YMMV / Laughing Jack

• Broken Base: While even the story's detractors admit that they like how the story sets the atmosphere at the beginning and that Jack's design is pretty good or at least decent, there are plenty of complaints about the story getting too gory too fast and how the mother still being able to write after being institutionalized is not realistic.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Jack's torture of Isaac is so gory and over-the-top it arguably loops around to being funny.
• Draco in Leather Pants: While there is an angle of sympathy for the titular Monster Clown in that his corruption was caused by his design to adapt to his playmate's personality, that being Isaac, and that boy later becoming a Serial Killer, Laughing Jack becomes more ruthless than the one who influenced him, as proven when Isaac is mildly thrown off by his own Cold-Blooded Torture while the clown watches with glee. Laughing Jack would then slaughter several children in horrific ways over the years, but some fans say his crimes are not his own fault at all, but instead Isaac's, as his neglect and vile ways turned Laughing Jack into a monster.
• Nausea Fuel: The detailed violence in these stories can get sickening sometimes, with some readers even commenting that they are excessive.
  • James is mutilated to almost beyond recognition yet still kept alive and pinned to the wall for his mother to see. She can't help but puke at the sight.
  • While Isaac does subject several of his murder victims to Cold-Blooded Torture, Laughing Jack's brutalisation of Isaac is both more horrific and nauseating, from blowing a balloon made from his intestine to fiddling an injection needle in his eye. What takes the cake out of it all, however, is when Laughing Jack summons cockroaches out of his mouth to inflate Isaac's punctured stomach, which crawl out of his nose and mouth.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Several mysterious and horrifying things happen around James' mother's home, but the climax where the entity that caused them finally reveals himself is terrifying. After finding her mutilated (yet alive) son, the titular Laughing Jack cackles from the shadows, his grotesque ragdoll-like figure towering between the mother and her child. Jack laughing at the "work" he made of James makes the mother snap, running towards the monster with a knife, but he vanishes for the blade to kill James instead, which horrifies and shatters her.
  • Isaac Grossman has become so twisted with hatred as an adult that he becomes a Serial Killer, his first victim being a lady he brought home from the bar that he tries to rape before giving up and breaking her skull open. He later subjects several others, even children, to gruesome torture and death, like bashing a boy's head to bits.
  • Laughing Jack's torture of Isaac is both more horrific and nauseating compared to that of what Isaac subjected any of his victims to. Mutilating Isaac's mouth and abdomen, as well as injecting a needle into his eye (which is kept open with fish hooks), fiddling it around and removing it along with the eyeball is either horrifying, Nausea Fuel, or both.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The titular Laughing Jack is an entity that horrifically kills children. At the end of the story, Laughing Jack mutilates the narrator's child (who was still alive afterwards) and he tricks the mother into killing her son. She's utterly distraught at what she's done as she failed to protect her son like she promised. Additionally, with the site of the crime and no killer clown in sight, she's framed for causing it all, which results in her getting institutionalized.
  • The official prequel is pretty heart wrenching as well. Laughing Jack was once a joyful cosmic entity sent by a guardian angel to be friends with the lonely Isaac, and was made to adapt to Isaac's personality. After accidentally killing the neighbor's cat, Isaac was sent to boarding school, but promised to reunite with Jack one day, so Jack agreed to staying in his box, which could only open after returning. Years passed and Jack lost himself in his solitude so much that his colors faded away. Isaac returning just to show that he forgot Jack was real doesn't elicit anything in the colorless clown as he had become void of self-pity. Additionally, Isaac becomes a Serial Killer, and when they reunite at the end of story, in a combination of resentment and adapting to Isaac's new love for violence, Jack tortures Isaac before killing him.
  • The final moments Isaac recalls as he bleeds out is that Christmas morning he met Laughing Jack, his first friend. Despite that said friend was now torturing him to death, Isaac is implied to have went out with a smile. For someone who was once a poor (although ambiguously innocent) boy turned twisted Serial Killer, it's oddly bittersweet that he dies remembering what's likely one of the few genuinely happy moments in his life.

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