I Learned Something Terrible About My Beloved Clown Statues
I’m a bit of a weirdo. Clowns? Love ‘em. Can’t get enough of them in any way, shape, or form. I’d climb into that sewer in a heartbeat. Please, hit me again with your massive hammer, Ms. Quinn.
I have a good idea of where my fascination with a clown aesthetic started. It was two things. One is a TV show I watched as a kid about a clown, though sadly I cannot remember what it was called (no, it wasn’t Bozo the Clown). The other is a lamp I had as a young child. The base was a clown (and a dog, for some reason) selling balloons, with the balloons being these colorful balls that you’d put the light bulb in. I’ve looked this lamp on eBay and almost bought one at least twice over the years.
I may have forgotten the show and lost the lamp, but that love never went away. So in my later life when I discovered a bunch of clown statues for $5 each at Goodwill, I snatched up several of them. I thought they were so cool, decorated in bright colors and weird poses. Many of them featured sad dudes in shabby costumes, but something about that spoke to me. Perhaps I saw myself in them. I displayed them on my shelves for years without thinking about them, failing to find any more in the wild for years.
That changed earlier this year, when I finally found another one. This one was going for $20, a steep price increase. I decided to look them up online to see what these were and if they were worth that price. Seriously, after all these years of owning them I never thought to look up what these were until right then and there. And boy howdy did I open a Pandora's box! I can only apologize to that poor antique store.
There’s a line of statues modeled after Emmett Kelley. He was an actor/performer who created a character called Weary Willie, performing at several circuses, shows, and even movies from 1921 to his death in 1979 (the character didn’t take on that name until 1937). He modeled the clown character after… unhoused people during the Great Depression. It was a “tramp” character, and his whole shtick was that he would do anything for money (usually sweeping the floor and asking for a handout) and being sad. Yeah…
For some reason, this character has spawned a bunch of figures and mini-statues. The ones I had aren’t official Emmett Kelly ones, they’re some kind of generic knock-offs. But they aren’t clowns, they’re hobos. They're dressed as clowns doing weird things because they're begging for money, and they look sad because they're reduced to this just to put food on the table. Once I learned that, I couldn’t bring myself to keep them. My love for these silly clowns, I thought designed to bring joy (or at least scare children) had evaporated into the knowledge that they’re whole point was actually to make fun of unhoused people.
I do still have some actual clown statues. There’s one on my bookcase you can see in some of my videos of two musician clowns, one with a cello, the other a drum. That one’s actually a music box type thing. There's a jester skull thing. Oh, there are two porcelain ones below that, though they're kinda small and hard to see. One’s waving!
Look, I didn’t choose the ‘tism life, the ‘tism life chose me.
