Sunday 9 October 2016

Send in the Crazy Clowns Craze


People are ridiculously fascinating. To my eye, 2016 seems to be plodding along as one of the most bizarre years in all of history. Aside from being one of the most bloodthirsty with regards to a lot of my favourite celebrities, a variety of crazes have swept the globe this year, fuelled by a now ubiquitous connection to social media, smartphone apps and a swelling memetic counterculture.

As soon as the majority of bandwagon riders had stopped hunting for Pokémon, the latest Internet phenomenon which began sweeping the globe, as you are probably aware of if you are connected to any kind of social media stream, is to dress up as creepy, crazy clowns walking around all menacing-like. The motivation behind this desire seems to be as divided as the many variety of clowns themselves – however it seems most in America have been bored teenagers wanting to spice up their evenings wandering around freaking out the normals. Some have attributed the clowns to a viral marketing campaign in order to generate hype for the remake of Stephen King’s It, though this has been disputed by a variety of sources as well.



Those Daffy, Laughy Clowns


Social media, being idiots who love being distracted by anything remotely unimportant, have embraced the craze in droves. Some people, like myself, are fascinated by the twisted nature of it all – the desire to scare others. Some people are scared shitless, like my coulrophobic (AKA clown-a-phobic) friends and relatives, who think that a subterranean race of demon clowns are choosing this moment in history to come out of their clown-cars and enslave us. Others are seeing the clowns in a more irreverent light (clowns being funny – a crazy idea, I know) and are tickled by the entire situation.



I am sure that without the near unlimited availability of text, video, and image data transfer, these situations wouldn’t sweep out of control in the manner in which they have been within the last few years. And note when I say out-of-control, I don’t mean I think you should begin freaking out that clowns are going to begin terrorising you every time you leave the house. I mean that these sorts of memes, activities, crazes and fads can spread at an unbelievably rapid rate throughout the collective consciousness of our entire planet extremely quickly. I like to picture it kind of like an idea virus, a simple activity, easily captured on the ever-present smartphone camera, which interests the basic underlying psychology of a large number of us on a collective level. Recent viral phenomena of the last few years including ‘planking’, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the Harlem Shake, and any of the recent multitudes of internet memes all seem to fall into this category.

The response of the second group of people to the clowns – the coulrophobes (hey, I like learning new words, OK??) – has been to enact the modus operandi of scared humans throughout history: respond with aggression, violence, and hate.








So it seems that in this situation, there are 5 kinds of people. There are:

1. Those who are fascinated by the clowns and want to know what drives their desire to want to hang out with other scary clowns and wander around with baseball bats and fake machetes

2. Those who hate clowns, have always been genuinely fearful of clowns, and are scared of what a bunch of fucking armed clown psychopaths could genuinely do to bring about the end of society

3. Those who think clowns are funny, clown pranks are funny, and want to see a bunch of freaky clowns walking around more often, because fuck it, why not? Somethin’ different.

4. People who don’t give a fuck about the clown thing, your silly internet memes, internet crazes in general, and who almost certainly won’t be reading this blog you young whipper snapper, get off my lawn! - (so who cares about them), and

5. People who ACTUALLY WANT TO GO OUT AND DRESS UP AS FUCKING CREEPY CLOWNS FOR FUN.


Neil Strauss’ excellent analysis of the rise of the fear response within humanity, is an extremely nuanced take at how human brain chemistry works, how Darwinian social memetics change and cultural symbols transfer. A summary I took from it: the meteoric rise of anxiety, fear and hysteria regarding a lot of large social issues (think ISIS, Donald Trump’s presidency, Brexit economic collapse, global warming, all the goddamn bees dying) is a fundamental design fixture of human brain psychology, hardwired within us a survival instinct, which is being subtly (and sometimes overtly) exploited for the agendas of others (or in the case of our clown friends, for their own amusement). Fear and mass groups of people wanting to create fear meeting in public are a result of collective neuroses our culture, society and zeitgeist is experiencing.

In the end, just as there are dwindling numbers of Pokémon hunters roaming the streets at night just months after the game’s release, history has shown that all crazes end the same way – with barely a handful of people still continuing to stand out in the cold-arse forest with a machete for fucking hours just waiting for some hapless bystander to come by and be freaked out. Most of the crazy clown bandwagon riders will have well and truly moved on to the next ‘cool’ thing. None of which will probably be cool for very long, being that a) variety is the spice of life and b) the smartphone generation has even less of an attention span than their ancestors (which wasn’t that long to begin with - let’s face it).

And while you’ve spent the last few minutes reading about clowns, never forget the truly terrifying thing: That it seems America is about to elect a clown to be the most powerful person in the world, no matter what happens.



Happy Halloween, Everybody! (Yes, I know it’s not Halloween yet but the clowns don’t seem to care so I guess it’s just Halloween every night forever now. Night night!)
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