Circus clowns: Source of mortal terror, or just deeply, deeply unsettling?

​Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Miscellaneous clown and circus-related ephemera

Discovered at: Crap shops across this great nation

Representative Quote:

“The clowns are funny men. They do funny tricks. The people laugh. People like clowns.”

Your Crap Archivist counts four lies in the above statements. And that’s not just some kneejerk conclusion based on the old standby that clowns are beings of pure grease and whiskers and nightmares, a comic observation that should suffer ignoble death in the first week of your community improv workshop, right along with “This Chinese buffet smells like Petco” and “Monkeys make projectiles of their waste.”

No, after a careful review of a great stack of clown-related Crap, I demand we adjust our clownophobia alert system, downgrading from “Defcon-Red Horror” to something more like “Elevated Uneasiness.” Let’s check the evidence.