Auburn Man’s Clown Mask Is a Dad Joke Gone Wrong

photo via Facebook / Auburn Police

So finally, all of this absurd clown hysteria has produced an actual person dressed as an actual clown in Massachusetts’ suburban wilds.

Except this time, the culprit here appears to have been an Auburn man making a very ill-advised dad joke.

According to police in the town, the unidentified man followed his child’s school bus in a car earlier this week and tailed him on the way home, while wearing a menacing clown mask.

“This caused extreme fear to the children and also caused them to have to hide under a nearby backyard deck to avoid the man,” police wrote on Facebook.

The department said yesterday that the man will face charges for disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace.

“We are hopeful that others will learn from this incident and not repeat these behaviors,” police wrote.

Seconded.

Look, feel free to tune out all of this clown business if you want, by the way. Hysteria has taken root, but the threat of punchy headlines and creepy screenshots is the real threat here. Which: guilty.

At the same time, there does seem to be a contingent of people who can’t muster the good sense not to put on clown garb in this anxiety-ridden climate for laughs. Take, for example, the teenager in Methuen who allegedly wore a clown mask and waved around a cell phone as if it were a gun.

Mostly, though, there have been reports of clowns where there were no clowns, and large-scale weird happenings, like the students at UMass Amherst who canvassed the streets en masse looking for villainous entertainers.

Meanwhile, actual local clowns say all this talk of chasing down practitioners of their craft has them on edge.

Halloween should be interesting this year. Hopefully we’ll have all of this out of our system by then.