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He wears the traditional clown makeup, a red wig and red nose, of course. But this clown is hurling out insults at anyone who walks within a 20-foot radius, trying to bait them into knocking him from his perch on a collapsible bench over a dunk tank. "What are you trying to do, show your girlfriend something else you can't do?" he sneers to one man who approaches the tank. To another: "You're not half the man your sister is." And another: "Hey buddy, why you got your pants on so tight, trying to smuggle in grapes?" Finally, a pretty brunette steps up. She grabs a baseball, eyes the target and lets loose with a throw. Splash! Joey the Clown plunges into the water, and the crowd cheers. Is it a circus, a carnival or a county fair? No, Joey is just outside New York's Union Square as part of an alternative media stunt for the new movie "Splinterheads," which is set at a traveling carnival. To promote the movie, distributor Atlantic Pictures staged its own mini-carnival with a dunk tank and a flash mob wearing clown noses near a Union Square theater that is showing the film. "In the film there is a dunk tank, and that is a big focal point, Dean Winters plays a dunking clown, so we searched around and found Joey the Clown. He has a company called Drown the Clown," says Darren Goldberg, a partner at Atlantic Pictures. "He is a maniac. We are developing a reality show around him." At 11 a.m. on Nov. 7, a crew began at began assembling Joey's dunk tank on 13th Street between 4th and Broadway. By 1 p.m., the clown was sitting in the tank, which had a big white sign on the front with red lettering that said "Warning: Clown jokes may offend some people. If you don't have a sense of humor you should not stay." Traffic to the dunk tank was steady throughout Joey's three-hour stay. Goldberg estimates that 1,000 people came by, some to watch and some to dunk. It was a nippy day, but luckily for Joey, the water in the dunk tank was heated. Meanwhile, also at 11, street teams at six different locations around Union Square began handing out red clown noses to passersby, inviting them to return at 4 p.m. At that time, everyone put on their noses and posed for a photo. Goldberg estimates they gave out 2,000 noses. The street teams also encouraged people to log onto "Splinterheads'" Facebook page, where the clown nose photo was posted, and tag themselves (identify themselves in the picture). The stunt worked in part because it related well to the film, pulling out the theme of the dunk tank and the carnival. That sparked passersby's interest about the movie, which ranked fifth in per-screen revenue across the country that weekend. But it also worked because it was just plain fun. Who doesn't want to lob balls at a dunk tank or pop a clown nose on their face when the rare opportunity arises? And on the streets of New York yet, which are themselves a living carnival of sorts?
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