When we lost the clowns

I don't remember a time when clowns were not considered scary, but scary in a "oh, you're terrified of clowns too?!" kinda way, you know? Like we're all suffering this fear of clowns in secret, all pretending to find them funny, still hiring them for our children's birthday parties, knowing full well we're terrifying them too.

But maybe it's just my secret shame. A GIS search for "scary clown" has no shortage of results. Now, I assume way back in the yonder, clowns were genuinely considered "fun". What changed? I suspect a large part of it is this guy:

John Wayne Gacy - the original killer clown. Quite a scary individual, and he might be the source for all this fear, for the loss of the clowns. Others jumped on the bandwagon - prime among them in my mind Stephen King's "Pennywise". And then once a meme enters the common consciousness, it takes off and lives a life of its own, such that we could all hold the idea and have no idea where it came from.  This is an autographed John Wayne Gacy picture, apparently.

Will there be a Clown Messiah, to redeem them all?

 I doubt it.

Also too:

All that said, I do recommend the movie "Shakes the Clown", but that's only because it's uber-ironic.