A recent classified ad in Creative Loafing magazine titled ‘Ex-Clown’ piqued my curiosity and made me wonder just what kind of court order would prevent a clown from doing the one thing he loves, entertaining children.

Mark Hoffman, AKA Stinks the clown, recently relocated to Savannah, Ga from a small logging town in the pacific northwest. As he tells the story he was forced from his hometown by the closed-minded small-town mentality. After his ‘incident’, about which his lawyer suggests he not go into detail, the local papers made him out to be a monster.

“Everybody knew me as the town clown. When I wasn’t doing children’s birthday parties I was entertaining for free around the schools.” Says Stinks.

That’s when the problems started. Calls from concerned parents to the school and even to the police about some of Stinks tricks.

“Some people are afraid of clowns, and fear can make people do irrational things,” says Stinks. “After that, if I was too close to the school the police would ask me to keep moving. That’s when I started drinking heavily.”

Stinks, whose grandfather committed suicide by drinking lye and whose father attempted the same resulting in his incarceration in a mental facility, began drinking vodka from liquid Drano bottles.

“I don’t know where I got the idea. I just started doing it, sometimes there are things I have to do.”

Among the things he feels compelled to do is wrap rocks in Christmas wrapping paper. “I was having so much fun one day wrapping and hiding rocks and giving them away. But there was this one family that wouldn’t take my gift. I got really upset and started crying. They called the police and I was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. I think it ruined their picnic.”

Amazingly with all the bad press he received for that incident Stinks still got hired for a birthday party later in the week. A local single mom was throwing a birthday party for her twin sons. Stinks was to be the entertainment.

“It was probably about five o’clock. The sun was out and I was in peak performance. I did a few sexual innuendo pranks and the kids loved it. They never really talked about sexuality in their home and I felt this was a safe atmosphere to play at it. So I did my Choke-the-Chicken routine.”

Stinks believes in being prepared. He had taken to wearing homemade underwear created by cutting the head off of a rubber chicken and sewing it onto the front.

“I unzip and pull it out, I’m acting goofy and go around and let the kids choke my chicken. One kid ran to his mom. The next thing I know the mothers are beating me up and I am in jail. It turns out the kid’s father forced him to perform sexual acts. I cried in jail that night wondering how somebody could traumatize a little child like that.”

Clowns have been with us for centuries, even farther back than the medieval court jesters and fools. But their make-up and slapstick style of comedy didn’t start to develop until the 1800’s.

All cultures have clown figures in their myths and legends. Among Native American religions, clowns are considered sacred or ‘wakan’. A clown or ‘heyoka’ was compelled to act out his dreams which would often include being naked in public.

For instance, the Zuni clowns, from New Mexico, would go around with large wooden penises and try to have sex with a wooden dummy while the whole village looked on and laughed. But none of them would succeed in having intercourse because they didn’t know how. I Stinks evil? Scary? Holy? That’s for you to decide. Your judgment, whatever it may be, doesn’t bother Stinks who believes that clowns are the breaker of taboos. And as such must pay a price for our social growth. He sees the fear of clowns as peoples inability to process experiences outside of the mainstream.

In the dictionary stink or stinks is defined as emitting a strong offensive smell, to be disgustingly inferior, or as an unpleasant fuss. When asked if any of this played a role in his choosing the name he said, “It just came to me one day, but all points of the definition fit. It kind of makes you wonder.”