Killer Clowns
00:00I 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 episodeand 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.
00:47And if you want to support the show and get cute bonus episodes, we're on Patreon atpatreon.com slash you're wrong about and lots of other places and I'm going to cut this littleintro short because we have stuff to discuss. I mean really just the one thing because likewe 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 thatthis was our hundredth episode actually but then you told me and you said that we should record aspecial little intro to this episode. So this is what we're doing. This is here we are and here
01:27we are. Yeah I mean this might prove contentious because what I did was I went I started thefirst episode and then I counted everything we've done that isn't putting like an episodewhere 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 absurdthat 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 forwanting to do this project with me and I was like let's see how long this lasts before he figuredout what a mistake he's made and it's been almost three years. And I still hadn't realized it.
02:13I have something to discuss today Sarah. I've called you here for a reason. You figured outthat 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 yetI also feel like I am excited for what we're going to learn in the next 100 episodes that we doand I guess I just wanted to share that feeling. You know I feel like we had one idea or a vagueidea of the kind of show we wanted to make when we started doing this and that that sort of evolvedover time and that you know to me the funniest thing about how this all started was that like wenever or at least I never imagined that it was going to be funny. Like that was never a call that
03:02we had right. Like did you have thoughts about that? I mean the early episodes are so differentthan the episodes now. The way we do research is different. A buddy of mine the other day was askingme if I could share my notes for the Going Postal episode which I think was our second episode withhim and I sent him the document and it was nine pages long. Like all my notes were nine pageswhich 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 was131 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
03:46there'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 showhave gotten in touch with us and people who are experts in the subjects that we discuss havegotten in touch with us. Like it really feels like a completely different level of responsibilityto do a show that people are actually listening to. Which is actually really great. It's a greataccountability mechanism for when we're researching the show. But it also just makes me like acutelyaware of this when I'm doing the research that I really don't want to fuck up basic stuff. Which
04:25does not stop me from fucking up basic stuff to be clear. But I try really really really hard notto 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'stotally counterintuitive. Oh yeah. Because when we started off and no one was listening I wasworking very much in the mode of an essayist which is where you're like okay I'm going to have athought my tender little fragile thought and then I will nurture it like a seedling in this little
05:03yogurt cup. So like when we started doing episodes it was like the most horrible feelingto 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 hadgotten about my work. Because yeah because I didn't think of myself as a perfectionist before andthen I was put in a position where I had to like release an episode you know where I had done mydue diligence. I had done my best. I had done a ton of research. Like I felt secure in the work Iwas 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
05:51and you don't like stop forever. This is kind of a theme in so many of our episodes. The idea ofwhat 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-upsand perfectionism directed at myself had teamed up with this idea of like anything less thanperfection. Well tear families apart and put people in prison. It's nice now because now youhave 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 dragme like a terrified dog like through the process of like returning to work as a place where you feel
06:42a great sense of responsibility and you understand the seriousness of what you're doing. There issomething 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 youare working with a partner who keeps you accountable and who you trust then I don't know I'm prettyhappy with that. I hope you find that partner someday. Oh shut up. I wish that for you would beit would be great. I feel like you're like Paul Hollywood being like it's a bit treakly. I don'tknow 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?
07:35Plans 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 onjunk science and forensics for a while and I shied away from that because of all the reasons youjust talked about. Yeah because I'm not worthy. I want to keep doing book clubs. I feel like thatwas something that we started doing out of necessity in quarantine times because it was just likehard to have the brain space to like research episodes like normal for a while and then thatwas something that people liked and that we really liked doing. We also have some maligned women leftthat we need to talk about. Really? We didn't get through everybody.
08:22We also, I know there's cases that are important to both of us that we haven't covered yet. Weboth 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 theMcDonald's hot coffee case and Britney Spears. We get probably three or four extremely goodideas from our listeners every week. Another one of my anxieties about doing the show is that Iused to think that we were going to run out of topics after like three months and what the experienceof doing the show has taught me is that like we may never run out of topics. There's always goingto be something else that the media got wrong unfortunately. Yeah no we won't. We're just
09:00going to keep doing this show until we look like the night at the end of Indiana Jones and the lastcrusade and then we're going to like give the show to some younger archaeologists. Yes so staytuned for that for our desiccated husks and all of this is an intro to our 100th episode which isabout Killer Clowns with a wonderful guest. Yeah I feel like this episode is like a nicetopper for our 100th episode versus Recake because it's about a moral panic. It is aboutissues 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
09:52to this point. It's amazing that it took us 100 episodes to do a crossover with our belovedsibling show American Hysteria and its host Chelsea Webersmith who is about to tell usabout Killer Clowns. So enjoy and we will see you for the next 100. Yeah meet you back here at our200th episode special. I will make a cake for that. I probably will. Today we have a special guestand a special topic. Yes we do. Hi I'm Chelsea Webersmith and I do a podcast called AmericanHysteria where we cover moral panics, conspiracy theories, urban legends and American fantasticalthinking. All those things come together and we try to explore false fears of Americans and whythey happen when they do. I feel like you're like a carnival barker for your podcast like the
10:43Millennial, our podcast the Millennial Carnivals. Hey come on, come on. I have been bingingChelsea's show all week and it is wonderful and people should check it out. But yeah and we aretalking 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 80spanic 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 nothave it. Mike I'm gonna do something for you right now actually before we jump into the clown
11:28panic. 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 clownsand 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 reallystriking about these pictures close in on their face I think what that made me realizeis that like oh clowns weren't meant to be seen close up, were they? Like clowns were meant to beseen 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
12:18they'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 wholesomeentertainment for a long time in a way that was jarring. Yeah circuses are like genuinelyterrifying. Right. Because of all the animal cruelty and like the weird economics and laborexploitation. There's so many things to be scared of at the circus. I'm scared of how the elephantsare suffering. Sarah do you have a killer clowns thing? Do you have a phobia? No I mean I feel likethere are a few different things at play here right because there's like an actual phobia ofclowns which is a named thing. I forget what it's called. Coralphobia. Oh nice. Why isn't it just
13:01clownophobia? That'd be so much easier. Well they had to make it hard but whatever so like yeah there'sclownophobia you know I feel like there's a lot of media and like cute shirts and stuff in the 90sthat were like clowns are scary haha. Yes. And this idea that like it was weird to find clownsscary 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 infull 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 fora while then they became scary? They weren't scary before. I think we'll go back a little
13:47bit later in the episode to what the clown was before this but to just sort of start in a reallyAmerican context and more recently the 1960s the experience of the clown was completely differentfrom today. Clowns were not scary period. I mean in the 60s Bozo the clown who is absolutelyhorrifying. He just has like these giant arched eyebrows and big red hair and it's just in someways 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.
14:36Well 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 imageso actors in any city could put on their own Bozo show. So it's like Camp Crusty. Exactly it'slike 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 findhim 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
15:27more alarming. Oh god. It's a really exaggerated big red upturned mouth shape. Also the lack ofhead hair he has these giant like three foot long almost like pigtails coming off of the sides of hishead but he has no hair on the top of his head which is really unsettling. Which is it which isPennywise the Clown. Yeah. Ronald McDonald came out of Bozo. He burst out of his chest and thenscurried away. Exactly. Willard Scott was the first Ronald McDonald and he was originally aBozo in Washington DC and then private contractors and volunteers everywhere would become Clownsthroughout the 60s and 70s and it was like a pretty lucrative industry. You know we see allthese old shows of Clowns coming to birthday parties and that was super normal and one of those
16:15people was John Wayne Gacy Jr. I did not know this he was a Clown. He was Pogo right. He wasPogo exactly and Pogo was just something like something he did at children's hospitals andparties and stuff and he was he was really known in the community as is like a great guy who wasgreat with children and had a nice family and a nice job and so of course if you all don't knowJohn Wayne Gacy was a serial killer in the mid to late 70s and he murdered and sexually assaultedat least 33 teenage boys and young men and their bodies were found in his crawl space under hishome that he lived in with his wife but of course like as you might imagine this guy who dressedas a Clown and there's a super iconic picture of him dressed as Pogo the Clown and that was what
17:04the media grabbed onto that was like the red meat of the story was a killer Clown and then it waslike oh the irony like isn't it strange that he dressed as a Clown to bring children joy and wasalso a murderer like it feels like that the media latched onto that came from a sense of like thatit was ironic in a way that it's hard to to connect with now well and of course as you guys know whatwas happening at the same time in the late 70s was the beginning of like three moral panicswhich are stranger danger the gay panic and satanic panic the triple crown so a gay pedophileluring children well dressed as a clown is absolutely perfect yeah that's the thing likethe clown i feel like the clowning is has gotten conflated with his identity with his like activities
17:52as a serial killer and it's like no i think the clown thing was like him trying real hard to benormal yeah and to be a good person and to sort of perform the actions of a good person like lookand a good people dresses clowns and bring joy to the children yeah he's a community man rightbut what he was doing is he was getting teenagers and young men to come and work for him constructionjobs and that was how it you know it's like not very sensational so the media just made him intosort of a killer clown and and one of the best things and i would bet my whole life that thiswas never said and that this was made up but uh when he was arrested he was reported to have saidyou know clowns can get away with the murder oh my oh god yeah could you imagine
18:40no that's so silly i mean like i sure like it could have happened lots of things could havehappened but like no yeah i mean that's just like if you're writing like a straight to video horrormovie in the 80s you're like come on come on how do we end this thing yeah what's the stingerbecause was he a clown for a long period of time it wasn't core to his identity he was more of aserial killer yeah i think children catch snippets right and they have to translate it through theirlittle seven-year-old brains and and they're hearing and seeing no matter what pictures andstories about a clown that kills children because that was the narrative so i think that that seepedinto the consciousness of both adults and children right so the link was made between
19:31clowning and killing right yeah exactly so it was like you're having clowns and serial killers rightso i think these things yeah they were just a perfect recipe for what would come soon afterthat which was the first panic about clowns the first panic about clowns yes about phantom clownsphantom clowns you guys are you guys ready to go into that yes okay so ready i feel like we'reabout to enter the haunted mansion ride i'm like i'm so scared but i'm so excited so john Waynegasey was sentenced to death in 1980 and it was again like a very very public trial so the veryvery next year it was april of 1981 it was kids in boston and they started reporting men in vansdressed as clowns that were trying to lure them with candy vans drink ding ding ding
20:22so then here's the thing right so you guys will probably remember how during the satanic panicthe the original mother and child whose names will escape me who were reporting abuse and daycaresparked the police to send a letter home to everyone saying hey this is happening did thishappen to you at the mc martin preschool yeah that was yeah mc martin was the one where thepolice sent a letter to all the parents and we're like these very specific things may have happenedto your child here's a long list of them that includes i believe the phrase anal sodomy yeah wedon't know and don't ask your kids about it and don't talk about it amongst yourselves or withanyone else will buy and that was a great plan so anyway boston public school district sends out
21:08memos telling parents to keep a close eye on their children because clowns are trying to kidnapthem wait they literally warned parents about clowns yes that they needed to keep an eye ontheir children because there had been reports of clowns trying to lure them with candy oh boycalls just started flooding in there were so many reports that police began profiling clownsoh and they started following and pulling over clowns oh my god and here's the thing there werelike so many clowns yeah there was a lot of birthday clowns that they pulled over but they neverfound anything nefarious and if you're driving between birthdays i mean i see like you're notyou're just gonna be in makeup yeah the whole day right it is very similar to the sort of child
21:53sex trafficking panic that we have now where you're like someone tried to traffic me at the grocerystore and then you hear the actual story and it's like a person came up to me and asked for directionsyeah and it's like this completely normal story i can see that being the same thing that happenedthen where it's like i saw a killer clown but it's actually literally just like a 40 year old manin clown makeup driving from one party to the other so okay so more clown sightings uh happenedthey started happening all over the northeast sort of and even in the midwest like Kansas Citythere was a clown chasing children with a sword nice this is my favorite one in boston the dayafter the story started airing on tv they were called to the park to investigate a clown that was
22:34reportedly just naked from the waist down i don't know if he was wearing shoes but of course therewas no pantsless clown identified or found so coming kind of at the same time as this clownpanic ronald reagan i think he had just won the election he was very much a representative of thissuncanny valley thing that i think we'll talk about a little bit more later and people kind ofremember him as as having like red cheeks and that like two polished veneer that almost renderedhim a little animatronic wait are you saying ronald reagan was a clown like he fit the clownaesthetic so here again this is just me so at the same time this was happening where heseems like he's a little bit play acting and some people talk about how he was kind of creepy
23:25our first stepford president this is very cultural studies phd and i'm extremely here for itwasn't ronald reagan the real killer clown i mean he was he literally was right because he was alsothis beloved figure because he had been in kind of cheesy movies and his career as an actor andthen had been this charismatic megafauna as governor of california and was just very telegenici feel like that was something that people were very aware that he was pioneering also this liketelegenic presidency that was style over substance and had pretty devastating consequences i mean hekilled a lot more people than john Wayne gacy yeah yeah there you go but yeah he had like the redcheeks and his hair was so molded and weird he did he looked like he looked like his animatron in the
24:16hall of presidents at disneyland also i mean not a lot of people know that ronald reagan's campaignslogan in 1984 was everything floats down here another parallel but anyway i don't know it's likehe had like a very polished veneer and it's like this the creepy crafted perfection of politicswe all see it and i imagine children interpret it you know in a certain way as well you know whati'll take it i'll take it yeah trump also was coming into office as the other clown panic happenedand that's sort of why i bring it up it's like the clowns are like a naturally produced like urbanlegend warning sign of like oh no we're about to have a really really bad administration rightwell speaking of harbingers shall we go into horror movies yes my favorite place so i think
25:06poltergeist it was in 1982 so it was like right after all this clown stuff and it was kind of thefirst representation of a clown being scary and it's that clown doll that pulls the boy i don'tknow his name i can't remember it under the bed that was really scary do you guys remember that ohyeah mike have you seen poltergeist i'm googling clown doll poltergeist because i'm still tooscared to see that movie it's a fantastic scene and i'm going to describe to you verbally becausei don't want to ask you to see it no it's this beautiful suspenseful scene where the boy islike looking under the bed you're like sure there's gonna be something under the bed he like looks downthere's nothing there and then he like gets up and the clown's behind him yeah i i this is the
25:47still that i have in front of me on google images it looks terrifying tell us about this clown itseems to be made of like porcelain or something plasticky and it's got like a big toothy grinand big bozo eyebrows oh you and like long arms and legs arms that got magically long tostrangle you with in the same way like children of the corn is creepy because it's like theseimages of innocence that are out to kill you the the idea of something that is perpetually smilingwhile also trying to murder you is just like the incongruity makes it that much scarier that's alsowhy dolls are creepy i think we're so naturally afraid of things that can't feel empathy the verybasis of our communication with people is like what is your facial expression right and if it's
26:30incongruent with the actions then you're like oh you're like super dangerous you're not committingan act of passion you're not like punching somebody because they said something mean you'relike calculatingly wanting to harm anyway so back to horror because steven king then published itin 1986 and then of course pennywise the clown who now has become a new yet againgiant cultural icon pennywise was the central villain and i think what steven king reallynailed in this was that the clown morphed into like a personalized worst fear of each childyeah is there anything that you want to say about it like what was your experience originally didyou read the book or was it more the movie for you sarah it's funny i didn't see the movie or read
27:17the book until i was like in my late 20s and that book features protagonists who start outat 11 years old when we first meet them and then we return and they're like 36 37 yeahand there's a real theme of repressed memory there like i really wondered how much steven kingkind of was influenced by the zeitgeist and telling a story about these characters whobasically did battle with this shape-shifting monster who often took the form of pennywise theclown and who didn't remember any of the first time or didn't remember their childhoods in thistown or this friendship that they had with each other and then the memories come back as they comeback to fight it again and repressed memories are so central to the satanic panic so this feels
28:04like a satanic panic informed story to me too what do you think about that i think about that all thetime every single morning i wake up and say was steven king influenced by the satanic panicand then you do your skincare and then you're like but he was he yeah he totally was i think hehad to have been informed by every every moral panic that was going on at that time i wanted toalso mention that's a good transition because pennywise i believe was also influenced heavily byronald mcdonald and i have a little bit of proof i found an old mcdonald's commercial that veryvery closely in my opinion resembles the very iconic scene with george who's the younger brotherof the main character who goes missing we see him meet pennywise in the sewer oh my god i want to
28:52see ronald mcdonald in the sewer so bad okay so i think we're gonna show i think we're gonna uhlet mic take a look at that right you're sending me uh okay you ready yes one two threewell hi didn't let mcdonald's hamburger delicious hi georgedon't you want a balloon mom told me never to talk to strangers i'm not supposed to takestuff from strangers my dad said so well your mother's right as always very wise of your dad georgevery wise indeed i'm ronald mcdonald give me a mcdonald's shakehi george i'm pennywise the dancing clown you are george so now we know each otherhe right you're no stranger you really are ronald mcdonald oh god i can't tell which one
29:51is more terrifying yeah and i think the thing about pennywise too is that all of these characterswho come back home as adults are confronting pennywise at the same time that they're confrontingtheir childhood traumas and you know the dynamic trauma that they still carry with them from childhoodthat they have maybe repressed or not dealt with but like they're home and it's back and pennywiseis still in the sewer like i feel like pennywise is so effective as a scary monster because likeall scary monsters that like are sticky and like stick in the culture the thing to me the thingabout pennywise is that he's synonymous with childhood trauma like he manifests as your worstand he knows how to terrify you with his knowledge of what your parents did to you or of what you
30:42have of the worst traumas that you have experienced and so to be afraid of pennywise it's not sillyright because pennywise is connected with with human trauma itself right so a lot of people blamethe it book for the phantom clown panic but obviously as we see it came five years laterso we're going to jump forward a little bit to 2008 just to sort of show how clowns havetransformed from jolly happy children's entertainers to really really scary so there was a studyconducted in 2008 where they pulled 250 children who were aged four to six and they were trying todecorate a hospital wing for children and they were trying to figure out how the children wouldlike the decor to look and every single child said that they did not want clowns to be part of the
31:33decor wow every single child so it's like the end of clowns as child entertainment it's the end ofclowns as pure happy fun like that just isn't a thing that exists anymore it's always complicatedI bet a lot of professional clowns hate Stephen King I wonder can we do I know that this is alittle out of order but can we go a little bit into the history of the clown because yeah wetalk about how like clowns used to be lovable childhood entertainers but that's not what theywere oh they do this ebb and flow thing because the archetype of the fool right that stretchesacross time right it dates back to ancient times and across most if not all cultures there is thissort of creation known as the fool or a little wise fool like a court jester type of situation yes
32:18this is so interesting to me ancient Greece had an actual profession where a man would come tofunerals and do impressions and crack jokes at the expense of the dead person and make fun of themourners and the family so it's like a funeral slash roast yes essentially this clown would showup and do that and sort of the idea was that if you're roasting dead people and the communitythat's mourning it would help vent the anxieties about death and and what sort of this transgressionit really helped vent sort of the darkness and sadness of death right that's also the originof your mom jokes exactly at people's funerals just fucking brutal so the other roots like youmentioned mike are in you know the royal kingdom in england and clowns were known as court jesters
33:04and also wise fools and they were really respected because they as much as they were goofballs andjoked around they also were known to hold kind of like a crude wisdom they were allowed to make funof the king without being tortured or killed and then not only that but they were politicaladvisors to the king because they were allowed to speak plainly i mean it's it's sort of similarnow to this stance that people like john stewart take where it's like oh i'm just a comedian i'mnot really a political actor when humor has always been political and humor has always been profoundlyinfluential on the way that we think about things right and the idea that humans like used to befundamentally different you know in this like deeply human way it's like no like like this is
33:49why to return inevitably to the topic of scary movies like scary movies to me are much scarierwhen characters are telling jokes and behaving like human beings if they're like grim and likeserious the whole time i'm like well this really takes me out of it because like i wouldn't be likethat because why the Blair witch project is so scary because they're like telling silly jokes andyelling at each other like human beings do under duress so this is just a fun another fun fact thiswas actually found out because uh my partner who's a producer on our show also was reading about thehistory of circus music she informed me that the classic clown song and you know it is aloop the classic clown song
34:36perfect beautiful so that song was proposed in 1897 in Czechoslovakia and its original name isthe entrance of the gladiators and it was a military march but it was played like it wasplayed really slow so it was like oh my god but get ready for this when the clowns came out andused it it was like it was like a faster tempo and when the clowns come out in the circus the nameof the song they come out to is called a screamer and they say they're not trying to be scary yeahthat's amazing it's perfect yes like i don't think anything has ever made me so happy so obviouslythis started out as like an ironic thing because people are like oh it's so funny they're playingour old favorite song doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot fast like that's so weird and
35:34ironic yeah it's like it used to be ironic for a serial killer to clown in his free time as opposedto just being appropriate so now i want to talk about one of my most favorite things in the worldand maybe you guys have talked about it but it's the uncanny valley we have not talked about thiswe have not talked about that on this show good so please take us there so the uncanny valley isan aesthetics theory that it's that thing where you are witnessing something that's human or likea humanoid and it's close it's it's like human but it's not and it's what inspires like eerinessthat discomfort you feel when looking at animatrons or dolls or clowns like when you check into a nicebed and breakfast and there's a Victorian doll in a chair facing you yeah as you get into bed
36:20and you're like i'm just going to turn this object around it's like the idea that whensomething is distinctly not human it's less unsettling than when it becomes closer andcloser to being realistic right i think of it as like the difference between the incrediblesand the polar express that in the incredibles all of the humans are super stylized yeah no oneis fooled that like are those real humans or not but then the polar express they're trying to be likeyou can't even tell that it's a computer but you fucking can and it's weird right and it evokes afeeling in us of like i don't know how many of you are things and how many of you are human yeahthat's exactly what it is and so the uncanny valley has like nobody can say definitively what it is
37:03why those things creep us out and make us feel really uncomfortable but there are a few theoriesthat i think are really interesting one of them is that perhaps it looks to us or may remind us ofa dead body which we want to avoid or someone who may be infected with something like rabies we arenaturally repelled from things that could be dangerous another theory is that it has to do withempathy so these things that are a little inhuman are more difficult to empathize withor read empathy from there's like a feeling of being like a little bit soulless so there's alot of mistrust that we're naturally biologically programmed to have when we're like there's somethingoff here and it could be something that's dangerous right it's like when somebody doesn't blink
37:53yeah like Charles Manson not a fan of blinking unsettling guy yeah so now this is the part thati love the most about the uncanny valley the theory that i love the most and it has to do withlike what is what is creepiness right what is eeriness it's different than fear we know thatthat it's a completely separate feeling right so we think of creepiness sometimes is like say you'reon a bus and there's a dude staring at you right like you're not purely scared you're just likecreeped out right it's about assessing a threat so our social norms say that we can't screamand freak out because that would possibly be rude or it would be outside of what's acceptableso we kind of sit there and we're just doing this like reconnaissance right so we're
38:39keenly aware of this threat and we're watching for more information and so it kind of creates likea little bit of an error message in our brains because we don't know what to do and so it'skind of like a creepy threat is ambiguous right clowns are a good example of this of course becausethey have all of the features of humans but they're all a little bit exaggerated they're just alittle bit off like their eyebrows are really wide their smile is really wide totally it feelsto me like now the well is poisoned i feel like people now associate clowns with freakiness morethan they associate them with joy and happiness and kids birthday parties right absolutely andthen there's also do you guys know about super normal stimuli what no and i think this could
39:18explain why clowns have been beloved and despise so we got the uncanny valley on one hand on theother hand we have this thing called super normal stimuli which is it's a psychologicalconcept that explores how we are naturally more attracted to things that are exaggerated andblown up which is like disneyland we want to watch these sort of dramatic you know theater the historyof art we want to see more drama and the main study that was done was with birds they gavebirds that had these small spotted eggs giant eggs with giant polka dots on them and they choseto abandon their eggs and go sit on these other eggs so you know and they have all these othertests with with fish that have like brighter colors so it's like they we will go to the fake if it's
40:07blown up and exaggerated so i think that there's that attraction because the clown is nothing ifnot a blown up version of a person you know we were talking about horror movies earlier and itfeels like clowns have always been appealing you know in a few different ways but one of them isthe way that horror movies are appealing where like you know it's just like this anarchic experienceof watching someone break the rules of the society that you are in and getting to have some kind ofcathartic experience through this so it's i don't know maybe clowns are for grown-ups oh i mean theywere as we were talking about they were not children's entertainers i think really untilmaybe the circus but even the circus was like not just for children but the circus is like huge
40:51everybody goes right the circus comes and you're like well i'm a servant in hartford connecticutso i'm going to go to the circus on my day off because these illustrated posters have promisedme fantastical things the circus was for people who fucking hated elephants that too or who justwanted to see an elephant and didn't know how the elephant had had gotten there but i meanyou think about dolls right dolls have also had this yeah dolls have also had a rough go of itculturally yeah yeah there another thing that's like been ruined by horror movies definitelyshucky was the end of us earnestly enjoying dolls absolutely um okay how about we talk about the2016 panic yes please i'm not even aware that there was a 2016 panic i was alive i did not see
41:36this at all what what is this what were you doing man it was huge is this do i have to be on tumblrhow do i find this no no no it was in the news it was like i i'd say facebook was the the transmissionyou were in friends with enough scared facebook people my yeah so what was what was this all rightso this came in 2016 a lot of people were like oh it's because it came out but it's not becauseit came out in 2018 so part of what people believe sparked it was um outside of sort of culturalconsciousness was the low budget horror director named adam kraus he had a creepy clown stand inthe street holding black balloons trying to make a viral marketing campaign for his short film whichwas called gags um and then a bunch of people called the police and started taking pictures
42:20spreading on social media another possible beginning point was uh have you guys watched thei well i might you probably haven't but sarah have you watched the wrinkles the clown documentaryon hulu i have not what is it so wrinkles was this character created by someone who has remainedanonymous he is just kind of seems like a normal dude and they started filming like creepy clownstuff and spreading it like found footage so he put up all these stickers that said wrinkles theclown with a phone number and you could call this phone number and there was a creepy messageor he would actually answer the phone and um you know he was like a uh hey kid just a littlekind of voice and and he also kind of created this idea that parents could call so that they're
43:08to scare their kids into obedience so parents would actually call and leave messages notactually wanting wrinkles to come but you can hear the kid just like crying and screaming in thebackground is being like we're gonna call wrinkles we're gonna have them come over if you don't eatyour dinner oh wow but it was a boogeyman scenario right and it was coming a couple years beforethe actual panic so 2016 we've got suddenly this group of kids in greenville south south carolinaare saying that a clown was trying to lure them in the woods but in perfect 2016 fashion it wasnot with candy but with large amounts of cash oh capitalism so that these these clowns flashedgreen lasers at them came to their door in the night rattling chains and banging around he left a
43:51trail of tide pods in the woods exactly 2016 anyway of course in in classic fashion the momof one of the children sort of fuels this by contacting the local news and coming on andthey interview a lot of the children who are again like about seven years old and it's so cuteyou know he's like and then i saw a cloud in the woods and hey it's just reallydarling but the mother is like they might she might as well be leading like some new coalitionagainst clowns you like out she's like a mad like mother's against drunk driving thing going onmother's against forest clowns exactly so she reports it um so then more and more people startreporting it because on the news right and so one woman says there's a clown with a blinking nose
44:38near a dumpster but i kind of think it's just this weird attention thing right like the poisonhalloween candy you have people jamming tax into candy and then putting it on facebook right andit gets like 40 000 shares or something is there any evidence that there were ever any actual clownsthere is no evidence but i think that some of it had to be because if i was a teenager and thiswas going on there's a part of me that might have like done some jokes well this is the thing isyeah if we're in the middle of like a clown panic it actually makes a lot of sense to go dress as aclown and fuck with people oh yeah and i'm sure that happened so basically those same children thatkind of were the first ones in south carolina told police that a clown lived in a house near a pond
45:24at the end of a trail through the woods which is so fantastically fairytale that's a thomasconcave painting you know and so the police did find this property and found nothing clown relatedor threatening yeah anyway uh it kept going reporting clowns with knives jumping out ofabandoned houses and bushes chasing kids from bus stops teenagers started making threats to schoolsposing as evil clowns likely to get out of tests oh my god kids did that at my school too but theyused bomb threats okay so this is the best one all right so this woman said that she was smokingon her porch at 4am and a man wearing a striped outfit and a clown mask and a red wig walked directlyup to her grabbed her by the throat and said i should just kill you now and then some students and
46:16teachers would wish they were never born at the junior and senior high school today the juniorand senior high school yeah and then just walked away after that so yeah that didn't happen the juniorand senior high school like that doesn't even make sense it's when people make up stories aboutcriminals you can often tell when something is sort of a myth made to circulate on facebookpartly because the killer always like they don't kill you they just say something scary and thenleave or whatever yeah it's like people explain themselves to you and don't just kill you andlike say things that are meant to be scary to an audience like something that you learned from ahorror movie i cannot believe people fell for this so clowns become a way to get out of school
47:03that's brilliant do local news reporters like i do this thing sometimes where people send me a tipand then i just don't do a story on it because it's fake people not know that they could do thatbut mike like if there is a killer clown out there and you didn't report on it you'd feel prettyafter he did something terrible at the junior and senior high schoolokay so penn state 500 students at penn state wanna went on an actual clown hunt uh because therewere claims that an evil clown had been spotted on campus there are videos of this i imagine itwas partially a joke right but but it's still something that people like know what it is andthey're like yeah whoo those kids did that to distract the cops from like the meth lab they
47:48had in their basement dude yeah this is obvious okay so ronald mcdonald was put on hiatus fromall community events it was this big of a deal oh in 2016 yep and i don't know if he's been reinstatedyet it's actually amazing to me that he's still around i thought the killer clown thing would havedone away with him years ago mcdonald's is powerful yeah they need to they need to rebrand i mean ihope they don't because i don't want them to do better but i think we need more of uh i don'tknow if he's grimace or the grimace but that guy the purple guy i can't believe all this washappening and i never heard about it in 2016 it was a really event for you mic that's true going onmaybe i don't know yeah so okay this got all the way to the white house when white house a reporter
48:33asked a white house spokesman john earnest for president obama's opinion on killer clowns andthis is what the white house spokesman said quote i don't know that the president has been briefedon this particular situation obviously this is a situation that law enforcement is taking quiteseriously come on oh wow fantastic so another example a mom and daughter called the police ona 12 year old boy uh who turned out to uh have autism spectrum disorder and he was just lookingto surprise his mom with his new pennywise costume like this is can you look at a 12 year old boyand realize that's a 12 year old boy and it's probably fine don't call cops on 12 year old boysclown outfits or not yeah and also like if i saw someone dressed like pennywise i would assume
49:19i wouldn't assume that they were pennywise himself like i would be like oh that person likespennywise and they're trying to be scary like they're a kid or an egg lord sometimes it's likedo people think that movies are real they do mic i think they do a little girl in athens georgiawas actually arrested for bringing a knife to school to fight off supposed clowns so things gotbad not because they were killer clowns but because people were reacting far out of proportion tophantom clowns so one thing that happened was a 16 year old was stabbed to death by an older manand we're not sure you can't say for certain why but he had a clown mask he's wearing a clown maskoh the one who got killed or the one who killed him the one who who was killed so it was possibly
50:06a reaction to the clown mask but i can't say that definitively so i don't want to put out any fakenews what were the circumstances of this did they know each other they did not know each otherit's a little bit foggy the extenuating circumstances but here is a certainty so going back to thatsouth carolina apartment building that kind of helped spark everything men who lived therewho were told that there were mysterious clowns in the woods started firing their guns into thewoods when they heard voices that they could not explain oh my god so we have like real dangercoming out of this but not the kind that everyone's expecting right which is always the case with amoral panic and of people being like keyed up and ready to like shoot you or stab you it's so
50:49fucking weird yes i want to interview one of these people like do you actually think that there's mendressing up as clowns trying to kill children is that like the actual belief i want to know if theythink that there are clowns with magical powers like if someone's wearing a clown costume they'rejust a person wearing a clown costume like i feel like people are treating clowns as some kind of asupernatural entity in these scenarios right if i was going to kidnap a child i would notdress in a way that made myself extremely distinctive and memorable and also somethingthat everyone is scared of already it's like dressing up as jason you know to try and likecrash a fun party so did this ever get like debunked or did it just sort of fade away as we
51:32got distracted by other events in 2016 it got debunked by chelsea it faded away as everythingdoes i think poison halloween candy is a great example of of a really similar situation wherethe reports come out and once they do get debunked they're no one's interested in reporting that orit's a tiny little footnote yeah what sticks is the sensational media reporting i feel like all of ussleep on the combination of fucking local news and facebook as engines of radicalization yesbecause like yes we talk about like fox news and stuff and fox news is bad but it's so sort of likeupfront forwardly bad and we talk about fourchan yeah and fourchan and these other places that arelike really obviously fucking terrible there's a lot of people that are sort of savvy enough to know
52:20that fox news is terrible and to not go on fourchan but they're watching the fucking local news everynight and they're seeing what their friends share on facebook and there's this like hugemiddle of people in america who are not getting radicalized by fox news but they're just absorbingwhat they think is credible media and it's just fucking trash and what is it that's so bad aboutit because i feel like my experience watching local news is like every story i'm like why am ihearing about this like this seems like a weird thing for you to be telling me about it's likenot relevant to like you know public information that i need to know about like voting and likestreet cleaning and stuff like that it seems like engineered to like scare me or be cute yes
53:04their behaving as if they ran out of stories when like obviously that's impossible so like why arethey talking about these things and it's so like there's so much copaganda that goes through localnews just like yes police sources say 65 people were trapped in a trafficking sting and then youlater find out that it's like not 65 not a trafficking sting but they were people thoughand it's piping police rhetoric just directly into people's homes like without any kind ofeditorialization or anything yeah out any context yeah i mean they still fucking do the razor bladesand the apple every year that still goes around local news i swear you're gonna be downloadingit from zoom this year seriously your 3d printing candy and it's gonna be full of weed you know
53:45i like to think of local news as a thousand ways to die and then one to help you sleep so likeit'll be like oh there was a fire a car crash like antifa's coming into the suburbs and then likehere's a new quack medication to help you someone helped ducks cross the road yeah that's the formatit's just 29 minutes of murder and then you end with ducklings yeah so speaking about the news uhi think obviously part of this that we can't ignore is what was happening culturally at the in2016 and i think it's really interesting that we had this i mean you can't not see clown in donaldtrump right he's he's so fake looking his hair's insane his coloring is insane he's meant to beseen from far away he's got this like oversized suit where his little tiny fingers poke out like he
54:39looks like a lot like a clown and then at the same time he's being rendered in magazines politicalcartoons as a clown like that's one of the biggest ways that people regard him right i think this isreally fun anarchists actually created a billboard in the middle of the night they painted over abillboard with trump dressed as a clown with the words clowns can get away with murder he was actuallyspecifically dressed as pogo oh wow even to the point where governor gabin gabin new some you knowwho loves to throw the punches he uh he compared trump to pennywise in a tweet you know got himgot him i uh i think the i think the donald trump as clown thing is like very overlandtotally cultural studies phd it is i fucking love it yeah i like as somebody who spends a lot of
55:27time on google scholar like for researching the show there are those papers 100 i came across onethat was talking about how like the beetles were so popular because there were four of them youknow and there's like four horsemen of the apocalypse oh my god and like four like books of the bibleand it was going through all this like symbolism of four sure i read the whole fucking paper it waslike 70 pages long i was like yeah like give it to me the last thing i uh thought would be fun totalk about was another clown sighting that came a little bit before the actual panic this uh thissighting this clown sighting and interaction with this cryptoid that would come to be known assam the sand down clown that was seen by two children i think they were seven and nine
56:11and this was around four p.m. and they were attracted to this area they were on a golf courseand they heard wailing and they follow the noise and then it stopped and then this clown came outof the bridge and they described him as about seven feet tall he looked wooden and mechanicaland flesh at the same time as the way these children described it the first thing that cameout was a hand wearing a blue glove and i believe it only had three fingers he couldn't communicatehis like words were all garbled and at one point he used like one of those weird tape recorderswith the microphone remember those where you could like talk into it and it would be loud but it waslike for children so he was trying to speak through that but he couldn't really communicate so they
56:54asked him to write like who he was on a piece of paper and why he could write so they're talkingto a disembodied hand at the golf course no sorry the hand came first then the clown the seven foottall clown who was wood mechanical and flesh yeah mike keep up sorry keep up so they asked him whohe was and he introduced himself as all colors sam or he said i am all colors oh my yeah could thisbe someone who was just tripping balls that's my theory for real and then they asked are you aghost and he wrote well not really but i am in an odd sort of way and they spent about 30 minuteshanging with this guy they weren't terrified of him or anything he lived in a metal shack which theyspent a little time in and and then he vanished but again the to the children didn't act afraid
57:40of this thing but when we hear a six foot tall flesh would mechanical clown creature talkinginto a weird microphone to us that's horrific and scary and weird i don't know i just think it'sthis interesting outlier that i'd never heard before well it's like a friendly killer clownscenario is what you mean that it's like a nice story of chatting with a dude who's trippingballs in an old suit what if these killer clowns are like sweetums in the muppet movie these likespectral clowns that live in the forest that only want to hear the laughter of a child andthey're tortured by the fact that we keep running away from them and shooting at them that soundsscary though all right they sound like like a mournful outsider artist sitting in their shack
58:28practicing clowning yeah it's Miranda July which is what i think a lot of this stuff is too likeit's funny to me also that people aren't more cynical about like if you see a clown holdingblack balloons like i would presume that to be a viral marketing campaign it's surprising to methat more people when they see something super weird aren't just like that's probably a viralmarketing campaign dude last time i was in new york i walked past a bar on the lower east sideor something it was like opening soon a bar just for pregnant women and it had like a photo of awoman like a visibly pregnant woman sipping a martini and it was like this is very fuckingobviously a viral marketing campaign that is like wanting us to get pissed and share that on instagram
59:10and then of course like two days later it was like viral marketing campaign comes to the lowereast side it's like yeah that was really fucking clear to you because i'm not on facebook and idon't watch local news it's actually kind of inspiring that the 2016 clown panic didn't resultin a bunch of laws for like three strikes for clowns or some bullshit of like george's lawi feel like clowns have have already been pretty marginalized and you know yeah i hope that a newdawn is breaking for the clowns of this nation do you i'm fine without clowns i do not miss clownsokay maybe this is another maybe this is better i feel like maybe the era of us pretending thatclowns are simple wholesome figures rather than complex trickster characters is over and maybe
59:59that's good now if only we could do the same thing for ronald reagan and stop shooting guns into theforest don't shoot guns into the forest that's the moral of the story is don't shoot at imaginary thingschelsea can you tell us about uh if people liked this episode like what else do you talk about onyour show yeah we do so much of the similar things that you guys do i mean we cover everything fromthe illuminati to quackery to the archetype of the redneck and how poor white people have beenmaligned by rich people forever and uh we have a new season coming up we're doing fake newscharismatic leaders televangelists but uh if you guys like this show i find you guys very inspiringand i think we're just kindred spirits kind of together in what we do so debunk mates yeah yeah
01:00:51you know more than debunking even just sort of like why right we want to know why we want to gointo the scary forest we do the haunted mansion right don't shoot us yeah don't shoot us
There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click any sentence in the transcript to leave one.