HE HAS A POINT.

Cold Spring Shops has long maintained that "Circus professionals and circus enthusiasts of all ages know better than to speak of the presidency as a circus.  To do so is to insult the circus."

Now comes Tim Cunningham, practitioner of the arts of clowning making precisely that point.  "Real clowns bring joy to the world, not chaos to Washington."

Because he described himself as a "woke clown" and professed to be offended with members of the media, including regime media, comparing Our President with a clown, he attracted the attention of Out Kick's Matt Reigle.

I was not prepared for a blistering hot take like this courtesy of the wokest clown I've ever heard of, Tim Cunningham, the board president of Clowns Without Borders.

That's not a joke. That's a real group that performs clown shows for communities facing hardship, which is great, but when I've faced hardship, my first thought was never, "I wish someone was here to shock me with a joy buzzer and spray me in the face with seltzer from a flower on the lapel," but we all process grief differently.

Anyway, the piece opens by discussing the way "clown" or "clown show" has become a common way for people to describe President Trump and the Trump administration.

However, Cunningham's problem wasn't that it's a lazy insult that typically misses the mark; he doesn't like the pejorative use of the word "clown," which I think has been going on since around the time the word came into existence.

"Clown, capital C, is a valuable and varied art form; pantomimes, acrobats, magicians, dancers, stand-up comedians, vaudeville artists and jugglers are all examples of artists who incorporate Clown into their work," Cunningham writes.

Alright, when I sat down at my desk with a cup of coffee this morning, I was not prepared for a pretentious lesson on "clown," but here we are.

Maybe Mr Reigle ought find himself a circus and go to it.  A circus, whether there are elephants and a train or not, is a much more orderly production than anything that goes on in politics.

As far as the art form Mr Cunningham refers to as Clown, proper noun, there is a reason the guy who shocks you with a joy buzzer probably isn't dressed as a tramp, and if there is a clown dressed as a tramp, he doesn't have a big painted-on smile.  Clown techniques getting into the circus generally?  "As long as there are acrobats, aerialists, equestrians, jugglers, and unicyclists there will be circus."

Hot Air's David Strom also had to get into the act.

I have to admit that the comparison of Trump to clowns is, in fact, unfair, although not in the way that Mr. Cunningham suggests.

Of course, I say that as a member of the Clown Haters Club, which, as far as I know, was just invented by me and gets no government money. I have never understood clowns, which appear to me to be a holdover from the days when parents used storytime to terrify kids with cannibal witches. It's no surprise that clowns feature prominently in horror movies.

In any case, Mr. Cunningham is deeply disturbed that his profession is being smeared by comparison with Trump. Clowns are good, Trump is evil.

Part of what makes those horror movies work is the whiteface clown with the painted-on smile getting way out of character.  I won't go as far as Mr Cunningham in describing the circus arts as "sacred;" and yet I share his irritation with people speaking of things political as "clown show" or "circus."

Yet, our joyful work has been diminished into an insult. Every election season, the word “clown” resurfaces to compare tumultuous Washington politics to a circus. Political commentators and social media users are not the only ones who wrongfully sling this jibe. “Clown” is used by almost everyone to belittle those seen as foolish or incompetent. The more we mistreat the word, the more we lose understanding of a sacred art form.

He proposes people use "buffoon" in place of "clown;" although Mr Strom flipped open his Thesaurus and chuckled.

Why not embrace the word "politician?"  Not "statesman."  Not "public servant."  Not "elected official."  Politician.