This may be the worst idea in the service of a good cause ever. When students at the San Francisco Clown Conservatory wanted to raise money to help a teacher stricken with multiple sclerosis and to fight MS generally, they used the incisive logic we all associate with clowns and decided to produce a naked clown calendar. It’s difficult to imagine who’d want to buy a calendar with pictures of fully clothed clowns, but they’ve got to outnumber the people who’d buy a calendar featuring 21 naked clowns. As chief naked clown Chad Benjamin Potter proclaimed optimistically:

Our goal was to create this sort of craziness in your mind…. When you think of clowns you think of costumes and makeup and hair. When you think naked clowns, that’s something else entirely.”

We’ll just add this to the mountain of evidence showing that clowns aren’t funny. They might have provided comic relief 600 years ago, when their chief competition in the humor market was the Black Death, but today they’re seriously out of touch with their audience. These clowns could have raised ten times as much money with far less effort by running a clown protection racket. You know, just sending a couple of clowns to your home or place of business, where they could stand around and muse offhandedly: “Say, that’s a mighty nice wall you got there. Be a real shame if you found a naked clown calendar hanging on it.”