Brow Beat

These Shelves of Clown Eggs Are Nothing to Worry About, According to Clowns

Here at Slate, we’ve always done our best to keep readers informed about clowns. Whether that means tracking waves of clown sightings throughout history, sending a reporter to live among the clowns, or just chronicling the daily life of notable clowns, our motto about clowns has always been, “The more you know about clowns, the better prepared you are should you encounter a clown.” So it is with a certain disappointment that we must report that the A.V. Club’s Clayton Purdom has scooped us with this story about a completely ordinary clown-related thing that naturally exists in the world and is definitely nothing to worry about, according to clowns. We apologize to our readers.

Purdom breaks the news of a new video from CNN’s Great Big Story with the innocuous title “The Clown Face Registry of the UK.” A clown face registry may sound like a reasonable compromise between civil libertarians and ordinary citizens, but there are a number of problems with this registry: It’s run by clowns, it’s run for clowns, and it’s not so much a registry as it is a giant shelf of clown eggs that have little clown faces on them.

Like most major media outlets on the clown beat, Slate is scrupulously careful to avoid anti-clown bias. (In fact, Slate’s Jacob Brogan went so far as to interview a professional clown for the Working podcast, heedless of accusations of “clown normalization.”)  So rather than editorialize about the clown face registry of the U.K. like certain other Johnny-come-lately media outlets we could name, let’s stick to the facts:

FACT: Each clown in the U.K. has exactly one clown egg.

FACT: The clown eggs have tiny little clown faces, matching the clown each egg belongs to.

FACT: According to Debbie Smith, the “clown egg artist,” these eggs are produced by painting a clown’s unique makeup onto ordinary chicken eggs, as a sort of informal copyright registry.

FACT: As the pioneering research of Gregor Mendel showed, organisms can inherit characteristics—including appearance—from their ancestors.

FACT: The largest clutch of clown eggs in the U.K. is at the Clowns Gallery-Museum in Wookey Hole.

FACT: The U.S. has its own clown egg registry, though the precise location of the nest of clown eggs is unknown except that it is “in storage.”

FACT: In Stephen King’s It, the final confrontation between the novel’s heroes and its villain—aka Pennywise the Clown—involves the discovery of an indeterminate number of what can only be described as “clown eggs.”

FACT: Debbie Smith, seen wearing clown makeup in the video, seems to be the video’s only source for its explanation of the origin of the clown eggs.

FACT: There are a noticeable lack of interviews with scientists, military experts, or masters of the macabre.

FACT: According to Debbie Smith, the shelf full of clown eggs is nothing to worry about.

Those are the facts about the Clown Egg Registry. We hope you’ll continue to trust Slate’s clown coverage in the future.