Bozo Takes a Trip to the Big Kid's Party in the Sky

Beloved children's entertainer or feared icon striking terror into the hearts of those clever enough to realise that clowns are created from pure, distilled evil - however you look at him the news is the same: Bozo the clown has passed on.

 Larry Harmon, credited not with the creation of the Bozo character but with the popularisation of an existing clown and in the process the creation of a legend, died of congestive heart failure on Thursday, aged 83. It is unconfirmed whether he was in full costume at the time, though we hope he was - just so the man could get one last smile from the world.

It's easy to wax lyrical about the decline of traditional entertainment in modern society, with the 'yoofs' and their obsession with 'music', 'video games' and 'gangland violence', but one thing has remained constantly popular in the culture of children's entertainment: the clown. Without Harmon and his Bozo character there likely wouldn't be such a prevalence of the silly, slappy-footed, red-nosed berks flitting around from house to house, making children squawk. And frankly, without Bozo's popularity, that behaviour would be frowned upon, if not illegal.

Larry did not come up with the Bozo the Clown character of his own accord - he purchased the rights for it and worked from there, introducing what is now taken for granted as how a clown should look, as well as helping the word 'bozo' enter common language - for example, 'Lindsay Lohan's dad acts like a bozo'. See? Without Harmon and his marketing savvy hecklerspray would have had to rely on a different descriptive term for that cash-hungry twit. You have to have respect for that.

Leading the character through 50 years of development, Harmon introduced Bozos all around Americ...

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