Killer Clowns

For our 100th episode, American Hysteria host Chelsey Weber-Smith visits our campfire to tell us about the time America was besieged by a killer clown panic ... and then the time it happened all over again. Digressions include Jon Stewart, "The Blair Witch Project" and John Wayne Gacy. Sarah coyly references the Hartford circus fire several times but no one seems to notice.”

If you want to skip the 100th-episode stuff, the Clown Content begins around 10:15.

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Links! 
American Hysteria on the web: https://www.chelseywebersmith.com/americanhysteria
& on Instagram: @americanhysteriapodcast 
& on Twitter: @amerhysteria 

Chelsey's "Phantom Clowns" episode:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-hysteria/id1441348407
https://open.spotify.com/show/4VjkwFSQpgnHwugtqJwSxD

Transcript

Sarah: I think millennial sexuality was very influenced by Tim Curry.

Welcome to Your Wrong About the show where we made an episode, and then we made another episode and 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. Nope, just sitting here drinking a Diet Coke in my closet. 

Mike: But that's kind of like a cake though.

Sarah: I think Congress could agree that it’s a cake. The same way ketchup is a vegetable.

Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post. 

Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic. 

Mike: If you want to support the show and get cute bonus episodes, we're on Patreon patreon.com/yourewrongabout and lots of other places. And I'm going to cut this little intro short because we have stuff to discuss.

Sarah:  I mean really just the one thing which is that, like we made it this far and 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.

Mike:  I was not aware that this was our hundredth episode, actually, but then you told me, and you said that we should record a special little intro to this episode. So this is what we’re doing. 

Sarah: Here we are. And here we're paying for it. Yeah. I mean, this might prove contentious because what I did was I went, I started the first episode and I counted everything we've done that isn't putting like an episode where we were guests on another show or something like that into the feed, or are we releasing something. So this is the hundredth instance of us releasing entirely new material. 

Mike: That is absolutely absurd that we've done this many episodes of the show. I never thought we were going to do this many.

Sarah: I don't think I had thoughts about it specifically, I just felt like you were clearly confused for wanting to do this project with me. And I was like, well, let's see how long this lasts before he figured out what a mistake he's made. And, uh, it's been almost three years. 

Mike: And, uh, I still haven’t realized it. I have something to discuss today, Sarah. I've called you here for a reason. 

Sarah: You figured it out that I've been tricking you into thinking that you liked my work. Oh, well. 

Mike: So what are your hundredth episode thoughts? 

Sarah: I mean, I feel like we have grown a lot and yet  I also feel like I am excited for what we're going to learn in the next a hundred episodes that we do. And I guess I just wanted to share that feeling. You know, I feel like we had one idea or a vague idea of the kind of show we wanted to make when we started doing this and that that sort of evolved over time. And that, you know, I, to me, the funniest thing about how this all started was that like we never, or at least I never imagined that it was going to be funny. Like that was never, a goal that we had. Right. Like, did you have thoughts about that? 

Mike: I mean, the early episodes are so different than the episodes now, the way we do research is different. A buddy of mine, the other day was asking me if I could share my notes for the Going Postal episode, which I think was our second episode with him. And I sent him the document and it was nine pages long, like all my notes were  nine pages, which is like the cutest shit. 

Sarah: Which, you know, out of context is a reasonable number of pages, but yeah how many, how many pages of research do you have for your Tuskegee episodes, Mike?

Mike: It was 131 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 this sort of the stakes are higher because, there's people listening now. I mean, we thought we were doing this for like our moms. 

Sarah: We were doing it for our moms for a few months there and like what a, what a different time. 

Mike: And now people listen and people who have people who we have mentioned on the show have gotten in touch with us and people who are experts in the subjects that we discuss have gotten in touch with us. Like it really feels like a completely different level of responsibility to do a show that people are actually listening to, which is actually really great. It's a great accountability mechanism for when we're researching the show, but it also just makes me like acutely aware of this when I'm doing the research that I really don't want to fuck up basic stuff, which does not stop me from fucking a basic stuff to be clear. But I try really, really, really hard not to get stuff wrong because I know that people who are real experts in this are listening.

Sarah:  Except when you mention sports, which you do not give a damn about.

Mike: I  refuse to do research on. I refuse to learn. 

Sarah: I mean, it's funny because I feel like I have gotten less anxious over time in a way that's totally counterintuitive because when we started off and no one was listening, I was working very much in the mode of an essayist, which is where you're like, okay, I'm going to have a thought. My, my tender little fragile thought. And then I will nurture it like a seedling in this little yogurt cup. So like, when we started doing episodes, it was like the most horrible feeling to let something out into the world when I hadn't been working on it for like a year of my life. Cause I was like, I have no idea if, if this is worth sharing, like, and I realized like how weird I had gotten about my work because, yeah, because I didn't think of myself as a perfectionist before. And then I was put in a position where I had to release an episode you know where I had done my due diligence, I had done my best, I had done a ton of research. Like I felt secure in the work I was 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. And you don't like stop forever. This is kind of a theme in so many of our episodes, the idea of like what 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-ups and perfectionism directed at myself had teamed up with this idea of like anything less than perfection will tear families apart and put people in prison. 

Mike: It's nice now, because now you have no editorial standards whatsoever. It's been really nice watching that transition happen. 

Sarah: Shush. But I mean, as you know, what's happened is that like you have had to like drag me like a terrified dog, like through the process of like returning to work as a place where you feel a great sense of responsibility and you understand the seriousness of what you're doing. There is something 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 you are working with a partner who keeps you accountable and who you trust, then I don't know. I'm pretty happy with that. 

Mike: I hope you find that partner someday.

Sarah:  Oh, shut up.

Mike:  I wish that for you.

Sarah: I feel like you're like Paul Hollywood being like, it's a bit treacly. I don't know if that's how he talks. I know he's British.

Mike: That's a shame. Do you want to talk about the next hundred episodes? 

Sarah: Yeah. Yes. 

Mike: What are our plans and goals?

 Sarah: Plans 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 on like junk science and forensics for a while. And I've shied away from that because…

Mike: Of all the reasons you just talked about.

Sarah:  Yeah. Because I'm not worthy. I want to keep doing book clubs. I feel like that was something that we started doing out of necessity in quarantine times, because it was just like hard to have the brain space to like research episodes like normal for a while. And then that was something that people liked and that we really liked doing. 

Mike: We also have some maligned women left that we need to talk about. We also didn't-

Sarah: Really? We didn’t get through everybody?

Mike:  We also, I know there's cases that are important to both of us that we haven't covered yet. Like, we both really want to do a series on the HIV epidemic. We want to talk about the Iraq war. We need to talk about JonBenet Ramsey and the Menendez brothers and Leopold and Loeb, and some McDonald's hot coffee case, and Brittany Spears. We get probably three or four extremely good ideas from our listeners every week. So another one of my anxieties about doing the show is that I used to think that we were going to run out of topics after like three months. And what the experience of doing the show has taught me is that like, we may never run out of topics. There's always going to be something else that the media got wrong, unfortunately. 

Sarah: Yeah, no, we won't. We're just going to keep doing this show until we look like the knight at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And then we're going to give the show to some younger archeologist.

Mike:  Yes. So stay tuned for that. For our desiccated husks. And all of this is an intro to our 100 episodes, which is about killer clowns with a wonderful guest. 

Sarah: I feel like this episode is like a nice topper for our hundredth episode versary cake, because it's about a moral panic. It is about issues that are about as serious as you can get. And it's also really ridiculous. 

Mike: And it's also about the friends we made along the way, because this show brought Chelsey to us, right? 

Sarah: Yeah. And this is in the same way that it's bizarre that we've never done a Menendez brothers episode to this point. It's amazing that it took us 100 episodes to do a crossover with our beloved sibling Show American hysteria and its host Chelsey Weber Smith, who is about to tell us about killer clowns. 

Mike: So enjoy, and we will see you for the next hundred.

Sarah:  Meet you back here at our 200th episode special. I will make a cake for that. Probably. I probably will. 

Mike: Today  we have a special guest and a special topic. 

Chelsey: Yes, we do. Hi, I'm Chelsey Weber Smith. And, uh, I, uh, I do a podcast called American Hysteria where we cover moral panics, conspiracy theories, urban legends, and American fantastical thinking. All those things come together and we try to explore false fears of Americans and why they happen when they do.

Sarah: I feel like you're like a carnival Barker for your podcasts. Like the current, the millennial, our podcast, the millennial carnivals. 

Chelsey: Hey, come one, come on. 

Mike: I've been bingeing Chelsey’s show all week and it is wonderful and people should check it out. 

Sarah: But yeah, and we are talking about I would call this killer clowns, I suppose. What title would you give this? 

Chelsey: I, we called our episode on this Phantom clowns. Um, and I think that's sort of like the original, when the original, Loren Coleman is his name. Uh, he was the only one really who wrote about the eighties panic, which we'll talk about, I'm sure. And he called them Phantom clown, so I stuck with that.

Mike: Okay. Okay. So I was not aware that there was a panic. I am aware of the phobia of clowns, but I do not have it. 

Sarah: Mike I'm going to do something for you right now, actually, before we jump into the clown panic. So I have a kid's encyclopedia book from the sixties called Great Days of the Circus. And I'm just going to turn my camera on for a second and show you some pictures of clowns and makeup.

Mike: Are you trying to terrify me right now? 

Sarah: I'm trying to unsettle you, Mike, like always.

Chelsey: Oh, there they are.

Mike:  Oh, God, the one with the teeth. Jesus Christ. 

Sarah: Well, the thing I find really striking about these pictures close in on their face, I think what that made me realize is that like, Oh, clowns weren't meant to be seeing close up, were they. Like clowns were meant to be seen from far, far away.

Mike: Yeah. This is what Trixie Mattel always says about drag Queens too. 

Sarah: Right. And that clowns, you know, they have these exaggerated intense facial features because they're conveying like one basic emotion and sort of like a broad, comedic emotion to the back row. I think the circus is also like a scary and dark place that was like sold as wholesome entertainment for a long time, in a way that was jarring.

Mike: Yeah. Circuses are like genuinely terrifying because of all the animal cruelty and like the weird economics and labor exploitation. 

Sarah: There's so many things to be scared of at the circus. I'm scared of how the elephants are suffering. 

Mike: Sarah, do you have a killer clowns thing? Do you have a phobia? 

Sarah: No. I mean, I feel like there, there are a few different things that play here. Right? Cause there's like an actual phobia of clowns, which is a named thing. I forget what it's called.

Chelsey: Coulrophobia.

Sarah:  Oh nice. 

Mike: Why isn't it just clownophobia? That'd be so much easier. 

Sarah: They had to make it hard, but whatever. So like yeah. There's clownophobia, you know, I feel like there is a lot of media and like cute shirts and stuff in the nineties that were like, clowns are scary, haha. And this idea that like, it was weird to find clowns scary and kind of like quirky. And even if you like clowns and 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 in full makeup meant to be seen from far away, got in my face, I would be like, please go far away again.

Chelsey: Backup.

Sarah: Or like tone down your look. 

Mike: Were clowns always scary or were they fun for a while and then they became scary? 

Chelsey: They weren’t scary before. I think we'll go back a little bit later in the episode to what the clown was before this, but to just sort of start in a really American context and more recently, uh, the 1960s, the experience of the clown was completely different from today. Clowns were not scary, period. I mean, in the sixties, bozo the clown who is absolutely horrifying, he just has like these giant arched eyebrows and big red hair. And it's just in some ways it's scarier than It. But there was a ten-year wait for kids to get tickets to see his live show. 

Sarah: So like, you start to talk about having a baby and you're like, we got to get in line for bozo tickets.

Mike: 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.

Sarah: I think you're thinking of Dean Martin. 

Chelsey: Uh, well, he was basically just the original clown show on television. 

Mike: So he was a TV show, okay.

Chelsey: So he sparked a franchise, which I think is super interesting. They franchise now his image, so actors in any city could put on their own Bozo Show.

Sarah: So it's like Kamp Krusty.

Chelsey: Exactly. It's like Kamp Krusty.

Sarah:  I want to get a visual of Bozo. Let's all look up Bozo the clown.

Chelsey: Because this guy is the archetype for everything scary, I think that came after. 

Sarah: Oh, you were not kidding. Like I was expecting, I didn't think that I wouldn't find him scary, but I really didn't think I would find him this scary. 

Mike: Yeah. That's horrifying. 

Sarah: The eyebrows are really upsetting and sometimes they're like more arched in the middle, which is like more alarming. It's a really exaggerated big red upturned mouth shape.

Mike: Also the lack of head hair. He has these giant, like three foot long, almost like pigtails coming off of the sides of his head, but he has no hair on the top of his head, which is really unsettling.

Chesley: Which is It, which is Pennywise the clown. Yeah. Ronald McDonald came out of bozo. 

Sarah: He burst out of his chest and then scurried away.

Chesley: Exactly. Willard Scott was the first Ronald McDonald, and he was originally a bozo in Washington, DC and then private contractors and volunteers everywhere would become clowns throughout the sixties and seventies. And it was like a pretty lucrative industry. You know, we see all these old shows of clowns coming to birthday parties, and that was super normal. And one of those people was John Wayne Gacy Jr. 

Mike: I did not know this. He was a clown. 

Sarah: He was Pogo, right. 

Chelsey: He was Pogo. Exactly. And Pogo was just something that like something he did at children's hospitals and parties and stuff, he was, he was really known in the community as is like a great guy who was great with children and had a nice family and a nice job. Um, and so of course, If you all don't know, John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer in the mid to late seventies and he murdered and sexually assaulted at least 33 teenage boys and young men. And their bodies were found in his crawl space under his home that he lived in with his wife. But of course, like, as you might imagine, this guy who did dress as a clown, and there's a super iconic picture of him dressed as Pogo the clown. And that was what the media grabbed onto. That was like the red meat of the story was a killer clown. 

Sarah: And then it was like, Oh, the irony, like, isn't it strange that he dressed as a clown to bring children joy and was also a murderer. Like, it feels like that the media latched onto that came from a sense of like that it was ironic in a way that it's hard to, to connect with now. 

Chelsey: And of course, as you guys know what was happening at the same time in the late seventies was the beginning of like three moral panics, which are stranger danger, the gay panic, and satanic panic.

Sarah: The triple crown. 

Chesley: So is gay pedophile luring children while dressed as a clown is absolutely perfect.

Sarah: Yeah. That's the thing. I feel like the clowning has gotten conflated with his identity, with his like activities as a serial killer. And it's like, no, I think the clown thing was like him trying real hard to be normal and to be a good person and to sort of  perform the actions of a good person, like look, good people dress as clowns and bring joy to the children.

Chesley: Yeah. He's a community man. Right. But what he was doing is he was getting teenagers and young men to come and work for him, construction jobs. And that was how it, you know, it's like not very sensational. So the media just made him into sort of a killer clown and one of the best things and I would bet my whole life that this was never said, and that this was made up. But, uh, when he was arrested, he was reported to have said, “you know, clowns can get away with murder.” 

Sarah: Oh my God.

Chesley:  Could you imagine. 

Sarah: No. That’s so silly. I mean, like, I sure like it could have happened. Lots of things could have happened, but like, no, I mean, that's just like, if you're writing like a straight to video horror movie in the eighties, you're like, come on, come on. How do we end this thing? What's the stinger? 

Mike: Cause was he a clown for a long time? 

Sarah: It wasn't core to his identity. He was more of a serial killer.

Chesley:  I think children catch snippets. Right. And they have to translate it through their little seven year old brains. And they're hearing and seeing no matter what, pictures and stories about a clown that kills children, because that was the narrative. So I think that that seeped into the consciousness of both adults and children. 

Mike: Right. So the link was made between clowning and killing.

Chesley: Right? Yeah, exactly. So it was like you're having clowns and serial killers. So I think these things, yeah, they were just a perfect recipe for what would come soon after that, which was the first panic.

Mike: About clowns? The first panic about clowns?

Chesley:  Yes. About Phantom clowns.

Mike: Phantom clowns?

Chesley:  You guys, are you guys ready to go into that? 

Sarah: Yes, so ready. I feel like we're about to enter the haunted mansion ride. I'm like, I'm so scared, but I'm so excited.

Chesley:  So John Wayne Gacy was sentenced to death in 1980 and it was again like a very, very public trial. So the very, very next year it was April of 1981. It was kids in Boston, and they started reporting men in vans, dressed as clowns that were trying to lure them with candy.

Mike: Vans! Ding, ding, ding.

Chesley: So then here's the thing. All right. So you guys will probably remember how during the satanic panic, the, the original mother and child whose names will escape me, who were reporting abuse in daycare, sparked the police to send a letter home to everyone saying, Hey, this is happening. Did this happen to you?

Sarah:  At the McMartin preschool? 

Chelsey: That was, yeah. 

Sarah: McMartin was the one where the police sent a letter to all the parents and were like, these very specific things may have happened to your child. Here's a long list of them. That includes, I believe the phrase ‘anal sodomy’, but we don't know. And don't ask your kids about it and don't talk about it amongst yourselves or with anyone else. Well, bye. And that was a great plan. 

Chelsey: So anyway, Boston public school district sends out memos telling parents to keep a close eye on their children because clowns are trying to kidnap them. 

Mike: Wait they literally warned parents about clowns?

Chesley: Yes. They needed to keep an eye on their children because there had been reports of clowns trying to learn them with candy. Calls just started flooding in. There were so many reports that police began profiling clowns, and they started following and pulling over clowns. And here's the thing. There were like so many clowns. There was a lot of birthday clowns that they pulled over, but they never found anything nefarious.

Sarah: And if you're driving between birthdays, I mean, I assume like you're not, you're just going to be in makeup the whole day. Right. 

Mike: Its very similar to the sort of child sex trafficking, panic that we have now where you're like someone tried to traffic me at the grocery store and then you hear the actual story. And it's like a person came up to me and asked for directions and it's like this completely normal story. I can see that being the same thing that happened then where it's like, I saw a killer clown. But it's actually literally just like a 40 year old man in clown makeup, driving from one party to the other. 

Chesley: So, okay. So more clown sightings, uh, hap and they started happening all over the Northeast sort of, and even in the Midwest, like Kansas City, there was a clown chasing children with a sword. This is my favorite one, in Boston the day after the story started airing on TV, they were called to the park to investigate a clown that was reportedly just naked from the waist down. I don't know if he was wearing shoes, but of course there was no pantsless clown identified or found. So coming kind of at the same time as this clown panic, Ronald Reagan,  I think he had just won the election. He was very much a representative of this uncanny Valley thing that I think we'll talk about a little bit more later. And people kind of remember him as, as having like red cheeks and that like too polished veneer that almost rendered him a little animatronic.

Mike: Are you saying Ronald Reagan was a clown? Like he fit the clown aesthetic?

Chelsey: Here again, this is just me. So at the same time, this was happening where he seems like he's a little bit play acting, and some people talk about how he was kind of creepy. 

Sarah: Our first Stepford president.

Mike: That is very cultural studies PhD, and I'm extremely here for it. I fucking love theories like this. Wasn't Ronald Reagan, the real killer clown?

Sarah:  I mean, he was, he, he literally was right because he was also this beloved figure because he had been in kind of cheesy movies in his career as an actor and then had been this charismatic megafauna as governor of California and was just very telegenic. I feel like that was something that people were very aware that he was pioneering also, this like telegenic presidency that was style over substance and had pretty devastating consequences.

Mike:  I mean, he killed a lot more people than John Wayne Gacy. 

Sarah: Yeah, there you go. 

Chelsey: Uh, but yeah, he had like the red cheeks and his hair was so molded and weird. He did, he looked like, he looked like his animatronic in the hall of presidents at Disneyland. 

Mike: So I mean, not a lot of people know that Ronald Reagan's campaign slogan in 1984 was everything floats down here. Another parallel.

Mike: But anyway I don't know. It's like he had like a very polished veneer and it's like this creepy crafted perfection of politics. We all see it. And I imagine children interpret it, you know, in a certain way as well.

Mike:  I'll take it. 

Chesley: Yeah. Trump also was coming into office as the other clown panic happened and that's sort of why I bring it up. 

Sarah: It's like clowns are like a naturally produced, like urban legend warning sign of like, Oh no. We're about to have a really, really bad administration. 

Chesley: Well, speaking of Harbinger's, shall we go into horror movies? 

Sarah: Yes. My favorite place. 

Chelsey: So I think Poltergeist, it was in 1982. So it was like right after all this clown stuff and it was kind of the first representation of a clown being scary. And it's that clown doll that pulls the boy, I don't know his name. I can't remember it under the bed. That was really scary. Do you guys remember that? 

Sarah: Oh yeah. Mike, have you seen Poltergeist?

Mike:  I'm Googling clown doll, Poltergeist. Cause I'm still too scared to see that movie. 

Sarah: It’s a fantastic scene that I'm going to describe to you verbally, because I don't want to ask you to see it. It's this beautiful suspenseful scene where the boy is like looking under the bed. You're like sure there's going to be something under the bed. He like looks down. There's nothing there. And then he like gets up and the clowns behind him. 

Mike: This is the still that I have in front of me on Google images. It looks terrifying.

Sarah: Tell us about this clown. 

Mike: It seems to be made of like porcelain or something plasticky. And it's got like a big toothy grin and big bozo eyebrows. Oh, ew. And like long arms and legs.

Sarah: Arms that get magically long to strangle you with. 

Mike: In the same way that like Children of the Corn is creepy because it's like these images of innocence that are out to kill you. The idea of something that is perpetually smiling while also trying to murder you is just like the incongruity makes it that much scarier. 

Sarah: That's also why dolls are creepy, I think. 

Chelsey: We're so naturally afraid of things that can't feel empathy. The very basis of our communication with people is like, what is your facial expression? And if it's incongruent with the actions, then you're like, oh, you're like super dangerous. You're not committing an act of passion. You're not like punching somebody because they said something mean you're like calculatingly wanting to harm. Anyway. So back to horror because Stephen King then published It in 1986. And then of course, Pennywise the clown who now has become a new, yet again, giant cultural icon. Pennywise was the central villain. And I think what Stephen King really nailed in this was that the clown morphed into like a personalized worst fear of each child. Is there anything that you want to say about it? Like what was your experience originally? Did you read the book or was it more the movie for you, Sarah? 

Sarah: It's funny. I didn't see the movie read the book until I was like in my late twenties. And that book features protagonists who start out at 11 years old when we first meet them. And then we return and they're like 36, 37. And there's a real theme of repressed memory there. I really wondered how much Stephen King kind of was influenced by the zeitgeists and telling a story about these characters who basically did battle with this shape-shifting monster who often took the form of Pennywise the clown and who didn't remember any of the first time or didn't remember their childhoods in this town or this friendship that they had with each other. And then the memories come back as they come back to fight It again. And repressed memories are so central to the satanic panic. So this feels like a satanic panic informed story to me too. What do you think about that?

Chelsey:  I think about that all the time. Every single morning, I wake up and say was Stephen King influenced by the satanic panic.

Sarah: And then you do your skincare and then you're like, but he was he. Yeah, he totally was.

Chelsey:  I think he had to have been informed by every, every moral panic that was going on at that time. I wanted to also mention that's a good transition because, uh, Pennywise, I believe was also influenced heavily by Ronald McDonald. And I have a little bit of proof. Um, I found an old McDonald's commercial that very, very closely in my opinion, resembles the very iconic scene with, uh, Georgie, who's the younger brother of the main character, who goes missing. We see him meet Pennywise in this. 

Mike: Oh my God. I want to see Ronald McDonald and the sewer so bad. 

Chelsey: So I think we're going to show, I think we're going to, uh, let Mike take a look at that. Okay. Ready? One, two, three.

*Recording* 

Ronald McDonald: Isn’t that McDonald’s hamburger delicious? Hi, Georgie. Don't you want a balloon? 

Georgie: Mom told me never could talk to strangers. I’m not supposed to take stuff from strangers! My dad said so.

Ronald McDonald: Well your mother’s right as always. 

Very wise of your dad, Georgie. Very wise indeed.

 I’m Ronald McDonald. Give you a McDonald shake! 

I, Georgie, am Pennywise the dancing clown. You are Georgie, so now we know each other. 

Georgie: You aren’t a stranger you really are Ronald McDonald.

Mike: Oh, God, I can't tell which one is more terrifying. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I think the thing about Pennywise too, is that all of these characters who come back home as adults are confronting Pennywise at the same time that they're confronting their childhood traumas. And, you know, the dynamic trauma that they still carry with them from childhood that they have maybe repressed or not dealt with, but like their home and it's back, and Pennywise is still in the sewer. Like, I feel like Pennywise is so effective as a scary monster, because like all scary monsters that like are sticky and like stick in the culture. The thing to me, to me the thing about Pennywise is that he's synonymous with childhood trauma. Like you manifest as your worst fear, and he knows how to terrify you with his knowledge of what your parents did to you, or of what you have of the worst traumas that you have experienced. And so to be afraid of Pennywise, it's not silly, right? Because Pennywise is connected with, with human trauma itself. 

Chelsey:  So, a lot of people blame the It book for the Phantom clown panic, but obviously as we see it came five years later. So we're going to jump forward a little bit to 2008, just to sort of show how clowns have transformed from jolly happy children's entertainers to really, really scary. So there was a study conducted in 2008 where they pulled 250 children who are aged four to six, and they were trying to decorate a hospital wing for children. And they were trying to figure out how the children would like the decor to look. And every single child said that they did not want clowns to be part of the decor, every single child.

Mike: So it's like the end of clowns as child entertainment. It's the end of clowns as pure, happy, fun. Like that just isn't a thing that exists anymore. It's always complicated.

Sarah: I bet a lot of professional clowns hate Stephen King. 

Chelsey: Can we do, I know that this is a little out of order, but can we go a little bit into the history of the clown? Because we talk about how clowns used to be lovable childhood entertainers, but that's not what they were. They do this ebb and flow thing because the archetype of the fool that stretches across time, it dates back to ancient times and across most, if not all cultures, there is this sort of creation known as the fool or the wise fool.

Mike:  Like a court gesture type of situation. 

Chelsey: Yes. This is so interesting to me. Ancient Greece had an actual profession where a man would come to funerals and do impressions and crack jokes at the expense of the dead person and make fun of the mourners and the family.

Mike: So it's like a funeral/roast. 

Chelsey: Yes. This clown would show up and do that. And sort of the idea was that if you're roasting dead people and the community that's mourning, it would help vent the anxieties about death. And with sort of this transgression, it really helped events sort of the darkness and sadness of death, right?

Mike: That's also the origin of it. Your mom jokes. At people's funerals, just fucking brutal. 

Chelsey: The other routes, like you mentioned, Mike, uh, are in, you know, the Royal kingdom in England, uh, and clowns were known as court jesters, and also wise fools. And they were really respected because they, as much as they were goofballs and joked around, they also were known to hold kind of like a crude wisdom. They were allowed to make fun of the King without being tortured or killed. And then not only that, but they were political advisors to the King because they were allowed to speak plainly.

Mike:  I mean, it's, it's sort of similar now to this stance that people like John Stewart take where it's like, Oh, I'm just a comedian. I'm not really a political actor. When humor has always been political and humor has always been profoundly influential on the way that we think about things. 

Sarah: Right and the idea that humans like used to be fundamentally different, you know, and this like deeply human way. It's like, no, like, like this is why to return inevitably to the topic of scary movies. Like scary movies to me are much scarier when characters are telling jokes and behaving like human beings. If they're like grim and like serious the whole time, I'm like, well, this really takes me out of it. Cause like, I wouldn't be like that which is why the Blair witch project is so scary because they're like telling silly jokes and yelling at each other like human beings do under duress.

Chelsey:  So this is just a fun, another fun fact. This was actually found out because my partner who's a producer on our show also was reading about the history of circus music. She informed me that the classic clown song and you know it-

Sarah: Is it *hums tune*  

Chelsey: That’s perfect. Beautiful. So that song was posed in 1897 in Czechoslovakia and its original name is the Entrance of the Gladiators and it was a military march. It was played like really slow. But  get ready for this, when the clowns came out and used it, it was like, it was like a faster tempo. And when the clowns come out in the circus, the name of the song they come out to is called A Screamer.

Sarah:  And they say they're not trying to be scary. Yeah. That's amazing. Yes. Like I don't think anything has ever made me so happy. So obviously this started out as like an ironic thing. Cause people were like, Oh, it's so funny. They're playing all our old favorite song, fast. Like that's so weird and ironic. It's like, it used to be ironic for a serial killer to clown in his free time as opposed to just being appropriate.

Chelsey: So now I want to talk about my, one of my most favorite things in the world. And maybe you guys have talked about it, but it's the Uncanny Valley. 

Mike: We have not.

Sarah:  We have not talked about that on this show. So please take us there.

Chelsey:  So the uncanny Valley is an aesthetics theory that it's that thing where you are witnessing something that's human or like a humanoid and it's close. It's like human, but it's not. And it's what inspires, like, eeriness that discomfort you feel when looking at animatronic or dolls or clowns.

Sarah: Like when you check into a nice bed and breakfast and there's a Victorian doll and a chair facing you as you get into bed. And you're like, I'm just going to turn this object around.

Mike: It’s  like the idea that when something is distinctly not human, it's less unsettling than when it becomes closer and closer to being realistic. I think of it as like the difference between the Incredibles and The Polar Express. That in the Incredibles, all of the humans are super stylized. No one is fooled that like, are those real humans or not, but then the Polar Express, they're trying to be like, you can't even tell that it's a computer, but you fucking can and it's weird. Right? 

Sarah: And it evokes a feeling in us of like, I don't know how many of you are things and how many of you are human. 

Chelsey: That's exactly what it is. And so the uncanny Valley has like, nobody can say definitively what it is, why those things creep us out and make us feel really uncomfortable.

But there are a few theories that I think are really interesting. Um, one of them is that perhaps it looks to us or may remind us of a dead body, which we want to avoid, or someone who may be infected with something like rabies. We are naturally repelled from things that could be dangerous. Um, another theory is that it has to do with empathy. So these things that are a little inhuman are more difficult to empathize with or read empathy from, there's like a, a feeling of being like a little bit soulless. So there's a lot of distrust that we're naturally biologically programmed to have when we're like, there's something off here and it could be something that's dangerous.

Mike: Right. It's like when somebody doesn't blink. 

Sarah: Yeah. Like Charles Manson, not a fan of blinking. Unsettling guy. 

Chelsey: Yeah. So now this is the part that I love the most about the uncanny Valley, the theory that I love the most, and it has to do with like, what is, what is creepiness, right? What is eeriness, it's different then fear. We know that it's a completely separate feeling. So we think of creepiness sometimes as like, say you're on a bus, and there's a dude staring at you, right? Like you're not purely scared. You're just like creeped out. Right. It's about assessing a threat. So our social norms say that we can't scream and freak out because that would possibly be rude, or it would be outside of what's acceptable. So we kind of sit there and we're just doing this like reconnaissance, right? So we're keenly aware of this threat and we're watching for more information. And so it kind of creates like a little bit of an error message in our brains because we don't know what to do. And so it's kind of like a creepy threat is ambiguous.

Mike: Right. Clowns are a good example of this, of course, because they have all of the features of humans, but they're all a little bit exaggerated. They're just a little bit off. Like their eyebrows are really wide. Their smile is really wide. It feels to me like now the well is poisoned. I feel like people now associate clowns with freakiness more than they associate them with joy and happiness and kids' birthday parties. Right?

Chelsey: Absolutely. And then there's also, do you guys know about supernormal stimuli? And I think this could explain why clowns have been beloved and despised. So we got the uncanny Valley on one hand. On the other hand, we have this thing called supernormal stimuli, which is, it's a psychological concept that explores how we are naturally more attracted to things that are exaggerated and blown up, which is like Disneyland. We want to watch these sort of dramatic, you know, theater, the history of art. We want to see more drama. The main study that was done was with birds. They gave birds that had these small spotted eggs, giant eggs with giant polka dots on them. And they chose to abandon their eggs and go sit on these other eggs. So, you know, and they have all these other tests with, with fish that have like brighter colors. So it's like, we will go to the fake if it's blown up and exaggerated. So I think that there's that attraction because the clown is nothing if not a blown up version of a person.

Sarah: You know, we were talking about horror movies earlier and it feels like clowns have always been appealing, you know, in a few different ways. But one of them is the way that horror movies are appealing. Where like, you know, it's just like this anarchic experience of watching someone break the rules of the society that you are in and getting to have some kind of cathartic experience through this. So it's, I don't know. Maybe, maybe clowns are for grownups.

Chelsey: I mean they were, as we were talking about, they were not children’s entertainers, I think really until maybe the circus. But even the circus was like, not just for children.

Sarah:  But the circus is like, everybody goes, right. The circus comes and you're like, well, I'm a servant in Hartford, Connecticut. So I'm going to go to the circus on my day off because these illustrated posters have promised me fantastical things.

Mike: The circus was for people who fucking hated elephants. 

Sarah: That too. Or for people who just wanted to see an elephant and didn't know how the elephant had gotten there. 

Chelsey: But I mean, you think about dolls, right? Dolls have also had this journey.

Sarah: Dolls have also had a rough go of it culturally. 

Mike: They are, another thing it's like been ruined by horror movies. Chucky was the end of us earnestly enjoying dolls. 

Chelsey: Absolutely. Um, okay. How about we talk about the 2016 panic. 

Sarah: Yes, please. 

Mike: I'm not even aware that there was a 2016 panic. I was alive. I did not see this at all. What, what is this? 

Sarah: What were you doing, man?

Chelsey: It was huge. 

Mike: Do I have to be on Tumblr? How do I find this?

Chelsey: No, no, no. It was in the news. It was like, I'd say Facebook was the, the transmission.

Sarah:  You weren’t friends with scared Facebook people, Mike.

Mike:  So what was, what was this? 

Chelsey: All right. So this came in 2016. A lot of people were like, Oh, it's because It came out, but it's not because It came out in 2018. So part of what people believe sparked it was, um, outside of sort of cultural consciousness, was the low budget horror director named Adam Kraus. He had a creepy clown stand in the street holding black balloons, trying to make a viral marketing campaign for his short film, which was called Gags. Um, and then a bunch of people called the police and started taking pictures spreading on social media. Another possible beginning point was, uh, have you guys watched the, well Mike, you probably haven't but Sarah, have you watched the Wrinkles, the clown documentary on Hulu?

Sarah: I have not. 

Mike: What is it? 

Chelsey: So Wrinkles was this character created by someone who has remained anonymous. He is just kind of seems like a normal dude. And they started filming like creepy clown stuff and spreading it, like found footage. So he put up all these stickers that said, Wrinkles, the clown, with a phone number, and you could call this phone number and there was a creepy message, or he would actually answer the phone. And you know, he used a ‘Hey kid’ kind of voice. And, and he also kind of created this idea that parents could call so that they're to scare their kids into obedience. So parents would actually call and leave messages, not actually wanting Wrinkles to come, but you could hear the kid just like crying and screaming in the background is being like, we're going to call Wrinkles. We're going to have them come over if you don't eat your dinner. But it was a boogeyman scenario. And it was coming a couple of years before the actual panic. So 2016, we've got suddenly this group of kids in Greenville, South Carolina are saying that a clown was trying to load them in the woods, but in perfect 2016 fashion, it was not with candy, but with large amounts of cash.

Mike: Capitalism.

Chelsey: So that these, these clowns flashed green lasers at them, came to their door in the night, rattling chains and banging around.

Mike:  He left a trail of tide pods in the woods for them to follow. Very 2016.

Chelsey: Anyway, of course, in classic fashion, the mom of one of the children's sort of fuels this by contacting the local news and coming on and they interview a lot of the children who were again, like about seven years old and it's so cute. And you know, he's like,*in child voice* “and that I saw a clown in the woods, and he pointed at me.” It's just really darling. But the mother is like, they might, she might as well be leading like some new coalition against clowns. I feel like she's like a MAD, like mothers against drunk driving, thing going.

Sarah: Mothers against forest clowns.

Chelsey: Exactly. So she reports it. Um, so then more and more people start reporting it because it's on the news. Right. And so one woman says there's a clown with a blinking nose, near a dumpster, but I kind of think it's just this weird attention thing, right? Like the poison Halloween candy, you have people jamming tacks into candy and then putting it on Facebook. Right. And it gets like 40,000 shares or something. 

Mike: Is there any evidence that there were ever any actual clowns?

Chelsey:  There is no evidence, but I think that some of it had to be because if I was a teenager and this was going on, there's a part of me that might have like done some jokes. 

Mike: Well, this is the thing is yeah. If we're in the middle of like a clown panic, it actually makes a lot of sense to go dress as a clown and fuck with people.

Chelsey:  And I'm sure that happened. So basically those same children that kind of were the first ones in South Carolina told police that a clown lived in a house near a pond at the end of a trail through the woods, which is so fantastically fairytale. 

Mike: That's a Thomas Kincaid painting. 

Chelsey: And so the police did find this property and found nothing clown related or threatening. Anyway, uh, it kept going, reporting clowns with knives, jumping out of abandoned houses and bushes chasing kids from bus stops. Teenagers started making threats to schools posing as evil clowns, likely to get out tests.

Mike:  Oh my God. Kids did that at my school too, but they use bomb threats. 

Chelsey: Okay. So this is the best one. All right. So this woman said that she was smoking on her porch at 4:00 AM and a man wearing a striped outfit and a clown mask, and a red wig walked directly up to her, grabbed her by the throat and said, I should just kill you now. And then some students and teachers would wish they were never born at the junior and senior high school today.

Sarah: The junior and senior high school?

Chelsey:  Yeah. And then just walked away after that. So yeah, that didn't happen. 

Sarah: The junior and senior high school, Mike.

Mike: That doesn't even make sense. 

Sarah: When people make up stories about criminals, you can often tell when something is sort of a myth made to circulate on Facebook, partly because the killer always, like they don't kill you. They just say something scary and then leave or whatever. Like people explain themselves to you and don't kill you. And like, say things that are meant to be scary to an audience. Like something that you learned from a horror movie. 

Mike: I cannot believe people fell for this.

Sarah: So clowns become a way to get out of school. That's brilliant. 

Mike: Do local news reporters, like I do this thing sometimes where people send me a tip and then I just don't do a story on it because it's fake. Do people not know that they can do that?

Sarah: But Mike, if there is a killer clown up there and you didn't report on it, you feel pretty foolish after he did something terrible at the junior and senior high school. 

Chelsey: Okay. So Penn state 500 students at Penn state went on an actual clown hunt, uh, because there were claims that an evil clown had been spotted on campus. There are videos of this. I imagine it was partially a joke.

Sarah: Right. But it's still something that people like, know what it is. And they're like, yay, whoo!

Mike: Those kids did that to distract the cops from like the meth lab they had in their basement. This is obvious.

Chelsey: Okay. So Ronald McDonald was put on hiatus from all community events. It was this big of a deal. 

Sarah: Oh, in 2016?

Chelsey: Yup. And I don't know if he's been reinstated yet.

Mike: It’s amazing to me that he's still around. I thought the clown thing would have done away with him years ago.

Sarah:  McDonald's is powerful. 

Chelsey: Yeah. They need to, they need to rebrand. I mean, I hope they don't because I don't want them to do better, bu. 

Sarah:  I think we need more of a, I don't know if he's grimace or the grimace, but that guy, the purple guy.

Mike: I can't believe all this was happening and I never heard about it in 2016.

Sarah: It was a really eventful year, Mike.

Chelsey: There was a lot going on, maybe, I don't know. Yeah, so, okay. This got all the way to the White House. When white house reporter asked a white house spokesman, John Earnest, for President Obama's opinion on killer clowns. And this is what the white house spokesman said. Quote, “I don't know that the president has been briefed on this particular situation. Obviously, this is a situation that law enforcement is taking quite seriously.”

Mike: Come on!

Sarah:  Wow.

Chelsey: fantastic. So another example, a mom and daughter called the police on a 12 year old boy who turned out to have autism spectrum disorder. And he was just looking to surprise his mom with his new Pennywise costume. Can you look at a 12 year old boy and realize that's a 12 year old boy and it's probably fine.

Mike:  Don’t call cops on 12 year old boys, clown outfits or not.

Sarah: Yeah. And also like if I saw someone dressed like Pennywise, I would assume, I wouldn't assume that they were Pennywise himself. Like I would be like, Oh, that person likes Pennywise. And they’re trying to be scary. Like they're a kid or an edge lord.

Mike: Do people think that movies are real? 

Sarah: They do Mike! I think they do. 

Chelsey: A little girl in Athens, Georgia was actually arrested for bringing a knife to school to fight off supposedly clowns. So things got bad, not because there were killer clowns, but because people were reacting far out of proportion to Phantom clowns. So one thing that happened was a 16 year old was stabbed to death by an older man. And we're not sure, you can't say for certain why, but he had a clown mask. He was wearing a clown mask. 

Mike: The one who got killed or the one who killed him?

Chelsey:  The one who was killed. So it was possibly a reaction to the clown mask, but I can't say that definitively. So I don't want to put out any fake news. 

Sarah: What were the circumstances of this? Did they know each other? 

Chelsey: They did not know each other. It's a little bit foggy the extenuating circumstances, but here is a certainty. So going back to that South Carolina apartment building that kind of helps spark everything. Men who lived there, who were told that there were mysterious clowns in the woods, started firing their guns into when they heard noises that they could not explain.

Sarah:  Oh my God.

Chelsey: So we have like real danger coming out of this, but not the kind that everyone's expecting, right. Which is always the case with a moral panic. 

Sarah: And, uh, people being like keyed up and ready to shoot you or stab you.

Mike: It’s so fucking weird. I want to interview one of these people. Like, do you actually think that there's men dressing up as clowns trying to kill children? Is that like the actual belief? 

Sarah: I want to know if they think that there are clowns with magical powers, because like, if someone's wearing a clown costume, they're just a person wearing a clown costume. Like, I feel like people are treating clowns as some kind of a supernatural entity in these scenarios.

Mike: If I was going to kidnap a child, I would not dress in a way that made myself extremely distinctive and memorable.

Sarah:  And also something that everyone is scared of already. It's like dressing up as Jason, you know, to try and like crash a fun party. 

Mike: So did this ever get like debunked? Or did it just sort of fade away as we got distracted by other events in 2016.

Sarah: It got debunked by Chelsey.

Chelsey: It faded away as everything does. I think poisoned Halloween candy is a great example of a really similar situation where the reports come out and once they do get debunked there, no one's interested in reporting that or it's a tiny little footnote. What sticks is the sensational media reporting.

Mike: I feel like all of us sleep on the combination of fucking local news and Facebook as engines of radicalization. Because like we talk about like Fox news and stuff, and Fox news is bad, but it's so sort of like upfront forwardly bad.

Sarah: And we talk about 4chan.

Mike: And 4chan and these other places that are like, really obviously fucking terrible. There's a lot of people that are sort of savvy enough to know that Fox news is terrible and to not go on 4chan, but they're watching the fucking local news every night and they're seeing what their friends share on Facebook. And there's this like huge middle of people in America who are not getting radicalized by Fox news, but they're just absorbing what they think is credible media and it's just fucking trash. 

Sarah: And what is it that's so bad about it? Cause I feel like my experience watching local news is like every story I'm like, why am I hearing about this? Like, this seems like a weird thing for you to be telling me about. It's like not relevant to like, you know, public information that I need to know about like voting and like street cleaning and stuff like that. It seems like engineered to scare me or be cute. They're behaving as if they ran out of stories when like, obviously that's impossible. So like, why are they talking about these things? 

Mike: And there’s so much propaganda that goes through local news, just like police sources say 65 people were trapped in a trafficking sting, and then you later find out that it's like not 65, not a trafficking sting.

Sarah: But they were people though. And its piping police rhetoric just directly into people's homes like without any kind of editorialization or anything. 

Mike: Yeah. Without any context. Yeah. I mean, they still fucking do the razorblades in the Apple that still goes around local news. 

Chelsey: I swear. You're going to be downloading it from zoom this year. You're 3d printing candy and it's going to be full of weed, you know. I like to think of local news as a thousand ways to die and then one to help you sleep. So like, it'll be like, there was a fire, a car crash, like Antifa is coming into the suburbs and then like, here's a new quack medication to help you sleep. Someone helped ducks cross the road.

Sarah: That’s the format, it's 29 minutes of murder. And then you end with ducklings.

Chelsey: So speaking about the news, uh, I think obviously part of this that we can't ignore is what was happening culturally in 2016. And I think it's really interesting that we had,  I mean, you can't not see clown in Donald Trump, right? He's so fake looking. His hair is insane. His coloring is insane. 

Sarah: He’s meant to be seen from far away. 

Chelsey: He's got this like oversized suit where little, tiny fingers poke out. Like he looks like a lot like a clown. And then at the same time he's being rendered in magazines, political cartoons as a clown, like that's one of the biggest ways that people regard him. Right? I think this is really fun. Anarchists actually created a billboard in the middle of the night. They painted over a billboard with Trump dressed as a clown with the words “Clowns can get away with murder”. He was actually specifically dressed as Pogo, even to the point where Governor Gavin Newsome, you know, who loves to throw the punches. He, uh, he compared Trump to Pennywise in a tweet, you know.

Mike: Got ‘em. Yeah. I think the Donald Trump as clown thing is like very Oberlin, cultural studies, PhD. I fucking love it. I like, as somebody who spends a lot of time on Google scholar, like for researching the show, there are those papers. Like I came across one that was talking about how like the Beatles were so popular because there were four of them, you know, and there's like four horsemen of the apocalypse. And like four like books of the Bible and he was going through all this, like symbolism of four, I read the whole fucking paper. It was like 70 pages long. I was like, yeah give it to me.

Chelsey: The last thing I, uh, thought would be fun to talk about was another clown sighting that came a little bit before the actual panic, this, uh, this sighting, this clown sighting and interaction with this cryptoid that would come to be known as, uh, Sam, the Sandown clown that was seen by two children. I think they were seven and nine and this was around 4:00 PM and they were attracted to this area. They were on a golf course and they heard wailing and they follow the noise and then it stopped. And then this clown came out of the bridge and they described him as about seven feet tall. He looked wooden and mechanical and flesh at the same time as the way that these children described it. The first thing that came out was a hand wearing a blue glove. And I believe it only had three fingers. He couldn't communicate, his words were all  garbled. And at one point he used like one of those weird tape recorders with the microphone. Remember those? Where you could like talk into it and it would be loud, but it was like for children. So he was trying to speak through that, but he couldn't really communicate. So they asked him to write like who he was on a piece of paper and why he could write. 

Mike:  So they're talking to a disembodied hand at the golf course. 

Chelsey: No. Sorry. The hand came first, then the clown, the seven foot tall clown who was, wood, mechanical, and flesh.

Sarah: Yeah, Mike, keep up.

Chelsey: So they asked him who he was, and he introduced himself as all colors, Sam, or he said, I am all colors. 

Sarah: Oh my. Could this be someone who was tripping balls? That's my theory. 

Chelsey: Then they asked, are you a ghost? And he wrote, well, not really, but I am in an odd sort of way. And they spent about 30 minutes hanging with this guy. They weren't terrified of him or anything. He lived in a metal shack, which they, uh, spend a little time in, and then he vanished. But again, the children didn't act afraid of this thing. But when we hear a six foot tall flesh wood mechanical clown creature, uh, talking into a weird microphone, to us that's horrific and scary and weird. I don't know. I just think it's this interesting outlier that I'd never heard before.

Mike:  Well, it's like a friendly killer clown scenario? Is what you mean. That it's like a nice story of people just chatting with a dude who's tripping balls in an old suit.

Sarah:  What if these killer clowns are like, Sweetums in the Muppet movie. These like spectral clowns that live in the forest that only want to hear the laughter of a child. And they're tortured by the fact that we keep running away from them and shooting at them. 

Mike: That sounds scary though.

Sarah:  All right. 

Chelsey: They sound like a mournful outsider artist sitting in their shack, like practicing clowning.

Mike: Yeah, it’s like Miranda July.

Sarah: Which is what I think a lot of this stuff is too. Like, I, it's funny to me also that people aren't more cynical about, like, if you see a clown holding black balloons, like I would presume that to be a viral marketing campaign. It's surprising to me that more people, when they see something super weird, aren't just like, that's probably a viral marketing campaign. 

Mike: Dude. Last time I was in New York, I walked past a bar on the lower East side or something. It was like opening soon a bar just for pregnant women. And it had like a photo of a woman like a visibly pregnant woman sipping a martini. And it was like, this is very fucking, obviously a viral marketing campaign that is like wanting us to get pissed and share that on Instagram. And then of course, like two days later it was like viral marketing campaign comes to the lower East side. It's like, yeah. That was really fucking clear.

Sarah: To you.

Mike: Because I'm not on Facebook. I don't watch local news. It's actually kind of inspiring that the 2016 clown panic didn't result in a bunch of laws for like three strikes for clowns or some bullshit. Of like Georgie’s Law.

Sarah:  I feel like clowns have already been pretty marginalized. And yeah, I hope that a new dawn is breaking for the clowns of this nation.

Mike: Do you? I’m fine without clowns. I do not miss clowns.

Sarah: Okay. Maybe this is another, maybe this is better. I feel like maybe the era of us pretending that clowns are simple, wholesome figures rather than complex trickster characters is over and maybe that's good. 

Mike:  If only we could do the same thing for Ronald Reagan.

Sarah:  And stop shooting guns into the forest.

Mike: Don’t shoot guns in the forest.

Chelsey: That's the moral of the story is, don't shoot at imaginary things.

Sarah: Chelsea, can you tell us about, uh, if people liked this episode? Like what else do you talk about on your show? 

Chelsey: We do so much of the more things that you guys do. I mean, we cover everything from the Illuminati to quackery, to the archetype of the redneck and how poor white people have been maligned by rich people forever. And, uh, we have a new season coming up, we're doing fake news, charismatic leaders, televangelists, but, uh, if you guys like this show, I find you guys very inspiring. And I think we're just kindred spirits kind of together in what we do. So.

Mike: Bunkmates!

Chelsey: Yeah. You know, more than debunking, even just sort of like why, right. 

Sarah: We want to know why we want to go into the scary forest. 

Chelsey: We do. The haunted mansion. 

Mike: Don't shoot us.