All those things come together and we try to explore false fears of Americans and why they happen when they do. I feel like you're like a carnival barker for your podcast like the

Millennial, our podcast the Millennial Carnivals. Hey come on, come on. I have been binging Chelsea's show all week and it is wonderful and people should check it out. But yeah and we are talking about, I would call this Killer Clowns I suppose. What title would you give this? We called our episode on this Phantom Clowns and I think that's sort of like the original, when the original, Lauren Coleman is his name. He was the only one really who wrote about the 80s panic which we'll talk about I'm sure and he called them Phantom Clowns so I stuck with that. Okay so I was not aware that there was a panic. I am aware of the phobia of clowns but I do not have it. Mike I'm gonna do something for you right now actually before we jump into the clown

panic. So I have a kids encyclopedia book from the 60s called Great Days of the Circus. Okay. And I'm just gonna turn my camera on for a second and show you some pictures of clowns and makeup. Are you trying to terrify me right now? I'm trying to unsettle you Mike like always. Okay. Oh there they are. Oh god the one with teeth, Jesus Christ. Well the thing I find really striking about these pictures close in on their face I think what that made me realize is that like oh clowns weren't meant to be seen close up, were they? Like clowns were meant to be seen from far far away. Yeah this is what Trixie Mattel always says about drag queens too. But right and that clowns you know they have these exaggerated intense facial features because

they're conveying like one basic emotion and sort of like a broad comedic emotion to the back row. Right. I think the circus is also like a scary and dark place that was like sold as wholesome entertainment for a long time in a way that was jarring. Yeah circuses are like genuinely terrifying. Right. Because of all the animal cruelty and like the weird economics and labor exploitation. There's so many things to be scared of at the circus. I'm scared of how the elephants are suffering. Sarah do you have a killer clowns thing? Do you have a phobia? No I mean I feel like there are a few different things at play here right because there's like an actual phobia of clowns which is a named thing. I forget what it's called. Coralphobia. Oh nice. Why isn't it just

clownophobia? That'd be so much easier. Well they had to make it hard but whatever so like yeah there's clownophobia you know I feel like there's a lot of media and like cute shirts and stuff in the 90s that were like clowns are scary haha. Yes. And this idea that like it was weird to find clowns scary and kind of like quirky and even if you like clowns I'm like I really like clowns actually. I think clowns are really neat. I'm appreciative of the art of clowning but like if a clown in full makeup meant to be seen from far away got in my face I would be like please go far away again. Back up. Or like tone down your look. So were clowns always scary or were they fun for a while then they became scary? They weren't scary before. I think we'll go back a little

bit later in the episode to what the clown was before this but to just sort of start in a really American context and more recently the 1960s the experience of the clown was completely different from today. Clowns were not scary period. I mean in the 60s Bozo the clown who is absolutely horrifying. He just has like these giant arched eyebrows and big red hair and it's just in some ways it's scarier than it but there was a 10-year wait for kids to get tickets to see his live show. So like you start to talk about having a baby and you're like we gotta get in line for Bozo tickets. What actually was Bozo the Clown? This was like a Las Vegas performer or something? What? I don't even know who Bozo the Clown was. I think you're thinking of Dean Martin.

Well he was basically just the original clown show on television. Oh so he was a TV show. So he sparked a franchise which I think is super interesting. They franchised out his image so actors in any city could put on their own Bozo show. So it's like Camp Crusty. Exactly it's like Camp Crusty. Yeah I want to get a visual of Bozo. Let's all look at Bozo the Clown. Bozo. Because this guy is the archetype for everything scary I think that came after. Oh oh oh oh you were not kidding. Like I was expecting I didn't think that I wouldn't find him scary but I really didn't think I would find him this scary. Yeah that's horrifying. The eyebrows are really upsetting and sometimes they're like more arched in the middle which is

more alarming. Oh god. It's a really exaggerated big red upturned mouth shape. Also the lack of head hair he has these giant like three foot long almost like pigtails coming off of the sides of his head but he has no hair on the top of his head which is really unsettling. Which is it which is Pennywise the Clown. Yeah. Ronald McDonald came out of Bozo. He burst out of his chest and then scurried away. Exactly. Willard Scott was the first Ronald McDonald and he was originally a Bozo in Washington DC and then private contractors and volunteers everywhere would become Clowns throughout the 60s and 70s and it was like a pretty lucrative industry. You know we see all these old shows of Clowns coming to birthday parties and that was super normal and one of those

people was John Wayne Gacy Jr. I did not know this he was a Clown. He was Pogo right. He was Pogo exactly and Pogo was just something like something he did at children's hospitals and parties and stuff and he was he was really known in the community as is like a great guy who was great with children and had a nice family and a nice job and so of course if you all don't know John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer in the mid to late 70s and he murdered and sexually assaulted at least 33 teenage boys and young men and their bodies were found in his crawl space under his home that he lived in with his wife but of course like as you might imagine this guy who dressed as a Clown and there's a super iconic picture of him dressed as Pogo the Clown and that was what

the media grabbed onto that was like the red meat of the story was a killer Clown and then it was like oh the irony like isn't it strange that he dressed as a Clown to bring children joy and was also a murderer like it feels like that the media latched onto that came from a sense of like that it was ironic in a way that it's hard to to connect with now well and of course as you guys know what was happening at the same time in the late 70s was the beginning of like three moral panics which are stranger danger the gay panic and satanic panic the triple crown so a gay pedophile luring children well dressed as a clown is absolutely perfect yeah that's the thing like the clown i feel like the clowning is has gotten conflated with his identity with his like activities

as a serial killer and it's like no i think the clown thing was like him trying real hard to be normal yeah and to be a good person and to sort of perform the actions of a good person like look and a good people dresses clowns and bring joy to the children yeah he's a community man right but what he was doing is he was getting teenagers and young men to come and work for him construction jobs and that was how it you know it's like not very sensational so the media just made him into sort of a killer clown and and one of the best things and i would bet my whole life that this was never said and that this was made up but uh when he was arrested he was reported to have said you know clowns can get away with the murder oh my oh god yeah could you imagine

no that's so silly i mean like i sure like it could have happened lots of things could have happened but like no yeah i mean that's just like if you're writing like a straight to video horror movie in the 80s you're like come on come on how do we end this thing yeah what's the stinger because was he a clown for a long period of time it wasn't core to his identity he was more of a serial killer yeah i think children catch snippets right and they have to translate it through their little seven-year-old brains and and they're hearing and seeing no matter what pictures and stories about a clown that kills children because that was the narrative so i think that that seeped into the consciousness of both adults and children right so the link was made between

clowning and killing right yeah exactly so it was like you're having clowns and serial killers right so i think these things yeah they were just a perfect recipe for what would come soon after that which was the first panic about clowns the first panic about clowns yes about phantom clowns phantom clowns you guys are you guys ready to go into that yes okay so ready i feel like we're about to enter the haunted mansion ride i'm like i'm so scared but i'm so excited so john Wayne gasey was sentenced to death in 1980 and it was again like a very very public trial so the very very next year it was april of 1981 it was kids in boston and they started reporting men in vans dressed as clowns that were trying to lure them with candy vans drink ding ding ding

so then here's the thing right so you guys will probably remember how during the satanic panic the the original mother and child whose names will escape me who were reporting abuse and daycare sparked the police to send a letter home to everyone saying hey this is happening did this happen to you at the mc martin preschool yeah that was yeah mc martin was the one where the police sent a letter to all the parents and we're like these very specific things may have happened to your child here's a long list of them that includes i believe the phrase anal sodomy yeah we don't know and don't ask your kids about it and don't talk about it amongst yourselves or with anyone else will buy and that was a great plan so anyway boston public school district sends out

memos telling parents to keep a close eye on their children because clowns are trying to kidnap them wait they literally warned parents about clowns yes that they needed to keep an eye on their children because there had been reports of clowns trying to lure them with candy oh boy calls just started flooding in there were so many reports that police began profiling clowns oh and they started following and pulling over clowns oh my god and here's the thing there were like so many clowns yeah there was a lot of birthday clowns that they pulled over but they never found anything nefarious and if you're driving between birthdays i mean i see like you're not you're just gonna be in makeup yeah the whole day right it is very similar to the sort of child

sex trafficking panic that we have now where you're like someone tried to traffic me at the grocery store and then you hear the actual story and it's like a person came up to me and asked for directions yeah and it's like this completely normal story i can see that being the same thing that happened then where it's like i saw a killer clown but it's actually literally just like a 40 year old man in clown makeup driving from one party to the other so okay so more clown sightings uh happened they started happening all over the northeast sort of and even in the midwest like Kansas City there was a clown chasing children with a sword nice this is my favorite one in boston the day after the story started airing on tv they were called to the park to investigate a clown that was

reportedly just naked from the waist down i don't know if he was wearing shoes but of course there was no pantsless clown identified or found so coming kind of at the same time as this clown panic ronald reagan i think he had just won the election he was very much a representative of this suncanny valley thing that i think we'll talk about a little bit more later and people kind of remember him as as having like red cheeks and that like two polished veneer that almost rendered him a little animatronic wait are you saying ronald reagan was a clown like he fit the clown aesthetic so here again this is just me so at the same time this was happening where he seems like he's a little bit play acting and some people talk about how he was kind of creepy

our first stepford president this is very cultural studies phd and i'm extremely here for it wasn't ronald reagan the real killer clown i mean he was he literally was right because he was also this beloved figure because he had been in kind of cheesy movies and his career as an actor and then had been this charismatic megafauna as governor of california and was just very telegenic i feel like that was something that people were very aware that he was pioneering also this like telegenic presidency that was style over substance and had pretty devastating consequences i mean he killed a lot more people than john Wayne gacy yeah yeah there you go but yeah he had like the red cheeks and his hair was so molded and weird he did he looked like he looked like his animatron in the

hall of presidents at disneyland also i mean not a lot of people know that ronald reagan's campaign slogan in 1984 was everything floats down here another parallel but anyway i don't know it's like he had like a very polished veneer and it's like this the creepy crafted perfection of politics we all see it and i imagine children interpret it you know in a certain way as well you know what i'll take it i'll take it yeah trump also was coming into office as the other clown panic happened and that's sort of why i bring it up it's like the clowns are like a naturally produced like urban legend warning sign of like oh no we're about to have a really really bad administration right well speaking of harbingers shall we go into horror movies yes my favorite place so i think

poltergeist it was in 1982 so it was like right after all this clown stuff and it was kind of the first representation of a clown being scary and it's that clown doll that pulls the boy i don't know his name i can't remember it under the bed that was really scary do you guys remember that oh yeah mike have you seen poltergeist i'm googling clown doll poltergeist because i'm still too scared to see that movie it's a fantastic scene and i'm going to describe to you verbally because i don't want to ask you to see it no it's this beautiful suspenseful scene where the boy is like looking under the bed you're like sure there's gonna be something under the bed he like looks down there's nothing there and then he like gets up and the clown's behind him yeah i i this is the

still that i have in front of me on google images it looks terrifying tell us about this clown it seems to be made of like porcelain or something plasticky and it's got like a big toothy grin and big bozo eyebrows oh you and like long arms and legs arms that got magically long to strangle you with in the same way like children of the corn is creepy because it's like these images of innocence that are out to kill you the the idea of something that is perpetually smiling while also trying to murder you is just like the incongruity makes it that much scarier that's also why dolls are creepy i think we're so naturally afraid of things that can't feel empathy the very basis of our communication with people is like what is your facial expression right and if it's

incongruent with the actions then you're like oh you're like super dangerous you're not committing an act of passion you're not like punching somebody because they said something mean you're like calculatingly wanting to harm anyway so back to horror because steven king then published it in 1986 and then of course pennywise the clown who now has become a new yet again giant cultural icon pennywise was the central villain and i think what steven king really nailed in this was that the clown morphed into like a personalized worst fear of each child yeah is there anything that you want to say about it like what was your experience originally did you read the book or was it more the movie for you sarah it's funny i didn't see the movie or read

the book until i was like in my late 20s and that book features protagonists who start out at 11 years old when we first meet them and then we return and they're like 36 37 yeah and there's a real theme of repressed memory there like i really wondered how much steven king kind of was influenced by the zeitgeist and telling a story about these characters who basically did battle with this shape-shifting monster who often took the form of pennywise the clown and who didn't remember any of the first time or didn't remember their childhoods in this town or this friendship that they had with each other and then the memories come back as they come back to fight it again and repressed memories are so central to the satanic panic so this feels

like a satanic panic informed story to me too what do you think about that i think about that all the time every single morning i wake up and say was steven king influenced by the satanic panic and then you do your skincare and then you're like but he was he yeah he totally was i think he had to have been informed by every every moral panic that was going on at that time i wanted to also mention that's a good transition because pennywise i believe was also influenced heavily by ronald mcdonald and i have a little bit of proof i found an old mcdonald's commercial that very very closely in my opinion resembles the very iconic scene with george who's the younger brother of the main character who goes missing we see him meet pennywise in the sewer oh my god i want to

see ronald mcdonald in the sewer so bad okay so i think we're gonna show i think we're gonna uh let mic take a look at that right you're sending me uh okay you ready yes one two three well hi didn't let mcdonald's hamburger delicious hi george don't you want a balloon mom told me never to talk to strangers i'm not supposed to take stuff from strangers my dad said so well your mother's right as always very wise of your dad george very wise indeed i'm ronald mcdonald give me a mcdonald's shake hi george i'm pennywise the dancing clown you are george so now we know each other he right you're no stranger you really are ronald mcdonald oh god i can't tell which one

is more terrifying yeah and i think the thing about pennywise too is that all of these characters who come back home as adults are confronting pennywise at the same time that they're confronting their childhood traumas and you know the dynamic trauma that they still carry with them from childhood that they have maybe repressed or not dealt with but like they're home and it's back and pennywise is still in the sewer like i feel like pennywise is so effective as a scary monster because like all scary monsters that like are sticky and like stick in the culture the thing to me the thing about pennywise is that he's synonymous with childhood trauma like he manifests as your worst and he knows how to terrify you with his knowledge of what your parents did to you or of what you

have of the worst traumas that you have experienced and so to be afraid of pennywise it's not silly right because pennywise is connected with with human trauma itself right so a lot of people blame the it book for the phantom clown panic but obviously as we see it came five years later so we're going to jump forward a little bit to 2008 just to sort of show how clowns have transformed from jolly happy children's entertainers to really really scary so there was a study conducted in 2008 where they pulled 250 children who were aged four to six and they were trying to decorate a hospital wing for children and they were trying to figure out how the children would like the decor to look and every single child said that they did not want clowns to be part of the

decor wow every single child so it's like the end of clowns as child entertainment it's the end of clowns as pure happy fun like that just isn't a thing that exists anymore it's always complicated I bet a lot of professional clowns hate Stephen King I wonder can we do I know that this is a little out of order but can we go a little bit into the history of the clown because yeah we talk about how like clowns used to be lovable childhood entertainers but that's not what they were oh they do this ebb and flow thing because the archetype of the fool right that stretches across time right it dates back to ancient times and across most if not all cultures there is this sort of creation known as the fool or a little wise fool like a court jester type of situation yes

this is so interesting to me ancient Greece had an actual profession where a man would come to funerals and do impressions and crack jokes at the expense of the dead person and make fun of the mourners and the family so it's like a funeral slash roast yes essentially this clown would show up and do that and sort of the idea was that if you're roasting dead people and the community that's mourning it would help vent the anxieties about death and and what sort of this transgression it really helped vent sort of the darkness and sadness of death right that's also the origin of your mom jokes exactly at people's funerals just fucking brutal so the other roots like you mentioned mike are in you know the royal kingdom in england and clowns were known as court jesters

and also wise fools and they were really respected because they as much as they were goofballs and joked around they also were known to hold kind of like a crude wisdom they were allowed to make fun of the king without being tortured or killed and then not only that but they were political advisors to the king because they were allowed to speak plainly i mean it's it's sort of similar now to this stance that people like john stewart take where it's like oh i'm just a comedian i'm not really a political actor when humor has always been political and humor has always been profoundly influential on the way that we think about things right and the idea that humans like used to be fundamentally different you know in this like deeply human way it's like no like like this is

why to return inevitably to the topic of scary movies like scary movies to me are much scarier when characters are telling jokes and behaving like human beings if they're like grim and like serious the whole time i'm like well this really takes me out of it because like i wouldn't be like that because why the Blair witch project is so scary because they're like telling silly jokes and yelling at each other like human beings do under duress so this is just a fun another fun fact this was actually found out because uh my partner who's a producer on our show also was reading about the history of circus music she informed me that the classic clown song and you know it is a loop the classic clown song

perfect beautiful so that song was proposed in 1897 in Czechoslovakia and its original name is the entrance of the gladiators and it was a military march but it was played like it was played really slow so it was like oh my god but get ready for this when the clowns came out and used it it was like it was like a faster tempo and when the clowns come out in the circus the name of the song they come out to is called a screamer and they say they're not trying to be scary yeah that's amazing it's perfect yes like i don't think anything has ever made me so happy so obviously this started out as like an ironic thing because people are like oh it's so funny they're playing our old favorite song doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot fast like that's so weird and

ironic yeah it's like it used to be ironic for a serial killer to clown in his free time as opposed to just being appropriate so now i want to talk about one of my most favorite things in the world and maybe you guys have talked about it but it's the uncanny valley we have not talked about this we have not talked about that on this show good so please take us there so the uncanny valley is an aesthetics theory that it's that thing where you are witnessing something that's human or like a humanoid and it's close it's it's like human but it's not and it's what inspires like eeriness that discomfort you feel when looking at animatrons or dolls or clowns like when you check into a nice bed and breakfast and there's a Victorian doll in a chair facing you yeah as you get into bed

and you're like i'm just going to turn this object around it's like the idea that when something is distinctly not human it's less unsettling than when it becomes closer and closer to being realistic right i think of it as like the difference between the incredibles and the polar express that in the incredibles all of the humans are super stylized yeah no one is fooled that like are those real humans or not but then the polar express they're trying to be like you can't even tell that it's a computer but you fucking can and it's weird right and it evokes a feeling in us of like i don't know how many of you are things and how many of you are human yeah that's exactly what it is and so the uncanny valley has like nobody can say definitively what it is

why those things creep us out and make us feel really uncomfortable but there are a few theories that i think are really interesting one of them is that perhaps it looks to us or may remind us of a dead body which we want to avoid or someone who may be infected with something like rabies we are naturally repelled from things that could be dangerous another theory is that it has to do with empathy so these things that are a little inhuman are more difficult to empathize with or read empathy from there's like a feeling of being like a little bit soulless so there's a lot of mistrust that we're naturally biologically programmed to have when we're like there's something off here and it could be something that's dangerous right it's like when somebody doesn't blink

yeah like Charles Manson not a fan of blinking unsettling guy yeah so now this is the part that i love the most about the uncanny valley the theory that i love the most and it has to do with like what is what is creepiness right what is eeriness it's different than fear we know that that it's a completely separate feeling right so we think of creepiness sometimes is like say you're on a bus and there's a dude staring at you right like you're not purely scared you're just like creeped out right it's about assessing a threat so our social norms say that we can't scream and freak out because that would possibly be rude or it would be outside of what's acceptable so we kind of sit there and we're just doing this like reconnaissance right so we're

keenly aware of this threat and we're watching for more information and so it kind of creates like a little bit of an error message in our brains because we don't know what to do and so it's kind of like a creepy threat is ambiguous right clowns are a good example of this of course because they have all of the features of humans but they're all a little bit exaggerated they're just a little bit off like their eyebrows are really wide their smile is really wide totally it feels to me like now the well is poisoned i feel like people now associate clowns with freakiness more than they associate them with joy and happiness and kids birthday parties right absolutely and then there's also do you guys know about super normal stimuli what no and i think this could

explain why clowns have been beloved and despise so we got the uncanny valley on one hand on the other hand we have this thing called super normal stimuli which is it's a psychological concept that explores how we are naturally more attracted to things that are exaggerated and blown up which is like disneyland we want to watch these sort of dramatic you know theater the history of art we want to see more drama and the main study that was done was with birds they gave birds that had these small spotted eggs giant eggs with giant polka dots on them and they chose to abandon their eggs and go sit on these other eggs so you know and they have all these other tests with with fish that have like brighter colors so it's like they we will go to the fake if it's

blown up and exaggerated so i think that there's that attraction because the clown is nothing if not a blown up version of a person you know we were talking about horror movies earlier and it feels like clowns have always been appealing you know in a few different ways but one of them is the way that horror movies are appealing where like you know it's just like this anarchic experience of watching someone break the rules of the society that you are in and getting to have some kind of cathartic experience through this so it's i don't know maybe clowns are for grown-ups oh i mean they were as we were talking about they were not children's entertainers i think really until maybe the circus but even the circus was like not just for children but the circus is like huge

everybody goes right the circus comes and you're like well i'm a servant in hartford connecticut so i'm going to go to the circus on my day off because these illustrated posters have promised me fantastical things the circus was for people who fucking hated elephants that too or who just wanted to see an elephant and didn't know how the elephant had had gotten there but i mean you think about dolls right dolls have also had this yeah dolls have also had a rough go of it culturally yeah yeah there another thing that's like been ruined by horror movies definitely shucky was the end of us earnestly enjoying dolls absolutely um okay how about we talk about the 2016 panic yes please i'm not even aware that there was a 2016 panic i was alive i did not see

this at all what what is this what were you doing man it was huge is this do i have to be on tumblr how do i find this no no no it was in the news it was like i i'd say facebook was the the transmission you were in friends with enough scared facebook people my yeah so what was what was this all right so this came in 2016 a lot of people were like oh it's because it came out but it's not because it came out in 2018 so part of what people believe sparked it was um outside of sort of cultural consciousness was the low budget horror director named adam kraus he had a creepy clown stand in the street holding black balloons trying to make a viral marketing campaign for his short film which was called gags um and then a bunch of people called the police and started taking pictures

spreading on social media another possible beginning point was uh have you guys watched the i well i might you probably haven't but sarah have you watched the wrinkles the clown documentary on hulu i have not what is it so wrinkles was this character created by someone who has remained anonymous he is just kind of seems like a normal dude and they started filming like creepy clown stuff and spreading it like found footage so he put up all these stickers that said wrinkles the clown with a phone number and you could call this phone number and there was a creepy message or he would actually answer the phone and um you know he was like a uh hey kid just a little kind of voice and and he also kind of created this idea that parents could call so that they're

to scare their kids into obedience so parents would actually call and leave messages not actually wanting wrinkles to come but you can hear the kid just like crying and screaming in the background is being like we're gonna call wrinkles we're gonna have them come over if you don't eat your dinner oh wow but it was a boogeyman scenario right and it was coming a couple years before the actual panic so 2016 we've got suddenly this group of kids in greenville south south carolina are saying that a clown was trying to lure them in the woods but in perfect 2016 fashion it was not with candy but with large amounts of cash oh capitalism so that these these clowns flashed green lasers at them came to their door in the night rattling chains and banging around he left a

trail of tide pods in the woods exactly 2016 anyway of course in in classic fashion the mom of one of the children sort of fuels this by contacting the local news and coming on and they interview a lot of the children who are again like about seven years old and it's so cute you know he's like and then i saw a cloud in the woods and hey it's just really darling but the mother is like they might she might as well be leading like some new coalition against clowns you like out she's like a mad like mother's against drunk driving thing going on mother's against forest clowns exactly so she reports it um so then more and more people start reporting it because on the news right and so one woman says there's a clown with a blinking nose

near a dumpster but i kind of think it's just this weird attention thing right like the poison halloween candy you have people jamming tax into candy and then putting it on facebook right and it gets like 40 000 shares or something is there any evidence that there were ever any actual clowns there is no evidence but i think that some of it had to be because if i was a teenager and this was going on there's a part of me that might have like done some jokes well this is the thing is yeah if we're in the middle of like a clown panic it actually makes a lot of sense to go dress as a clown and fuck with people oh yeah and i'm sure that happened so basically those same children that kind of were the first ones in south carolina told police that a clown lived in a house near a pond

at the end of a trail through the woods which is so fantastically fairytale that's a thomas concave painting you know and so the police did find this property and found nothing clown related or threatening yeah anyway uh it kept going reporting clowns with knives jumping out of abandoned houses and bushes chasing kids from bus stops teenagers started making threats to schools posing as evil clowns likely to get out of tests oh my god kids did that at my school too but they used bomb threats okay so this is the best one all right so this woman said that she was smoking on her porch at 4am and a man wearing a striped outfit and a clown mask and a red wig walked directly up to her grabbed her by the throat and said i should just kill you now and then some students and

teachers would wish they were never born at the junior and senior high school today the junior and senior high school yeah and then just walked away after that so yeah that didn't happen the junior and senior high school like that doesn't even make sense it's when people make up stories about criminals you can often tell when something is sort of a myth made to circulate on facebook partly because the killer always like they don't kill you they just say something scary and then leave or whatever yeah it's like people explain themselves to you and don't just kill you and like say things that are meant to be scary to an audience like something that you learned from a horror movie i cannot believe people fell for this so clowns become a way to get out of school

that's brilliant do local news reporters like i do this thing sometimes where people send me a tip and then i just don't do a story on it because it's fake people not know that they could do that but mike like if there is a killer clown out there and you didn't report on it you'd feel pretty after he did something terrible at the junior and senior high school okay so penn state 500 students at penn state wanna went on an actual clown hunt uh because there were claims that an evil clown had been spotted on campus there are videos of this i imagine it was partially a joke right but but it's still something that people like know what it is and they're like yeah whoo those kids did that to distract the cops from like the meth lab they

had in their basement dude yeah this is obvious okay so ronald mcdonald was put on hiatus from all community events it was this big of a deal oh in 2016 yep and i don't know if he's been reinstated yet it's actually amazing to me that he's still around i thought the killer clown thing would have done away with him years ago mcdonald's is powerful yeah they need to they need to rebrand i mean i hope they don't because i don't want them to do better but i think we need more of uh i don't know if he's grimace or the grimace but that guy the purple guy i can't believe all this was happening and i never heard about it in 2016 it was a really event for you mic that's true going on maybe i don't know yeah so okay this got all the way to the white house when white house a reporter

asked a white house spokesman john earnest for president obama's opinion on killer clowns and this is what the white house spokesman said quote i don't know that the president has been briefed on this particular situation obviously this is a situation that law enforcement is taking quite seriously come on oh wow fantastic so another example a mom and daughter called the police on a 12 year old boy uh who turned out to uh have autism spectrum disorder and he was just looking to surprise his mom with his new pennywise costume like this is can you look at a 12 year old boy and realize that's a 12 year old boy and it's probably fine don't call cops on 12 year old boys clown outfits or not yeah and also like if i saw someone dressed like pennywise i would assume

i wouldn't assume that they were pennywise himself like i would be like oh that person likes pennywise and they're trying to be scary like they're a kid or an egg lord sometimes it's like do people think that movies are real they do mic i think they do a little girl in athens georgia was actually arrested for bringing a knife to school to fight off supposed clowns so things got bad not because they were killer clowns but because people were reacting far out of proportion to phantom clowns so one thing that happened was a 16 year old was stabbed to death by an older man and we're not sure you can't say for certain why but he had a clown mask he's wearing a clown mask oh the one who got killed or the one who killed him the one who who was killed so it was possibly

a reaction to the clown mask but i can't say that definitively so i don't want to put out any fake news what were the circumstances of this did they know each other they did not know each other it's a little bit foggy the extenuating circumstances but here is a certainty so going back to that south carolina apartment building that kind of helped spark everything men who lived there who were told that there were mysterious clowns in the woods started firing their guns into the woods when they heard voices that they could not explain oh my god so we have like real danger coming out of this but not the kind that everyone's expecting right which is always the case with a moral panic and of people being like keyed up and ready to like shoot you or stab you it's so

fucking weird yes i want to interview one of these people like do you actually think that there's men dressing up as clowns trying to kill children is that like the actual belief i want to know if they think that there are clowns with magical powers like if someone's wearing a clown costume they're just a person wearing a clown costume like i feel like people are treating clowns as some kind of a supernatural entity in these scenarios right if i was going to kidnap a child i would not dress in a way that made myself extremely distinctive and memorable and also something that everyone is scared of already it's like dressing up as jason you know to try and like crash a fun party so did this ever get like debunked or did it just sort of fade away as we

got distracted by other events in 2016 it got debunked by chelsea it faded away as everything does i think poison halloween candy is a great example of of a really similar situation where the reports come out and once they do get debunked they're no one's interested in reporting that or it's a tiny little footnote yeah what sticks is the sensational media reporting i feel like all of us sleep on the combination of fucking local news and facebook as engines of radicalization yes because like yes we talk about like fox news and stuff and fox news is bad but it's so sort of like upfront forwardly bad and we talk about fourchan yeah and fourchan and these other places that are like really obviously fucking terrible there's a lot of people that are sort of savvy enough to know

that fox news is terrible and to not go on fourchan but they're watching the fucking local news every night and they're seeing what their friends share on facebook and there's this like huge middle of people in america who are not getting radicalized by fox news but they're just absorbing what they think is credible media and it's just fucking trash and what is it that's so bad about it because i feel like my experience watching local news is like every story i'm like why am i hearing about this like this seems like a weird thing for you to be telling me about it's like not relevant to like you know public information that i need to know about like voting and like street cleaning and stuff like that it seems like engineered to like scare me or be cute yes

their behaving as if they ran out of stories when like obviously that's impossible so like why are they talking about these things and it's so like there's so much copaganda that goes through local news just like yes police sources say 65 people were trapped in a trafficking sting and then you later find out that it's like not 65 not a trafficking sting but they were people though and it's piping police rhetoric just directly into people's homes like without any kind of editorialization or anything yeah out any context yeah i mean they still fucking do the razor blades and the apple every year that still goes around local news i swear you're gonna be downloading it from zoom this year seriously your 3d printing candy and it's gonna be full of weed you know

i like to think of local news as a thousand ways to die and then one to help you sleep so like it'll be like oh there was a fire a car crash like antifa's coming into the suburbs and then like here's a new quack medication to help you someone helped ducks cross the road yeah that's the format it's just 29 minutes of murder and then you end with ducklings yeah so speaking about the news uh i think obviously part of this that we can't ignore is what was happening culturally at the in 2016 and i think it's really interesting that we had this i mean you can't not see clown in donald trump right he's he's so fake looking his hair's insane his coloring is insane he's meant to be seen from far away he's got this like oversized suit where his little tiny fingers poke out like he

looks like a lot like a clown and then at the same time he's being rendered in magazines political cartoons as a clown like that's one of the biggest ways that people regard him right i think this is really fun anarchists actually created a billboard in the middle of the night they painted over a billboard with trump dressed as a clown with the words clowns can get away with murder he was actually specifically dressed as pogo oh wow even to the point where governor gabin gabin new some you know who loves to throw the punches he uh he compared trump to pennywise in a tweet you know got him got him i uh i think the i think the donald trump as clown thing is like very overland totally cultural studies phd it is i fucking love it yeah i like as somebody who spends a lot of

time on google scholar like for researching the show there are those papers 100 i came across one that was talking about how like the beetles were so popular because there were four of them you know and there's like four horsemen of the apocalypse oh my god and like four like books of the bible and it was going through all this like symbolism of four sure i read the whole fucking paper it was like 70 pages long i was like yeah like give it to me the last thing i uh thought would be fun to talk about was another clown sighting that came a little bit before the actual panic this uh this sighting this clown sighting and interaction with this cryptoid that would come to be known as sam the sand down clown that was seen by two children i think they were seven and nine

and this was around four p.m. and they were attracted to this area they were on a golf course and they heard wailing and they follow the noise and then it stopped and then this clown came out of the bridge and they described him as about seven feet tall he looked wooden and mechanical and flesh at the same time as the way these children described it the first thing that came out was a hand wearing a blue glove and i believe it only had three fingers he couldn't communicate his like words were all garbled and at one point he used like one of those weird tape recorders with the microphone remember those where you could like talk into it and it would be loud but it was like for children so he was trying to speak through that but he couldn't really communicate so they

asked him to write like who he was on a piece of paper and why he could write so they're talking to a disembodied hand at the golf course no sorry the hand came first then the clown the seven foot tall clown who was wood mechanical and flesh yeah mike keep up sorry keep up so they asked him who he was and he introduced himself as all colors sam or he said i am all colors oh my yeah could this be someone who was just tripping balls that's my theory for real and then they asked are you a ghost and he wrote well not really but i am in an odd sort of way and they spent about 30 minutes hanging with this guy they weren't terrified of him or anything he lived in a metal shack which they spent a little time in and and then he vanished but again the to the children didn't act afraid

of this thing but when we hear a six foot tall flesh would mechanical clown creature talking into a weird microphone to us that's horrific and scary and weird i don't know i just think it's this interesting outlier that i'd never heard before well it's like a friendly killer clown scenario is what you mean that it's like a nice story of chatting with a dude who's tripping balls in an old suit what if these killer clowns are like sweetums in the muppet movie these like spectral clowns that live in the forest that only want to hear the laughter of a child and they're tortured by the fact that we keep running away from them and shooting at them that sounds scary though all right they sound like like a mournful outsider artist sitting in their shack

practicing clowning yeah it's Miranda July which is what i think a lot of this stuff is too like it's funny to me also that people aren't more cynical about like if you see a clown holding black balloons like i would presume that to be a viral marketing campaign it's surprising to me that more people when they see something super weird aren't just like that's probably a viral marketing campaign dude last time i was in new york i walked past a bar on the lower east side or something it was like opening soon a bar just for pregnant women and it had like a photo of a woman like a visibly pregnant woman sipping a martini and it was like this is very fucking obviously a viral marketing campaign that is like wanting us to get pissed and share that on instagram

and then of course like two days later it was like viral marketing campaign comes to the lower east side it's like yeah that was really fucking clear to you because i'm not on facebook and i don't watch local news it's actually kind of inspiring that the 2016 clown panic didn't result in a bunch of laws for like three strikes for clowns or some bullshit of like george's law i feel like clowns have have already been pretty marginalized and you know yeah i hope that a new dawn is breaking for the clowns of this nation do you i'm fine without clowns i do not miss clowns okay maybe this is another maybe this is better i feel like maybe the era of us pretending that clowns are simple wholesome figures rather than complex trickster characters is over and maybe

that's good now if only we could do the same thing for ronald reagan and stop shooting guns into the forest don't shoot guns into the forest that's the moral of the story is don't shoot at imaginary things chelsea can you tell us about uh if people liked this episode like what else do you talk about on your show yeah we do so much of the similar things that you guys do i mean we cover everything from the illuminati to quackery to the archetype of the redneck and how poor white people have been maligned by rich people forever and uh we have a new season coming up we're doing fake news charismatic leaders televangelists but uh if you guys like this show i find you guys very inspiring and i think we're just kindred spirits kind of together in what we do so debunk mates yeah yeah

you know more than debunking even just sort of like why right we want to know why we want to go into the scary forest we do the haunted mansion right don't shoot us yeah don't shoot us