The creepy clown could be considered the mascot of the Halloween season, nearly as pervasive as the jack-o-lantern and far more unnerving. October’s favorite figure has been particularly active this year in horror media. HBO’s brand new series It: Welcome to Derry gives us a prequel to the IT films, starring Stephen King’s sewer-dwelling monster, Pennywise the Clown. In Shudder’s latest slasher Clown in a Cornfield, Frendo terrorizes teens, in striped jester pants and white pancake makeup. Peacock just premiered its new scripted series based on the life of John Wayne Gacy, the prolific serial killer who preyed on boys for years while also entertaining children as a clown named Pogo. Meanwhile, thanks to the blockbuster success of Zach Cregger’s film Weapons, we’re sure to see countless Aunt Gladys impersonators out in force on Halloween night, dressed in red wig, exaggerated lip, and excessively arched eyebrows.
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This list goes on, raising the question: what ever happened to the clown as a balloon-carrying birthday party entertainer, the friendly fast-food spokesclown, and the silly circus celebrity?
While the bad clown—a horror staple—might seem like a perversion of a wholesome form of entertainment historically meant for children, the clown in popular culture has always been subversive. Indeed, the history of the American circus reveals that the twisted clown that haunts us today evolved from a similarly debauched type of comedy designed to shock and provoke its adult audiences.
Since medieval times, the colorful fool—from court jesters to Shakespeare’s characters—has used playful wit to critique authority and buffoonery to whip up excitement. This is also true of the American clown, which got its start in the circuses of the early 19th century. The original clowning actors in the United States joined trick riders on horseback, jugglers, and rope walkers to draw laughs by mocking conventional norms of the time.
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With the growth of the railroad and the rise of more American cities, the traveling circus expanded in size and reach. These shows featured many of the ingredients we typically associate with the circus today: exhibitions of trained animals, acrobats, stunt performers, and the charismatic ringleader. But early circuses also offered sideshow entertainment. On the periphery of the main arena, smaller tents with colorful banners announced other, more lurid amusements, including “freak” curiosities, like the glass eater and the “bearded lady,” along with “gentlemen only” entertainment, where women danced and removed clothing.
By the mid 19th century, clowns were more central to circus entertainment, and their acts more risqué. The clown’s job was to offer something extraordinary to keep circus crowds in their seats and to entice sideshow visitors back to the big top for the main events. And they offered it all: irreverent political comedy, with clowns performing satirical stump speeches to poke fun at the powerful; absurdist violence, including simulated boxing matches that often involved crowd participation, a precursor to professional wrestling; drag performances that allowed for public displays—and enjoyment—of gender transgressions; and a lot of sex, in the form of innuendo, simulated sex acts, and obscene jokes.
In their exaggerated costumes and topsy-turvy representations of human behavior, clowns playfully violated social and cultural norms without consequence, making them some of the era’s most beloved rebels—and stars of the show.
But not for kids. As with older clowning traditions, the early American circus clowns were adults performing taboo acts to shock and delight other adults. They didn’t supply entertainment for children but instead delivered a smutty good time for mature audiences, much to the dismay of critics.
Nineteenth century reformers and religious authorities condemned the circus as an ungodly, drunken spectacle ripe with gender transgressions and obscenities. One Christian periodical warned in 1831 that the circus encouraged in its crowds “idleness, intemperate drinking, profanity, a taste for low company [and] boisterous vulgarity.”
Even P.T. Barnum himself, a showman known for his humbugs and shell games — and eventually for one of America’s largest circus spectaculars — explained that the criticisms were fair. He admitted that the arrival of the circus was “dreaded by all law abiding people, who knew that with it would inevitably cause disorder, drunkenness and riot.”
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Throughout the first half of the 19th century, state legislatures, city leaders, and town clergy, with some success, sought to limit circus promotion, restrict performances, or ban it altogether. In response, circus proprietors in the late 19th century, including P.T. Barnum and James Bailey, cleaned up the circus experience. Proprietors removed lewd content, banned alcohol, scaled back sideshows, and posted rules of behavior to discourage audience fighting. Less expensive daytime matinee performances were added to attract polite patrons, including mothers with children.
Most notably, clowns were tamed, silenced, and directed to reimagine their physical comedy to appeal to the youngest viewers. Clowning performers might offer slapstick comedy between other acts by doing things adults normally shouldn’t or wouldn’t do, like stealing an audience member’s hat or playing a trumpet from the wrong side. But what had once been raucous and raunchy mischief, was now benign horseplay.
And yet, at the turn of the 20th century, family-friendly circuses couldn’t compete with new movie houses and the spectacle of the feature film. By the end of the 1920s, many American circuses were in the red, unable to sell enough tickets to sustain the elaborate three-ring enterprises, attract talent, and pay crew.
By the years of the Great Depression, the clown came to represent the faded glory of the circus and reflected the weariness felt by so many Americans in crisis. This was the era when Emmett Kelly, a trapeze performer, created “Weary Willie,” a clown character who wore tattered clothes and a battered hat, sported stubble, and sadly munched on cabbage while silently watching others have fun. For many, Kelly’s so-called “hobo clown” exposed the dissolution of the American Dream—perhaps the reason a Weary Willie mask was initially considered for the slasher character Michael Myers in the original 1978 Halloween film.
The clown as a fun family entertainer rebounded in the late 1940s, as American companies developed cheerful new mascots to absorb Cold War anxieties. In 1946, Capitol Records introduced Bozo the Clown, a character created for a series of children’s albums and, then in the 1950s, for an animated TV series. In 1963, inspired by Bozo’s popularity, McDonald’s premiered Ronald McDonald, the “hamburger happy clown,” to help market the restaurant’s drive-in menu to kids.
But that resurgence of the child-friendly clown was also short-lived.
The archetypal trickster reemerged in popular culture in the 1970s, driven by the disillusionment and violence of the Vietnam War era. The unironically chipper clown couldn’t sustain its sanitized image against a growing culture of cynicism.
Then, in the 1980s, the clown turned scary, activated by the reported crimes of the so-called “Killer Clown” John Wayne Gacy, a series of “phantom clown” sightings from Massachusetts to Kentucky, and popular horror fiction, including Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film Poltergeist and Stephen King’s 1986 novel IT. In the late 20th century, clowns returned to form—transgressive as always, just with more extreme makeup and sinister motives.
The clown has a provocative past. In American history in particular, this character has long toyed with the taboo and engaged very adult forms of free expression to thrill audiences and rile critics. This transgressive nature—the very thing that makes the clown so compelling—has made it a poor fit for innocent children’s entertainment, even with the brightly colored costume and big red smile. But, as it turns out, the clown’s fundamental subversiveness does make it well suited for horror, and a perfect Halloween monster.
Felicia Angeja Viator is associate professor of history at San Francisco State University, a culture writer, and curator for the GRAMMY Museum.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.