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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder what triggers that. Were you like scared by a mean clown as a child? Or was it just like that without any stimuli?

I mean many children are scared of Santa due to it being a stranger in their house but I see no adults say they are scared of Santa.

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Reminds me of Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey from Saturday Night Live:

To me, clowns aren’t funny. In fact, they’re kind of scary. I’ve wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my dad.

For me, it is highly dependent on the context.

If I see a clown in the midst of a performance, it's fine. It feels "right". You're kind of far away from where they are, and them wearing colorful clothes and strange makeup makes sense because it helps a large crowd see their movements a bit easier. It's the "home" of the clown.

If I see a clown doing anything mundane, or just not actively "on" performing in front of a crowd it feels repulsive and weird. Clown just walking down the street? Horrible. Taking pictures with a group of people? Gross. It feels unnatural. It's like the hairy child vomiting photo. [1]

The worst is if I see a clown eating or smoking. A clown is a mechanism of performance and entertainment. For them to be "merely human", to be doing something relaxing evokes a kind of juxtaposition that leads to a kind of horror and disgust I can't quite describe. It's like walking down the road and coming across a Silverback Gorilla casually sipping a cup of coffee, reading the newspaper - it's an incongruity.

Also, I'm pretty sure the initial spark for my weirdness with clowns started with The Simpsons. [2]

[1] https://www.trendzified.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/what-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZcfGRroiaA

For me, it's a "man behind the mask" thing. Clowns play big, with exaggerated expressions and responses.

The incongruence between the acting and the person behind the acting wigs me out.

That's what it is for me. I also get the same feeling from certain common manga/anime drawing styles (e.g., "moe") with exaggerated eyes and exaggerated responses, despite moe apparently being seen to be cute by most people. (I get this feeling especially strongly from styles where no nose is drawn.)

Moe from the Simpsons? I thought the running bit was that he was considered ugly?

No, "moe" in the Japanese sense. Typically, a petite face, large eyes dominated by enormous black pupils, etc.

The way it makes me feel is a little like the response evoked by the movie Coraline, which used dolls with big black button eyes and no noses to evoke a queasy kind of horror-lite response.

It doesn't have to be large features though, it can be exaggerated small ones too. For example, Art the Clown has a small black dot on the tip of his otherwise white nose. It's unsettling.

That makes sense though in this case, if you look at the banner video on the homepage, none of them are wearing masks, just some light makeup. So perhaps that will make it better for any coulrophobics in the audience.

I tried making a clown using stable diffusion one day by blending 3 different clown-generating prompts together, and the result that came out was a horrifyingly grotesque inhuman monster. I've never had that happen just blending prompts together to make normal people. The clown makeup screws with how their faces are embedded or something. It ended up with Giger-esque multiple sets of teeth. I can only assume there's a similar phenomenon going on in peoples' imagination.

Dunno for sure, I've always found them creepy and repulsive.

I do recall flipping through the channels as a child and coming across one of the scarier scenes from It. That might have some bearing on this.

Clowns don't bother me, but I think it might be an uncanny valley thing. Clowns have exaggerated human features, ones that could be grotesque if they were real. I think that means they can share an element with body horror, which does bother me.

What causes fear of clowns? Probably the prevalence of both evil clowns (John Wayne Gacy, Stephen King's It, the recent Evil Clown meme). That, and the prevalence of the fear of clowns.

for me it was a hobo clown painting in the family room whose eyes always followed me as a child. told my parents it was scary but it never came down, i just assumed it had a lock on my parents souls or something.

I always thought it was a joke, until I met someone that was genuinely afflicted by it. On the plus side, it's really fun to go through haunted houses with them around Halloween.

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