There’s nothing inherently wrong with clowning as a profession. It’s perfectly valid to dress up all funny with the intent of making folks laugh or roll their eyes at a circus or carnival or whatever.
Rather, the problem with clowns, conceptually, is that clowning serves as an avenue for evil, or at least horrible, people and creatures to also be really annoying.
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As clown and jester characters have been around in games for ages, it’s only natural that at least a few of them get a little too carried away with their own shtick.
These clowns use their tricks and shenanigans to inconvenience, hurt, or otherwise menace people, and could really use a good smack upside the head to make them knock it off.
For the crime of irritating us, we sentence these ten clowns to a repeated pummeling by a boxing glove hidden in a jack-in-the-box.
10Beppi The Clown
In the defense ofthe many cartoony folksthatCupheadand Mugman do battle with, they’re just trying to keep their souls safe from the Devil and his efforts to collect their contracts. All the same, Beppi the clown could stand to take the matter of his own soul a little more seriously.
As soon as you confront Beppi at the boardwalk, he’s immediately cackling up a storm, zooming around in a bumper car.
That’s only his first distraction, though, as it’s immediately followed by inflating himself like a balloon, riding around on a merry-go-round horse, and finally transforming into one of those giant swing rides and spitting out acrobatic penguins.
During most of this, he’s also flanked by a spiked, man-eating rollercoaster, which we can’t imagine he had the boardwalk’s permission to install.
As an additional insult to injury, if Beppi defeats you, he hits you with some real groaners of puns, like “Why’d the clown drive over the cup? He wanted to crack him up.” We can tolerate a lot around here, but we draw the line at puns.
Clowns generally make good horror fodderbecause there’s supposed to be a contrast between something fun and child-friendly and something more overtly evil and dangerous.
Even if the trope is a little played out, a monster clown can still be good for their intended purpose with a little subtlety. Subtlety, unfortunately, is not a well-understood art on the grounds of the undead CarnEvil, especially if its mascot, Umlaut, is any indication.
Umlaut is a flying jester skull with a rictus grin lined with sharp teeth. He’s normally just a stone statue on top of Ludwig von Tökkentäkker’s gravestone, but when some stupid schmuck feeds him a token, he springs to life and conjures CarnEvil back from the fiery depths.
Between every level of the game, Umlaut appears to provide an introduction, usually involving a long, somewhat questionably formatted limerick.
Umlaut mostly just pops up and leaves throughout the game, but he actually serves as the game’s penultimate boss fight in the Big Top. Despite literally only being a floating head, he’s surprisingly hard to pin down, and you might end up losing a good chunk of life before finally giving him the shotgun send-off he deserves.
Devil May Cry 3
Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening
Early into Dante’s exploration of the demonic tower Temen-ni-gru inDevil May Cry 3, he encounters a dark-suited, clown-like entity who introduces himself as Jester.
Very swiftly, Jester makes an ass of himself, mocking Dante to his face and offering cryptic, quasi-helpful information about the tower. Dante pulls Ebony and Ivory on him multiple times, but he’s too fleet-footed to nail down.
As we later learn, Jester is actually an alter-ego of Vergil’s human associate, Arkham, who had been helping Dante through the tower without Vergil’s knowledge. The purpose of this was to guide them, as well as Lady, into conflict with one another so he could break the seal on Sparda’s power and claim it for himself.
Presumably, Arkham’s reason for, and we quote, “dressing up like a complete idiot,” was to guide Dante to his fight with Vergil without appearing overtly threatening.
It’s not a terrible plan, admittedly; “threatening” is definitely not the first word that comes to mind when we think of Jester. No, that word would be “obnoxious.”
7Kefka Palazzo
Final Fantasy VI
Before the events ofFinal Fantasy VI, the Gestahlian Empire conducted covert experiments to create artificial magic users known as Magitek Knights. The first to be subjected to this experiment was Kefka Palazzo, a presumably ordinary man who was left very muchunordinary after the fact.
The experimental process completely shattered Kefka’s mind and sanity, leaving him acackling, sadistic clown. He’s not the kind of guy anyone would want on their payroll, really, but the process did succeed in giving him powerful magical abilities, and, for better or worse, he was quite good at using them to get results for the empire.
This earned him a prominent position as the Emperor’s court mage and fix-it man, even if nobody else in the empire could stand him.
Kefka remains one of the most iconic villains in the entire Final Fantasy series, rivaling even the likes of Sephiroth in sheer, manic cruelty. His obnoxious face has appeared in multiple Dissidia Final Fantasy games, and he was even a boss fight in Final Fantasy XIV’s Stormblood expansion.
Kirby Super Star
In the Milky Way Wishes campaign ofKirby Super Star, the sun and moon overPlanet Popstarstart fighting and messing up the sky. Marx, an odd little jester creature, tells Kirby he can fix this with the wish-granting power of Galactic Nova.
Kirby goes through the motions to summon Nova and prepares to make a wish, only for Marx to knock him out of the way and wish for absolute control over Popstar himself.
With Nova’s power, Marx transforms into what we can only describe as a harlequin demon, increasing in size and getting massive, clawed wings. In this demonic form, he can launch crescent projectiles, fire off spiked vines, and even split himself in half to generate a small black hole.
Marx has made a few more appearances outside of the Kirby series since Super Star. He was a boss fight in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, where he gained some even more disturbing moves, like transforming his wings into giant veins and launching his eyeballs as projectiles.
Super Paper Mario
Dimentio is one of Count Bleck’s chief minions inSuper Paper Mario, and quite possibly one of the most irritatingly self-absorbed individuals on this list. To his credit, he is a skilled magician and master of dimensional manipulation, which naturally made him well-suited to assist in Bleck’s little cross-dimensional genocide.
Using various tricks and elaborate schemes, Dimentio harasses Mario and company, as well as the denizens of the many dimensions.
He deliberately causes Fracktail to malfunction, turns his associate O’Chunks into a mind-controlled vegetable person, and even straight-up murders Luigi… ahem, “Mr. L,” sending him off tothe afterlife of the Underwhere. During all this, he’s constantly peppering his taunts with gratuitous Italian and French and weird similes.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dimentio doesn’t actually care about Count Bleck or his goal of dimensional destruction. Rather, he just wanted the power of the Chaos Heart for himself so he could remake reality in his own, quote-unquote, “perfect” image.
He even turns Luigi into a giant clown monster to serve as a vessel for the Chaos Heart’s power, because… clowns are a force of chaotic energy or something.
4Kenneth “The Clown” Chase
Dead by Daylight
Due to the rules ofthe Entity’s realminDead by Daylight, the Survivors can’t do much of anything to directly combat the Killers that hunt them, merely hinder or trick them. If, however, the Survivors were permitted one good shot with a lead-lined boxing glove, it’s a fair bet that Kenneth “The Clown” Chase would be on the receiving end of it.
This ghoulish fellow spent most of his young years tormenting small animals before getting a job as a circus stagehand. Following his old, dark urges, he’d swipe costumes and makeup from his coworkers and use a clown persona to lure patrons to their doom.
After getting chased off from the circus, he’d begin latching onto other traveling acts around the country before finally disappearing into the Fog.
So not only is he a psychopathic murderer, he’s not even a real clown. He brings shame upon the entire profession with his farcical imitation. Also, he kills people and takes their fingers, which isn’t great either.
In the first chapter ofDeltarune, Kris, Susie, and Ralsei find a mysterious jail cell in the basement of the Dark World castle. Its occupant asks them to retrieve the keys and free him for a fun time. This occupant is Jevil, a mad jester with a seemingly infinite wellspring of chaotic power.
Jevil can either be fought or pacified with Ralsei’s sleep-inducing abilities, but no matter how you go about it, he doesn’t make it easy for you. As the chapter’s secret boss, Jevil pulls out all the stops, bombarding you with a mess of projectiles fired in disorienting patterns.
He’s undoubtedly the hardest enemy in the chapter, and while he’s no Sans, he’s given quite a few players a nasty headache trying to beat him.
According to Seam, the shopkeeper, Jevil used to be employed as the court jester to the four Dark World kings.
Back then, he was apparently a pretty okay guy, but after an encounter with a mysterious person, Jevil went completely bonkers, treating the Darkners as “players” in a game and harassing them with his abilities. This is what prompted the kings to lock him up.
2CircusMan.exe
Mega Man Battle Network 6
TheMega Man Battle Networkseries has had a small handful of clown and clown-adjacent NetNavis that MegaMan.exe has done battle with. However, in the sixth game in the series, he encounters an evil Navi who isn’t just a clown; he’s the whole circus: CircusMan.exe.
CircusMan.exe is a villainous Navi under the employ of the newly revived criminal organization, World Three, and the instigator behind the Cybeast incident that drives the game’s plot.
On Dr. Wily’s orders, CircusMan.exe drains energy from innocent Navis at a virtual festival and uses it to awaken both Falzar and Gregar, capturing one and leaving the other to attack MegaMan.exe.
CircusMan.exe fancies himself something of a beast tamer, with one of his primary shticks being generating a cage in his stomach for capturing foes.
He’ll also crack his whip to call up virtual lions, which he forces to jump through flaming hoops as improvised projectiles. Of course, he’s not above just being annoying, conjuring his large hands from both sides of the arena to clap MegaMan.exe.
1Rudy The Clown
Wario Land 3
After getting sucked into a magical music box world in Wario Land 3, Wario is contracted by a mysterious figure to gather five special music boxes from around the world to set itself free from an ancient seal. Wario’s not interested at first, but the figure mentions that there’s treasure to be had, and suddenly he’s more amenable.
When Wario returns with the music boxes, though, the figure reveals itself as a gigantic, monstrous clown named Rudy. Turns out that an ancient seal was placed on him for a very good reason: because he wants to conquer the entire world inside the music box, as well as the entire world outside of it.
Rudy actually makes a second appearance in Dr. Mario 64, where he orders his minion, Mad Scienstein, to steal Dr. Mario’s Megavitamins to cure his cold.
So not only is Rudy an evil, world-conquering clown, he steals life-saving medicine from doctors just to cure what could probably be handled with some orange juice and bed rest. What a jerk.
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