“Can’t sleep, clown will eat me.”
–Bart Simpson
I always used to think one of the silliest phobias was coulrophobia — the fear of clowns — until I saw this album cover.
This thing is terrifying. I mean, it just reeks of menace! Mr. Bat is wearing some kind of traditional Pagliacci-type of outfit, and though I do find the color scheme kind of foreboding, it’s not so bad. And he has your usual whiteface on, but instead of a nice happy red smile, he has a black frown painted over his mouth. And a tiny red soul patch underneath. (Or is that just a glob of human flesh?)
Then there are the glasses. I know Mr. Bat can’t help it if he’s short-sighted, but he might want to invest in some contacts for his clowning around. Wait a minute. . . wait . . . is that Dick Cheney?
That would explain why he’s holding up his left hand as though he was going to pummel us with his meaty Vice-Presidential fists of anguish. Maybe he’s called Mr. Bat because that’s what beats the children with. Then again, if Mr. Bat is Dick Cheney’s alter-ego, then he probably wasn’t ever holding a bat in that fist — it was probably a shotgun and they decided later to airbrush it out. (An easy enough feat, given the brooding black background — the pitch of evil that spawns malevolent Mr. Bat.)
“Hey kids, I’ve booked Mr. Bat to come and sing at your birthday party!”
“Aiiiiii!”
No, the kiddies wouldn’t scream and run. They’d be too paralyzed by their dread to run. And certainly not scream.
First a whimper, and then the awful wet sound of Mr. Bat “singing”.
Do you suffer from coulrophobia? Are you haunted by images of that clown at your sixth birthday party — you know, the one where the clown turned balloon art into something that made your mother scream and your father inexplicably start wailing on him?