Clown Species

Elect a Clown and you get a circus.

Clowns are easy to read as not so much a person as they are a grotesque parody of one. Exaggerated proportions in their noses and feet, skin colors unnatural to any specific human or animal, behavior that ranges from unspecified mental disorder to full-on Blue-and-Orange Morality. The really bad ones are confirmed not to be human and something much, much worse. Because of this, clowns are feared by some and are made a fascinating archetype to others.

Since Coulrophobia^note fear of clowns is commonplace, these are almost Always Chaotic Evil inhuman monsters. Clowns are meant to appeal to children, so they lure them in to eat them. Clowns can perform magic tricks, so they must be magical in origin. Clowns come in droves from a suspiciously saucer-like tent, so it must be hiding a flying saucer, the clowns stealing our cows to bring back to their clown planet to use our milk for their clown cereal to be fed to their clown children's clown breakfast. Clowns perform logic defying tricks and behave beyond rational thought, so they must be some mysterious humanoid horror summoned by ill-informed teenagers.

Sub-Trope to Planet of Hats. See Magical Clown for other nonhuman examples of clowns. These characters might technically be Mistaken for Clown.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• Ronald McDonald of the McDonald's commercials has been hinted to naturally have a clownlike appearance rather than wearing makeup, with one ad detailing his first visit from the Tooth Fairy even showing that he looked like that when he was a child.

Anime and Manga

• Clowns in Soul Eater are living embodiments of fear and madness. The first Clown Maka and Soul encounter in the manga does resemble a monstrous circus clown, with a bulbous nose and permanent grin, but later clowns have different forms.
• Implied with Vermoud from Dragon Ball Super, the God of Destruction from Universe 11. He's also a Monster Clown and it's not explained just what species he is supposed to be. The series suggests God of Destruction is a position given to powerful mortals, so it's not out of the question that an entire race of clowns exist like him.
  • He gets pampered at one point by some Sexy Jesters who may belong to a clown species in the hopes that he won't destroy their planet.

Audio Dramas

• The Big Finish Doctor Who, Ravenous introduces The Ravenous. A race of Monster Clowns from the Time Vortex that feast on Time Lords for their Regeneration energy. It's thought that genetic memory of them inspired clowns throughout the universe.

Comics

• Green Lantern featured the Poglochis, a race of clownlike aliens, who were hired by the evil Weaponers of Qward, impersonated the Guardians of the Universe and handed out phony power rings to a dozen undeserving recipients (including recurring comedy-relief Green Lantern G'nort), as part of a scheme to destroy the Green Lantern Corps's reputation.
• Clowns are loosely implied to be their own race of humans in the Little Nemo series. Unlike most depictions, they are largely benign (though mischievous).
• In Polish comic book Emilka Sza, it is stated that mimes are subrace of humans, with snow-white skin, ability to see pantomime world (inviisble to normal mortals) and disability to produce sounds, as well having over the top reactions to everythig. It's even imply Mime's are rare sight enough to be seen as mythological creatures, having ancient writings about them. While only one clown appears in the book (Miss Pon-Pon) it's not clear if the clowns fallow similiar rules and logic as mimes.
• In one The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror story, a scheme by Kang and Kodos to convert humans into Rigellians through mutagenic fast food is thwarted when feeding them Krusty Burger turns them into dimwitted and weak-willed humans. Unfortunately, any security assured by this is shot by the final page revealing that Krusty Burger is part of a plot by aliens resembling Krusty the Clown to pacify humans to be eaten.
• The first arc of the Bravest Warriors comic book by Boom Studios has the heroes having to help out a race of clown people, which is bad news for Danny since he is deathly Afraid of Clowns.

Films — Live-Action

• The Klowns from Killer Klowns from Outer Space are a race of alien Monster Clowns that once visited Earth long ago, their appearance becoming assimilated into mankind's collective consciousness as clowns. Unlike their human copiers, the Klowns are anything but harmless, kidnapping humans to drain them of their blood, using tools normally associated with clowns with a lethal twist to kill or capture humans.
• The titular Monster Clown of the horror film Clown is described as being a kind of snow-dwelling Icelandic demon, and its various deformations (red nose, big feet etc) are actually adaptations to make it a more effective killer. This monster also has rainbow blood, and eats children to survive.
• The fourth story of Scary or Die is about a guy getting bitten by an evil clown and slowly turning into one himself.
• The clowns in Stitches (2012) are something akin to this, as they go through a ceremonial rite in which they paint an egg with their style of makeup (and yes, this is an actual practice originating in the 1940s) and if they die while giving a show, they aren't allowed to rest until they've completed it.

Live-Action TV

• The Big Comfy Couch features clowns as the main characters. They seem to be 1 to 1 exactly like humans apart from the big red clown noses, however, one episode states that instead of birthdays, they have "Mirthdays" as clowns are apparently born with a number of clowns all start laughing and all that laughter and mirth comes together to form a baby clown.
• Downplayed in Children's Hospital, where one of the main characters is a clown, but they are depicted as an ethnicity rather than a race.

Literature

• Mentioned in Daniel Pinkwater's Borgel. The main character, who's stuck at a waystation on an interdimensional highway, encounters all sorts of alien races, including Clown-men from Norfo.
• Steve Barlow and Steve Skidmore's Star Wars parody, Star Bores has artificially grown clown soldiers in place of the clones from Attack of the Clones.
• The Cannibals of Candyland focuses on a race of clowns with candyfloss hair that live underground luring and eating children.

Music

• They Might Be Giants: In "Or So I Have Read", one of the Little Known Facts in the narrator's book is "A mime is the hybrid offspring of a human and a clown".
• With the baby clown seen at the end of the now deleted video for "The Abortion Song" by Kunt and the Gang, Ronald McDonald must belong to one of these.

Mythology and Religion

• Pueblo Clowns are a type of character celebrated by the Kachina religion and the culture that practices them (Pueblo Tribes of North America). These clowns present themselves with black and white horizontal stripes painted on their bodies and faces, paint black circles around the mouth and eyes, and part their hair in the center and bind it in two bunches which stand upright on each side of the head and are trimmed with corn husks. Legends and customs surrounding them differ, but they are commonly seen as spirits of early man, being tricksters that have emerged from within the Earth and have yet to mature into humanity, their iconography meant for satire and fertility rites.

Tabletop Games

• The 5th Edition version of Dungeons & Dragons has space clowns in their take on Spelljammer. They are fiends from an area in Wildspace known as "Clownspace," and are explicitly stated by their creator, Chris Perkins, to be the origin of most things known about clowns in the Dungeons and Dragons multiverse as well as an homage to Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
• Mortasheen has the Jokers, the setting's take on Monster Clowns. These colorful creatures take shapes associated with clowns and circuses, but are all essentially organic balloons filled with a mysterious gas. They live in hives that appear to share a single consciousness, and seem to exist solely to play cruel and often lethal pranks on anyone within reach. A great many Jokers engage in Mind Rape, typically by venting the gas that fills them, which has psychedelic effects on the minds of living beings.

Theatre

• Clown Aliens is about a family leaving Clown Planet and trying to fit in on Earth.

Video Games

• Dropsy: Dropsy, the titular clown, initially seems like a very grotesque and weird human, but the ending shows that he actually comes from a race of whitefaced humanoid aliens that live in a spaceship resembling a circus tent.
• Kid Klown in Crazy Chase: The hero, the Damsel in Distress, her father, and the Big Bad all come from Klown Planet, a world where everyone is a clown.
• A downplayed example in NieR: Automata involves a culture of Machine Lifeforms inhabiting the ruins of an ancient amusement park universally adopting clown-like attires. Despite looking rather creepy, the amusement park machines are staunch pacifists and will stick to their nonviolent ways even when infected by the logic virus that makes every other machine form go berserk.
• Nightmarens from the NiGHTS into Dreams… franchise are a race of beings created by the God of Nightmare Wizeman the Wicked to serve him and gather ideya from dreamers unfortunate enough to stumble across them. Third-Level Nightmarens are the least humanoid, resembling monstrous parodies of animals and cartoonish little men. Second-Level Nightmarens are similar to Third-Level Nightmarens but are much larger, acting as Boss Battles, their appearance ranging from animal-like (Claws, Gillwing, Girania, Chamelan, Cerebrus and Queen Bella) to a more exaggerated toy and/or human-esq form (Jackle, Donbalon and Bomamba), all with a clown-like, Art Nouveau design to them. First-Level Nightmarens are both the most powerful as well as the most humanoid, their appearances the most unambiguously Jester-like (NiGHTS and Reala).
• Pokémon
  • Mr Mime from Pokémon Red and Blue is a Psychic/Fairy type Pokemon that is almost humanoid, with clownhair-like horns, elf shoes for feet, and bulbous fingertips with pads. As its name suggests, it likes to mime and is able to create invisible barriers by waving its hands.
  • Pokémon Diamond and Pearl introduce a pre-evolution to Mr. Mime called Mime Jr., who resembles a small humanoid harlequin with a red nose. Mime Jr. mimics its opponents to confuse them, similar to Mr. Mime's miming. Interestingly enough, a 1997 Space World demo for Pokémon Gold and Silver actually has data for an earlier design for a Mr. Mime pre-evolution, which got scrapped. This one followed similar design principles to Mime Jr., but was egg-shaped instead of humanoid.
  • Blacephalon, one of the Ultra Beasts, resembles a clown mixed with a bomb. Specifically, it uses its own head as an explosive weapon after tricking the opponent through acting funny and harmless. While you can catch only two of them in the Ultra Sun, it's implied that, like other Ultra Beasts, the ones the player encounters is just two of a species.
• Clowns are an alien race in Space Station 13. There's also a rival race of mimes from the same planet.
• The Fools from Spyro the Dragon (1998) are an Invincible Minor Minion native within the Dream Weavers Worlds. While considerably harmless, they have the ability to affect the world around them. The Fools in Dream Weavers and Jacque's boss level is attacked become a timer that lower or tighten select platforms before the bell rings. The Fools in Dark Passage carry around lamps that, when lit, keep the Demon Dogs and Armored Turtles in their smaller, more docile state, becoming giant and much more of a threat when the lamp is extinguished.
• Rodeo clowns in West of Loathing are a race of devil whose natural enemies are the demonic Cows. When The Cows Came Home, the clowns followed them into the realm of the living. You can learn a little about them by exploring the circus: they hatch from eggs with natural "facepaint" patterns, and no two clowns have the same facepaint. Their leader, Barnaby Bob, may or may not be Old Scratch himself, and has a pretty cool knife-throwing act.

Web Animation

• Implied in the first season finale of BIGTOP BURGER; it's revealed that not only is Steve a "real, genuine" clown, but clowns themselves are regarded as a mythical species separate from humans (although some of the main characters don't think they really exist). The final episode of Season Two reveals that clowns are an ancient interstellar species that have existed for billions of years before humans even came into being. They live in their own planet and highly revere the musical Cats, which was actually written by one clown that lived nine billion years ago, and is performed regularly by the clown society as a sort of ritual.
• Bugbo: Implied in "Under the Oak." The Hollow Clown has a black, empty mouth and eyes, and he doesn't seem to have a life outside of being a clown. Also, there is a creature that is implied to be his father that looks like some sort of clown dragon thing.
• Elain the Bounty Hunter: In the series' setting, Clowns are a known ethnicity with their own quirks (such as a fully-functioning quiz game being part of their stomachs) and often come from the town Fuzner's Circus City. The criminal Gop Donsterly is 1/4 Clown, allowing him to use the quiz game in his stomach to his advantage.

Web Comics

• Bongo and Luna: The Clowns, such as the titular character Bongo, are a sub-species of humanity. Believed to be the result of some type of Clown God mating long ago with humans. They can also tap into a Reality Warper ability called the 'Clown Force'.
• Clowns in the Cirque Royale have unique traits that make them their own species. This include light blue skin with colorful hair (any color but black), prominent red noses, solid black eyes and star-shaped nipples. They also have a sugary-based diet and can't digest meat, and have superhuman and physical abilities (super strength, voice manipulation).
• MS Paint Adventures:
  • Problem Sleuth: The kingdoms of the Clowns, Weasels, Hogs and Elves have diplomatic conflict with each other.
  • Homestuck:
    • Prototyping the kernel with an item causes all of the denizens of the players' planets to take on the characteristics of that item. When John prototypes his kernel with a harlequin doll, this populates his planet with clown-themed monster mooks. These come in a shapes in sizes but share a clown-like appearance and a propensity for japery and visual gags.
    • Almost the entire purpleblood caste of trolls seen in spin-off games Hiveswap and Hiveswap Friendsim follows an unnamed religion — they wear Juggalo makeup, drink faygo, have honks in their theme music, and are otherwise very clown-adjacent. Apart from background characters, every one so far has been a member of the church.
• Killjoys, a stalled webcomic, has clowns with two distinct sub species, jesters and mimes
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has a few comics along this line. This one posits that the "infinite scarves" trick is actually clowns expelling their viscera as a defense mechanism, while this comic features a man telling a little girl that clows are actually a kind of subterranean predator (though he might just be lying). In the mouseover text for another comic Zack admits it was pointed out one of the few consistent things about his comic is clowns being their own species and he agreed after thinking about it.

Web Original

• Tropers: The Series: The mimes in "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" are implied to be their own species. They all come from a "mime factory" in Tropesberg, they are never seen without their costumes or breaking character, and their mime is treated as a separate language (which Puma, being a Non-Ironic Clown, is fluent in as well.)
• There's a minor meme making rounds on tumblr of making PSAs for proper clown care, pretending to be from a universe where clowns and similar professions like mimes and jesters are domesticated species. Most of these posts can be found under the "clown husbandry" tag. Youtuber STRANGE ÆONS made a video showcasing some examples.
• SCP Foundation:
  • The group of interest Herman Fuller's Circus of the Disquieting (and its central canon, Dread & Circuses) describes four categories of Clowns, or "bozomorphic entities" as some Foundation researchers may call them loquaciously.
    • Original Clowns: Lovecraftian Reality Warpers from another plane of existence that took near-human form to join the Circus for their amusement. They are host to "Fun-lovers", symbiotes that give them power and generate Clown Milk, a black substance rich in serotonin to the point of toxicity for humans.
    • Converted/Turned Clowns: Humans converted into Clowns. They're a little more normal looking and a little less temperamental but otherwise the same as the Originals. The current ringmaster and her girlfriend, "Icky the Magic Clown" and "Li'l Lollipop", are both examples.
    • Bred Clowns: Clowns created using biological material from both Originals and Turned Clowns, and gestated within Fun-lovers. These have very specific and very extreme traits, are typically less intelligent than other Clowns, and involuntarily generate Clown Milk, requiring "milking" as to not build up internally and explode. The SCP-2912 were three such instances acquired by the SCP Foundation.
    • Not Clowns: The traditional notion of clowns as a profession, being mundane or mildly anomalous people who have nothing to do with True Clowns.
  • Due to the Loose Canon of the website, its ambiguous and sometimes up to the reader's interpretation if other clowny creatures and characters are Clowns as defined above or something else unrelated.
    • SCP-2734, a peaceful herbivorous human-like species who look like clowns. They've fled to our world from an Alternate Universe where they were being systematically exterminated by humans, and only want to live in the wilderness in peace.
    • SCP-4671 indicates that he, his parents, and his Big Brother Bully are one of many beings considered a species of clowns. He appears to know of (but distinguishes himself from) the "not exactly clowny clown clowns" of the Circus of the Disquieting, but isn't familiar with the name of Fuller or his circus.

Western Animation

• In the short-lived children's cartoon Little Clowns of Happytown:
  • The titular Little Clowns may or may not be a species separate from humans. Despite looking like little kids in clown suits, they seem to be only ever referred to as "clowns", and they come from a Sugar Bowl land to spread happiness to other parts of the world.
  • A more straight example would be Clownimals, which at first look like just normal circus animals (an elephant, a seal, etc.) wearing clown facepaint and other accessories. However, the show's theme song informs us of their true nature:
    And Clownimals don't have clownface on like Little Clowns, THAT'S HOW THEY'RE BORN!
• In the The Fairly OddParents! special "School's Out! The Musical", the film's antagonist Flappy Bob was originally the clown-baby of clown parents in a circus that was given up when they thought that they were about to die in a train-accident to carry on their "super hilarious (and kind of creepy) clown heritage"... that is if they had noticed that they were on the not destroyed train tracks. Unusually for this trope, Flappy Bob is established as wearing makeup and is able to pass as a normal human being when not wearing the makeup.
• In the remake of Danger Mouse, the Bozorians are aliens who look exactly like clowns, and whose technology and culture is based on clownishness (custard pies, balloon animals, etc). They aren't inherently evil, but they find being laughed at very offensive.
• Silverhawks: Variant. The Copper Kidd is mentioned at least once during the show to come from "the Planet of the Mimes". The obvious joke is never followed upon.
• It has been implied a few times in The Simpsons that Krusty the Clown is not just a man wearing clown makeup but the show is not consistent about this.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: implied in the episode "Don't Feed the Clowns", and their natural habitat is the slapstick plains.
• Spinels from Steven Universe are a gem-type specifically created to be like jesters, their purpose to endlessly entertain their owners. Spinel in-particular was created to be Pink Diamond's own personal playmate, being a Rubber Man Non-Ironic Clown before her mistreatment turned her into a Monster Clown lashing out by plotting to destroy Steven and the Earth.
• The second episode of The Midnight Gospel has Clancy visiting a planet ruled by clown-parasites. They resemble clown babies in their juvenile form and spiders with cylindrical clown heads in their adult form.
• Tripping the Rift has the Dark Clown Empire which is a parody of The Empire from Star Wars but they're clowns.
• The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald suggests this is the case for Ronald McDonald as it was in the McDonaldland commercials, as Ronald gets squirted in the face with water in Visitors from Outer Space with no change and still looks like a clown when he's de-aged into a toddler in Birthday World, hinting that he's not wearing makeup and always looked like that.

---