clown world

English

Alternative forms

🤡🌏 (emoji)

Etymology

Emerged from The Honkler, a version of Pepe the Frog meme featuring a red clown nose and rainbow wig, characterized as honking a bicycle horn whenever liberals speak.^[1] That meme is associated with the use of honk honk ("HH") as a dog whistle for Heil Hitler.^[2]^[3]^[4]

Pronunciation

Audio (US): (file)

Noun

clown world (plural clown worlds)

(slang, derogatory, alt-right) The current absurd and irrational state of global society from the perspective of the alt-right movement.
- 2020 December 10, James Nicholls, How Uk Should Be‎^[1], Xlibris Corporation, →ISBN:
  […] instead of the young boys growing up to be feminine, weak cry babies like they are in the modern ultra-liberal clown world they live in today.
- 2020, P. J. Vanston, Somewhere in Europe, unnumbered page:
  "Bloody idiots. But remember, this is an age when hurty feelings come above everything else, especially free speech. Sums up our stupid clownworld backward feminut times, eh?"
- 2021, anonymous, quoted in Martin Robinson, You Are Not the Man You Are Supposed to Be: Into the Chaos of Modern Masculinity, unnumbered page:
  But he wasn't a chad. If you are not a chad you are literally an unperson in this clown world.
- For more quotations using this term, see Citations:clown world.
(figurative) A crazy world or environment.
- 2000 October 24, ., “Chumley is a big fat idiot (part 2)”, in rec.arts.bodyart‎^[2] (Usenet), retrieved 14 January 2022:
  > negating the self centered aspect of your
  > comment, it was through the resulting disagreement that this realization was
  > able to come to fruition. In all honesty I'm exceptionally happy with how
  > things turned out and I truly hope the best for her family.
  
  Your crazy clown world has nothing to do with reality.
- 2018 August 15, Christopher Othen, Soldiers of a Different God: How the Counter-Jihad Movement Created Mayhem, Murder and the Trump Presidency‎^[3], Amberley Publishing Limited, →ISBN, →OCLC:
  The /pol/ or politically incorrect board at 4chan became an alt-right clown world.
- 2021 August 3, Zach Vorhies, Kent Heckenlively, Google Leaks: A Whistleblower's Exposé of Big Tech Censorship‎^[4], Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 64:
  The government was so top-heavy and bureaucratic that it created a circus show, a clown world where nothing worked as it was expected. It wasn't simply that there was waste and corruption everywhere. The most corrupted part of that life ...
- For more quotations using this term, see Citations:clown world.
Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see clown,‎ world.
- 2003, Donald McManus, No Kidding!: Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theatre‎^[5], page 33:
  While he did not see these experiments as anti-textual, the most significant contribution to the clown world from the Copeau years was the development of modern French mime.
- 2013, Jon Davison, Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice‎^[6], page 29:
  This is a clown world, the openly theatrical world of the stage-clown, and not a world of masters and servants, despite the origin of the role being partly in imitation of a recognisable social type.
- 2015, Slava Polunin, edited by David Bridel and Ezra Lebank, Clowns: In Conversation with Modern Masters, page 49:
  He said that my essence was grotesque, that I would be a part of the clown world naturally, that I could organically belong to a circus or any other environment, because the grotesque is not limited to or contained in one genre – it has no boundaries.

Translations

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