Police in Middlesboro say an officer got a little more than he bargained for when he pulled over a car late Sunday night after seeing it swerve several times along a wooded area in Bell County and noticed balloon animals coming out of the exhaust pipe. When Officer William Reedy got to the window, he learned the driver was a clown who then proceeded to squirt the officer with windshield wiper fluid right in his face. Reedy says he then asked for everyone to get out of the car and according to Reedy, “they just kept coming out of that little Honda Civic. Probably 30-40 of them. When I pulled them over, I assumed we were dealing with drunk driving or possibly meth. But this was much, much worse.”
Sunday’s incident is just the latest in a silly string of clown sightings throughout the United States. Just like the prophecy of those Jack In The Box toys predicted, clowns have recently begun popping up everywhere, usually in wooded areas and presidential elections, turning what is a usually a pro-clown country into a nation of people that’d be happy to never see a clown again. Members of the clowning industry, who are feeling the backlash, are fed up by what they call “clown impostors.”
“Clowns were never meant to be scary,” said Bell County resident Margie Henderson, curator of Middlesboro’s 3rd largest clown museum. “Clowns are supposed to be fun-loving and wholesome, like Ronald McDonald, Bozo, or John Wayne Gacy.”
President of the Clown Union, Bobo Chucklepants, held a brief press conference early this morning in front of Lexington’s southside Shoe Carnival. “These punks getting together, putting on the makeup and going out with their insane clown posses and terrorizing people are doing permanent damage to the professional working clowns who are having to cancel all hiking trips and are now getting flooded with birthday party cancellations left and right. It’s time for these impostors to stop clowning around.”
While clown sightings are terrifying, it is important to remember that not all clowns are drunk hobos by the train tracks or cashiers at Spencer’s Gifts in the mall during the day. One professional clown, Doodles, tried to remind us, “Most of us have just made a lifetime of bad decisions that has led us to this profession we love, and we do it to make others pretend to smile because of how uncomfortable we make them. And keep in mind, those of us who went to college for this get paid for it. I showed up at a kid’s birthday party at Jacobson’s Park last week and got tasered by the birthday boy’s drunk uncle Terry. And I was just trying to do my job.”
We reached out to the Mime Union for their take on the issue, but they had no comment.