THE YOLK’S ON YOU
Why Funny-Looking Eggs Are No Laughing Matter
Many people find clowns to be creepy or downright scary, so apologies for this next visual: Close your eyes for a moment and imagine the face of a circus clown. You’ll probably settle on a powder-white face with an exaggerated red nose, but beyond that, the details will vary. Maybe your imaginary clown has droopy blue eyes and a frown. Perhaps he has a huge mop of rainbow hair or tiny purple dimples drawn on his cheeks. Maybe he is a she, with blond locks and a cowboy hat.
To the nonclown public, these unique details aren’t terribly important. But to the clowns themselves, they are. Take that sad clown, for example. The person behind the makeup is, for all intents and purposes, an actor—one who has probably spent years crafting his character. Beyond the face makeup, he has to embody the role of someone who is inconsolably upset (except for a glimmer of happiness here or there right before he gets a deluge of seltzer shot into his face). The details of his makeup help define that character, and it’s likely that he’s spent more time than you’d think in refining every brushstroke. Much like a painter wouldn’t take kindly to someone else copying his work, this sad clown would probably be truly upset if another clown happened to don the same face. So how does a clown prevent this from happening?
The answer: eggs. Yes, the twelve-to-a-carton ones that come from chickens.
The explanation for this starts with copyright law. In the United States, you can only get copyright over a creation if the work is “fixed in any tangible medium of expression.” The definition isn’t an exact science, but there are some examples which aren’t debated—the words in a book or a painting on a canvas for instance. The word “fixed” means that the work has to be put into a permanent form. Fake noses, face makeup, and wigs don’t work, because sooner or later, you’re going to take them off.
So if painting your face doesn’t earn you copyright protection over your design, what about painting it on something else? Something oval, like your head—and if it’s already eggshell white, like your makeup, even better! Sounds a lot like an egg, right? And that’s essentially what the Clown Egg Register is.
In 1946, a Londoner named Stan Bult—whom the BBC describes as “a chemist by trade, though not a clown himself”—decided to capture the faces of the clowns who entertained him on the shells of eggs in hopes of ensuring that wannabes didn’t copy their looks. By the time of his death twenty years later, Bult had created a library of two hundred such eggs—a de facto library of clowns who performed in and around the UK’s capital city. And the city’s clowns used that library as a way to ensure that they weren’t encroaching on another’s designs.
After Bult’s death, Clowns International (yes, there’s an international brotherhood of clowns) took over the efforts. Today, there are dozens of eggs in the register, each atop a pedestal and painted and dressed to mimic the design of a professional clown. The eggs can be seen on display at the Clowns Gallery-Museum in the village of Wookey Hole in Somerset, England. In 2018, photographer Luke Stephenson and his cohort, a clown named Helen Champion, also put together a book featuring photos of 169 of the portraits.