“All circus clowns are of only three basic types. Every clown face in the world is a variation of the whiteface clown, the auguste (rhymes with “roost”), and the character clown.

The whiteface clown derives from the classic Pierrot, the white clown of French pantomime. . . . His clown face is all white, with the features (eyebrows, nose, mouth) painted on in black and red, and other decorations, if wanted, in various other colors. . . . When interacting, the whiteface quickly becomes an authority figure—the adult or parent or boss.

The auguste is the scapegoat, the recalcitrant child, the foolish employee, the country bumpkin among city slickers. He is overtly funny, so he wears the most comic clown face. . . . The base color is pink or reddish instead of white. The features (red and black) are of enormous size. . . . The mouth is usually thickly outlined with white, and white is often used around th eyes. The auguste is the most slapstick of all clowns; his actions are wilder and broader, and he gets away with more. . . .

The whiteface represents order and authority and the auguste represents disorder and rebellion, the two most basic psychological types of the human race. . . .

In contrast, the character clown is a comic slant on some of the roles we play: cops, farmers, ethnics; and the makeup is a comic slant on the standard human face. . . .

The most well-known character clown is the tramp or hobo, and has been for decades. In the 1890s, jugglers on the vaudeville stage often dressed as tramps to burlesque the then-popular ‘salon jugglers,’ who wore white tie and tails and juggled top hats and canes. Tramp jugglers wore rags and juggled old plug hats and cigar boxes. . . .

Charlie Chaplin made the tramp character clown universally popular with his film comedies, starting in 1914 and continuing through such masterpieces as The Tramp (1915) and The Gold Rush (1925) to Modern Times (1936).”

—John Culhane, from The American Circus: An Illustrated History, 1990.