Video • Video Digest: March 16, 2007

What I’m about to show you may scare you. What I’m about to show you may hurt you in a place that strangers shouldn’t touch. Are you sitting down? Do you have supportive friends nearby? Are you at least drinking a diet soda? Don’t say you weren’t warned. It’s the Christian clown training video.




Oh, clowns. What went wrong? How did something meant for pure enjoyment become such a collective terror? I blame Stephen King. Who do you blame? Maybe you just blame the clowns. Don’t blame them—they were trying to help. They suffered through all that pancake makeup and the rainbow wigs and bulb noses. All for you! Just to make you laugh. Dane Cook never did that shit. (Though if he did, let me tell you: nightmares for life.) When you search for clown videos on YouTube, one of the first ones you get is something called “Scary Dancing Clown.” As far as exposition, that about sums it up.




Here is another person you could blame: Crispin Hellion Glover. Personally, I blame Glover for a lot of things. For instance, the fact that my sink is full of dishes, or that I had to spend four seconds looking up the spelling of “Hellion.” Glover has been an enigma in Brylcreem since he burst on the scene in 1985’s Back to the Future (Video Digest has also previously brought you Glover’s work in the bizarre cult favorite of that year, the “Beaver Trilogy”). Here, in a music video (why?????), he tackles a subject that matches him in creepitude: “Clowny Clown Clown.”




A round-up of clown videos couldn’t be complete without the infamous Anna Nicole Smith home video. It’s like, come on. Clowns already had such a bad rap. Did somebody need to go and do this? You’ve probably already seen this, but why not watch again?




As for me, I’m not afraid of clowns. I like their colorful balloon animals, and their polka-dot outfits, and their flair with red lipstick. But there is one clown in this world who frightens me. I mean, he terrifies me. Who is this clown? He is the man who runs the Russian cat circus, and he scares the holy hell out of me.

Back in 2000, I actually went to the Russian cat circus, which, as you can tell by the following video, is just as ridiculous as it sounds. This man signed my program, and he smelled of whiskey and sweat, and he smiled at me with such gleeful dementia that it has haunted me ever since. Before I go to sleep at night, I check the closets for this clown. If I ever die mysteriously, I want this clown investigated. Now, he loves cats, and I love cats, and I’m sure he’s a nice man. But that doesn’t mean I won’t one day be dead by his hand.




—Sarah Hepola

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