What do you think of when you think about clowns? Smiling painted faces pulling never-ending scarves from their mouths? Sad hobos with five o'clock shadow and patches on their clothes? Or maybe Robin Williams playing "Patch Adams," the doctor who believed in the powerful medicine of laughter.
Or how about this guy:
In 1952, Jimmy Stewart played a clown who would never take off his make-up in Cecil B. Demille's "The Greatest Show on Earth." Spoiler alert: Stewart's character was actually a murdering husband hiding out after killing his wife, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
By 1986, when Stephen King released his book-turned-movie "It," the public was pretty much freaked out by clowns. It didn't take much to shove imaginations into a clown car and push them over the edge.
Clown conventions (yes, there are such things) and other clown-related gatherings started to see declined attendance in the 2000s, according to Smithsonian Magazine. "You don't really see clowns in those kinds of safe, fun contexts anymore. You see them in movies and they're scary," Martin Antony, a professor of psychology at Ryerson University in Toronto, told Smithsonian Magazine. "Kids are not exposed in that kind of safe fun context as much as they used to be and the images in the media, the negative images, are still there."
So in an age of Krusty the Clown on "The Simpsons," are kids ever going to experience the joy of a grown man (or woman) wiping banana cream from their eyes?
Some studies say "yes" to the pie in the eye, like a study conducted in Italy and published in the January 2013 issue of the Journal of Health Psychology. Study findings indicated that children exposed to clowns before undergoing surgery had less anxiety about the procedure.
A 2011 study published in the Natural Medicine Journal suggested that "clown interventions" helped speed the recovery time of children with respiratory illnesses. "Up to this point most of the data on laughter and healing has focused on only immune function -- in particular the effect of laughter on allergic and autoimmune responses -- with very little if any measurement of effect on acute infectious illnesses," the study author wrote. "The results of this study suggest a wider application of humor and laughter to a wider range of medical conditions."
Maybe Patch Adams was really on to something.
