From a gaming emoji to 4chan
The character's story begins in the summer of 2018 on a Discord server devoted to League of Legends, where an emoji called pepoclown appeared and began to spread. It was a remake of an existing smiley drawn in clown makeup. The image is attributed to a user going by the name Brizi.
By December 2018 the picture had been posted to a thread on the 4chan board, and by January 2019 the clown Pepe had become a local meme of that site, with its own recognizable aesthetic and terminology taking shape around it.
The philosophy of Clown World
The Clown World concept existed before this character, but the clown Pepe gave it a clear visual symbol and mass popularity. The philosophy rests on a parable commonly attributed to Søren Kierkegaard: a clown comes onstage in a burning theater to warn the audience of the danger, but the crowd takes his words for part of the show and applauds. Perhaps, the idea's author suggests, the modern world will end in a similar way, to the laughter of people who do not believe that what is happening is real.
In a broad sense, Clown World became a label for the current state of affairs, from excessive political correctness to environmental and political crises. Its proponents describe the present as an absurd circus whose audience refuses to acknowledge how serious things are.
The 'Honk Pill' vs. the 'Black Pill'
The image is closely tied to another metaphor, the 'honk pill,' coined as an alternative to the 'black pill,' an established symbol in internet culture of total pessimism and a sense of inevitable doom. Unlike the grim black pill, the honk pill presents the same nihilism through absurd humor, seeing what is happening as a ridiculous, pointless joke rather than a reason for despair.
Appropriation by the alt-right
From February 2019, users of right-wing and nationalist communities on 4chan began borrowing the clown image and creating versions of the character with racist and antisemitic undertones, which came to be called Honkler. In April 2019 Right Wing Watch published an article under a headline claiming that white nationalists were turning the clown into a new racist symbol. In the summer of the same year, Reddit removed a subreddit devoted to the character for content that violated the platform's rules against violence and hate.
Facebook, for its part, began blocking posts containing the word 'Honk.' This only fed media interest in the topic and cemented the character's reputation as a controversial symbol, although many ordinary users of the format say they put no racist meaning into the joke.
What it means today
Despite its scandalous history, for most of the audience the clown Pepe remains first and foremost a symbol of an ironic, pessimistic view of the world rather than a political statement. An avatar with the Honkler usually signals its owner's skeptical attitude toward social processes, and the exclamation 'Honk Honk' is used in comments and captions as a short cry of exasperation or absurdist resignation.
