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I think it's more likely the fact that clown shows used to be something aimed at adults, and then they got dumbed down to be kid friendly.
Old school performances had lots of jokes about murder, sex, suicide, and other dark topics.
Look at it this way, the Three Stooges was actually a clown show. Moe was the Whiteface. Larry, Curly, and Shep played the role of Auguste.
That's how it sort of went, the actual clowns ditched the makeup and started performing on TV or in movies, and the children's performers threw out all of the rich history and defined roles and instead focused on bright colors and loud fart jokes. Not that fart jokes weren't a rich part of that history. They really were.
Other contributing factors in the death of the clown show were things like The Joker, and John Wayne Gacy.
BTW, the Joker is a classic Whiteface clown taken to a sadistic extreme, he wouldn't be caught dead wearing a red nose. To the Joker, jokes happen to other people. That's what he finds funny. The fact that no one else laughs is what drives him mad.
(As a note, the Auguste is also sometimes called the Red Nose, because they wear the over sized red nose, the white face might paint their nose red, but will never wear the prop)
I saw a troupe at the circus in Brasil growing up (this was well after the 3 Stooges, I'm not that old), and the vibe very much was mean-spirited like you described in the first post, not the Bozo Show kiddie version you're talking about here.
I preferred the elephant kicking soccer balls into the crowd, she boomed the shit out of those little suckers.
Excellent point about the 3 Stooges though, I had thought of it primarily as borscht belt wordplay + slapstick on film, but the social dynamics really do match circus clowns.
Yeah, the Whiteface is a sort of archetype that can be off-putting if done wrong.
Look at modern comedians who often follow the clown archetypes, if loosely. George Carlin was a prime example of the Whiteface. He pointed at a wrong in the world, and people laughed at it.
Robin Williams was an Auguste. He took pratfalls, he had zany antics, pure physical comedy matched with rapier wit. You laughed at him as often as you laughed at something he said about someone else.
There's also a third archetype, mostly American in the clown world, the Tramp. These guys are like the Auguste in that they're the butt of the joke, but unlike the Auguste, they never have a moment where they win. They're the downtrodden, the bumbling idiots who never suceed in pointing and laughing, only at being pointed at. The trope is the life so bad that it's funny.
Another piece of media to really understand clowns is the play, Waiting for Godot. You can find versions of it on Youtube, and the Internet Archive. It's a darkly funny play that is actually a clown show pretending to be a play. It's surreal and kind of fucked up, but in a good way.