Upsetting Day: Clown Act Omnibus (Patreon)

In 1960, a square dance caller named Wes McVicar wrote what was meant to be the ultimate guide to clowning. It wasn't. It was fifteen pages of clown facts and about 160 poorly described clown acts. Nevertheless, it was a clown hit and new editions of it kept getting published for 27 years. I'm, of course, talking about Clown Act Omnibus: Everything you need to know about clowning plus over 200 clown stunts.

The reason we're talking about it is because in 2009, some shitty Kevin copied it, added his name to it, made it a little worse, and called it Clown Skits & More….

In modern media, it's not unusual to see people scrape together a sad living by stealing and repackaging other people's work. That's most of social media and at least one website I used to work for. But to see it here? In the world of clown!? We didn't know stakes could get this low. A man threw away his integrity to take credit for a mediocre clown manual most clowns already had. Fucking why? Let's look at the back cover to see if we can learn more.

To be fair, I guess Kevin isn't hiding what he's done. He scribbled "AND PLAGIARIZED BY ME, KEVIN!" under the author's name on a 50-year-old book, self-published it, and sent it to a Polish Christian clown for a pull quote. And he got one! That man said Kevin took the book "to another level by updating the language and adding missing information". Todd "Suitcase Sam" Anderson said Kevin made a big improvement on the original! This proves neither one of them read it. Because Kevin did not do those things. Kevin, who I will not be calling Sneakers McSilly, took a bloated, ancient mess and added 5% mess. And for what!? To turn several hours into negative tens of dollars? Let's go through this pointless clown crime, starting with the Introduction. The original is on the top while the improved, updated, taken-to-the-next-level version is on the bottom:

As I mentioned before, the original wasn't a great book. It started with "I would have opened with the origin of the word 'clown' but couldn't find it." Luckily, Kevin was copying this from the year 2009 and he could easily look that up. Instead, he didn't, and moved the unchanged, exact text from below "Historical Background:" to above "Historical Background:", end of updates. If anyone else had watched themselves do this, sit down to "update" a clown book and instead do nothing, they probably would have realized, "Oh, I guess I hate doing this. Or can't do this? Either way, maybe fuck this shameful, unethical project with potential legal risks and no hope of profit?" Instead, Kevin kept editing(?) for 247 pages.

"No one is allowed to reproduce any portion of my book in any form whatsoever," says Kevin Andrews, the man reproducing an entire book. Ha ha the balls on this idiot clown plagiarist.

As I might mention again, the original wasn't much of a book. It promised 200 clown acts on the cover, but that was clown talk for 168, sucker. I guess learning to never trust a clown is a clown lesson worth 32 clown skits. Kevin does more editing here in the About section than he'll do all book. He explains some of the original skits are "quite dated," but assures us they're easily updated for current events. Well, maybe not "easily" or the stupid asshole writing the book for the sole purpose of updating them would have updated them, but you get it. Change the Spanish Flus to 9/11s or whatever.

You'll notice in the updated text, the number of clown skits has jumped to 180. That's because Kevin did add 12 clown skits of "his own," and I put that in quotes because they're all just century-old vaudeville routines. Let me be clear what I'm saying: this man mashed the top 12 results from a Google search for "jokes" randomly into a book of 200 clown skits he stole, but it still didn't get him to 200 clown skits, so he kept the original excuse. Subdivisions of clown skits are entirely new clown skits. For instance, 14: Throw Pie and 14b: Throw Pie (To Honor 9/11) count as two distinct entries; legally you can't do shit.

For Chapter 1, Kevin updated the book for today's clown generation by removing the art and nothing else. Why is Kevin doing this? He hates this! He has seen with his own eyes he has nothing to add to any of this! I mean, look at all the obvious ways he could have modernized the language. Instead of "clowns teeter and tumble, all without injury" he could have said, "clowns can detect the struggle of an intruder anywhere along their web, skitter, skitter." Or instead of leaving it as "a gymnastic clown should be a gymnast," he could have updated it to "a gymnastic clown should be a gymnast, I told my clown wife. Yet she still killed Friar Bumbles."

In the original Clown Act Omnibus, the types of clowns were clearly described and illustrated. From the Grotesque Whiteface to the Pierrot Strangler to the Night Sex Strangler With Hair Variant. It's slightly less than looking up "Clown" in an Encyclopedia, but if you've never heard of clowns, now you have. And if you're looking to start your new life as a Neat Whiteface, it's absurdly inadequate. For instance, it doesn't tell you how to get breast milk out of a wig, or which facepaint is hardest for forensics to identify. So let's see how Kevin fixed it.

Kevin, again, removed all the original art, maybe for what he thought were copyright reasons, but probably because the images didn't come with when he copy-and-pasted from clownac~1.pdf. He added generic clipart sort of where it went, so now, instead of accurate drawings of each clown, there's a group of confusingly, some might say "wrongly" numbered clowns. He kept all the text more or less the same except for two haunting whiteface details: they are "required" to wear gloves, and they command clowns. It's why, in recent years, you may have heard grotesque whitefaces say things like, "My class got nerfed hard in the latest ruleset. I like having Suggestion (Clown) as a cantrip, but half of my build was based around bare fingers."

Let's move on to chapter 2.

"Kevin Andrews updated Wes McVicar's Clown Act Omnibus for today's clown lifestyle by changing 'Program & Organization' to 'Organizing Your Program,' and deleting the picture of a clown getting caught having an argument with his hot dog."

- Friar Bumbles, former "gymnastic" clown

The original book had one (1!) paragraph about Training Clowns. As you can see, I'm not kidding when I say 25% of its advice was to drive to Colorado Springs and ask the local theater for their copy of a filmstrip called Clowning for Kids. Fun and easy, but in 2009, most readers would have recognized this as the exact plot to Victor Salva's Honk 2, so Kevin deleted the entire section.

In another small but correct decision, Kevin removed this clown from Chapter 3 and made literally no other changes. Here's another smart change he made:

In the very first skit from the original book, Wes McVicar suggested having a clown rush in while a clown quartet sings, and I quote, "IT'S AN AWFUL DEATH TO DIE, IT'S AN AWFUL DEATH TO DIE."

Kevin thought, wisely, it'd be better if they didn't. Everything else, he left as it was. Even though the joke was now 49-years-old, Kevin knew he could never improve on listing the days of the week, in order. I thank you.

Aside from removing a correct comma and an incorrect hyphen, Kevin could not improve upon "Hair! Hair!," a clown skit about a clown stealing a clown's hair. I can't be reading this right. You dedicate your life to learning how to balance a medicine ball on a vaulting pole (etc.) and then you stop the spectacle to pretend another man's hair is on your forehead? For what? To amuse and delight fucking whom? I denounce this madness. This sounds like something a druid would do to check your unseeded womb for werewolf.

"Henpecked Harry" is a skit where a "fat lady clown" forces her husband to carry packages and beats him until he snaps. I would have probably added some comedy or an ending, but Kevin decided it was fine the way it was. It's not a story; it's barely anything. It's what I assume you would do if someone had a gun on your kids and told you, "Go clown" without further explanation. I only showed it to you because several entries later, both authors included this skit called "Other Ideas":

Weirdly, even for clowns, this skit is three incomplete and non-related skits. The first is just "clown on stilts? Walk around, maybe?" This is the clown equivalent of writing down things you see around the room. For instance, "clowns enter with many autopsy photos; clowns walk around with previous wig owner's expertly tanned face leather." The second idea is okay, but unfortunately it's only "Henpecked Harry" again with less of a character arc. The third idea, which I also denounce, is "clown's thumb fall off?" If Kevin had any creativity, any passion for this whatsoever, he couldn't have found an easier, more perfect place for a thought of his own. Any thought. But he didn't add a single thing. Across his entire clown career with his clown wife, he's never had an original idea that could stand alongside "oh, right, I forgot about (this idea shall henceforth known as subdivision 13a and as such counts toward the total of 200 clown acts) stilts."

This joke isn't going to land in a summary, but "Why Men Leave Home" is a skit where a clown is so tired of changing diapers he kills his baby. Ha, never mind. The joke still works. Kevin agreed, changing nothing.

You might be asking, "Are all clown skits about violent crimes and death?" And I might be answering, "Shut up, you already know the answer to that."

In "#24 Death, Where Is Thy Sting?", you'll need a small black casket (on wheels with pull-string), a clown, a Hobo clown, a clown, a clown hammer, and a clown. When the action starts, strip the shirt off hobo and pretend to kill the insects living in his chest hair with a clown hammer. For the punchline, have Hobo Clown say, "It should be done on cement."

This is plainly a timeless work of genius. Kevin should not have touched a thing.

But he did have one tiny punch up:

He left every word the same except, for today's more sophisticated clowns, he changed "cement" to "a very hard surface." And god damn it, he was right. What a contribution Kevi– nay, he's earned it… Sneakers McSilly has made to clowning.

This book is something clumsier and less than plagiarism. I've been thinking this whole time about the best way to explain it and I think I've decided it's like Mel Gibson claiming he co-wrote Lethal Weapon because he had the idea to put more gentiles in Lethal Weapon 3.

Let's skip ahead to "#41f Suicide Quartet," or as Kevin called it, "#52f. Suicide Quartet."

It's a skit about four singing clowns, and one clown executes each of them after a miscue, including himself. There's no punchy "It should be done on cement" closing line for Kevin to ruin this time. The ending of this skit is simply a lack of clowns. "They're all dead," the audience will eventually realize, and… laugh?

But Kevin knew he had to change something. Otherwise, what's the point? Of him, of any of this? Hundreds -hundreds- of copies of the original Clown Act Omnibus are available for $2.06 on Amazon. Kevin's book, Clown Skits & More…, is printed-to-order and costs $13.97 more, so he knows he has to give it that Sneakers McSilly polish. "This is for you, me fans, Kevin says as he worthlessly, almost insanely, changes the word "miscue" to "offender" and nothing else.

I'm not proud of myself for typing this, but no one can argue that fingers and wieners slide in and out of buns and mouths in this erotically charged clown skit. It ends with a note to the performer to make sure to lick your clown finger clean each time. And here's how I know Kevin isn't a real clown because when he read this he thought, "fucking gross." The only edit he made was to add a second note, "clown can wipe finger with a baby wipe." No, Kevin! The filth is the point, Kevin! Clowns can't cum until the fog carries the redolence of rot, Kevin!

"#68 How Loud Can You Shout?" is a skit where two clowns humiliate and rob a diseased clown, who is then taken by God after one last scream. And I don't know if it was laziness or his ability to recognize perfection, but Kevin left every last word the way it was.

If I can get serious for a second, if you're updating a 1960 clown book for a modern audience, your main obstacle is the whole creepy horror thing. Whether it's John Wayne Gacy, It, The Simpsons, or at least seventy different movies, clowns are no longer "welcome to walk among us." I'm not saying everyone thinks of clowns as nightmares, and I'm sure some people enjoy them, but a joke about clown murder isn't going to catch anyone off guard.

It's intentionally ignorant for Kevin not to address this. The very first thing you'd do when modernizing a clown skit book is to take out all the ones where the clowns slaughter each other. Sure, you'd only be left with zero clown skits, but maybe then you'd understand the scope of the problem.

"Hypnotics" is a tangle of sexual fetishes and limbs. A thousand curses upon the circus that would allow it. Trying to explain it would take longer than the ritual itself, which is already a full page of suspiciously specific shapes made of clown flesh. Anyway, the important parts of the spell are A) Clown cannot separate his hands, B) Clown feels no pain, and C) Clown is made light as a feather.

"This is almost perfect. But I'm going to update A, B, and C for a modern audience by making them 9, 10, and 11," thought Kevin, the most pathetic goddamn fucking fuck.

I don't like this one. Partly because using Hershey's kisses to cutely replace normal kisses is a loathsome, Godekian act, sure, but I also don't like where the clowns pick girls from the audience and put their mouths on them. However, my least favorite part is Kevin's single edit.

In the original, there's a final line letting you know it's more of a crowd-pleaser to kiss older "girls." Something about all this gave even vintage clowns pause. Which brings me to what I especially don't like. I don't like that Sneakers McSilly's only update to "#75 A Kissing Game" was "lose the line where they tell you not to kiss children."

Here's another one where a clown dies and Kevin changes nothing. Sorry, let me try to find one that doesn't end in a dead clown getting dragged off the stage.

I made a mistake! End of article!

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