Will Ross Noble as a killer clown have us in stitches?

Geordie comedian Ross Noble recently broke into films with The Hunt For Tony Blair, appearing as an Old Labour trade unionist.

So he’s returned from the dead to frighten the kids once already, but in a new film called Stitches he’ll star as a clown killed at a children’s party who’s back for vengeance. Stitches is directed by Conor McMahon, whose previous credits include Zombie Bashers, The Disturbed and The Braineater - Noble has likened it to “Saw meets the Chuckle Brothers”.

That’s a tremendous quote; it makes Stitches sound like a schlock-horror romp that could be good, bad or so bad it’s brilliant. Or completely unwatchable. Either way, the film taps into widespread fears that anyone who chooses to spend a day making balloon animals with children is not someone you’d choose to leave your children with.

Ever since John Wayne Gacy performed at birthday parties as Pogo the Clown, serial killers have struggled to shed their association with children’s entertainers. In The Simpsons, Sideshow Bob imagines himself a maligned, floppy shoe-wearing artiste who must kill the barbarous, low-brow Krusty for the good of Western civilisation.

Coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, certainly seems rational if you consider The Joker in Batman; Mr Jelly, the hook-handed harlequin in the BBC comedy Psychoville or Tim Curry as the terrifying Pennywise in Stephen King’s It. At last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, the stand-up Mark Olver twisted this fear into brutal reprisals in Olver: Portrait of a Serial Killer, in which the Deal or No Deal warm-up man fantasised about systematically murdering all clownkind.

Stand-up has always had this violent side of course, as comics profess to want to knock em’ dead, slaying the audience with their punchlines. So it’s tempting to interpret Stitches as a performer seeking to bludgeon his insecurities about the practitioners of a lesser form of comedy. But that’s only if you ignore the fact that Noble, who studied circus skills, is among our most clownish stand-ups, incorporating gifts thrown on stage in his improvised routines.

No, the thrill of seeing an irrepressible laughter-leech like Robin Williams playing a disturbed sociopath in One Hour Photo, a cold, calculating killer in Insomnia or indeed, plotting revenge on his children’s entertainer replacement in Death To Smoochy, isn’t the counter-intuitive casting or witnessing the jester costume slip to reveal the tortured soul and exceptionally hairy torso beneath. It comes from him sparking and cathartically channelling those violent, unhinged impulses that audiences repressed as he clodhopped through ‘feelgood’ clown doctor ‘comedy’ Patch Adams.

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