Plot
A man misses an evening bus and walks home down an alley, humming to himself. A clown watches from a rooftop and follows him. Cornered at a dead end, the man is relieved to find his stalker is only a clown, and after an apology the clown begins to juggle. The man laughs. The clown slaps his wallet away, grabs him, and a monstrous tongue surges out of its mouth and swallows him whole, leaving only his clothes on the ground.
At the Firehouse, Roland Jackson is laughing at his own joke while Garrett Miller and Kylie Griffin sit silent and Slimer and Eduardo nap on the couch. After some bickering between Garrett and Eduardo, Egon Spengler announces a call. Ecto-1 reaches the alley, where Kylie gets a P.K.E. reading and Roland bags the victim's clothes. The eyewitness, a woman in curlers and face cream, says the man was laughing before he melted and that the culprit wore big shoes.
Searching the area, Kylie is stalked by the clown, which produces a sock puppet and tries to make her laugh. She stays silent and unmoved, and the frustrated clown throws her down and flees. The team works out that laughter is the common link among the victims. When the clown ambushes another laughing man, the Ghostbusters arrive and Eduardo traps it himself after kicking Garrett aside in the scramble. Eduardo celebrates, but three more clowns watch from a nearby rooftop. Kylie theorizes the entities are drawn to laughter and use their clown appearance as bait.
The team drops Eduardo at his house. He finds a jack-in-the-box on his mail slot, and a clown toy pops out and bites his arm before transforming into a more gruesome form and chasing him. Eduardo flees on foot to Ecto-1 and backs the car over the toy. Kylie notices the cut on his arm, which he shrugs off, though he begins to laugh oddly.
The clowns surface from a manhole and enter the Laugh Riot comedy club at 23rd and Sheldon, turning laughter into screams. The team arrives mid-feeding. One clown blows them away with a horn and another throws pies. As a clown grabs a customer, Garrett pries its glove off the man's neck and sees the victims' faces on the exposed hand. Eduardo, waiting outside, lets the escaping clown go and claims it got away. Kylie offers a new theory: the entities are vampires that feed on laughter instead of blood. Eduardo suddenly starts juggling and tumbling, his shoe prints have grown from his normal size 9 to a size 40, and his cut has worsened before he breaks into manic laughter.
Back at the Firehouse, Egon places Eduardo in an isolation chamber and confirms his white blood cells are mutating. He accepts Kylie's vampire analogy and concludes the clowns can also turn victims, as they did with Eduardo in retaliation for their captured comrade. The only cure is to trap all of the clowns. Examining the recovered glove, Egon finds beach sand, mustard, and popcorn flecks, pointing the team to Coney Island. He stays behind to study Eduardo's blood for an antidote, but Slimer is tricked into freeing Eduardo for cotton candy, and Eduardo emerges from the chamber already partly transformed.
At the Coney Island fun house, Roland is reminded of his bathtub joke, laughs, and is devoured by a clown that turns out to be Eduardo. Kylie and Garrett hold back to avoid hurting Roland, then fight the other clowns. Punching one reveals its true form, a worm-like entity. They trap the clowns but fall through a trap door Eduardo triggers, landing in a pool of water, where a much larger slug-like head vampire reveals itself from a giant ticket stand. It grabs Kylie and Garrett and tries to tickle them into laughing.
As Kylie starts to laugh, the vampire is distracted by a laughing figure in a trench coat, Slimer, playing a recording of laughter on a radio. Egon steps forward with his Field Projector, and he, Garrett, and Kylie blast the head vampire. Eduardo floats up and reverts to normal, Slimer traps the last vampire, and all victims the clowns had consumed are released across the Coney Island fairgrounds, naked but alive. Roland has no memory of his ordeal. Eduardo also has no memory of being a clown. Kylie realizes Egon was spared because he is not a laugher, and the team sets out to locate the other victims.
Entities and one-off characters
Evil Clowns
The vampiric entities are referred to in-episode only by Kylie's analogy "Laughter Vampires." The official Extreme Ghostbusters website listed them simply as "Evil Clowns." A nest of five settled in Coney Island and ranged into the city to feed. They cannot prey on a victim unless that person is laughing; if laughter cannot be found naturally, their clown disguises serve as bait to provoke it.
The four that roam the city each have a distinct appearance: the first resembles a conventional clown; the second a chicken; the third wears black and is styled like a knock-over toy; the fourth wears boxing gloves and a tutu. The fifth, their ring leader, does not adopt a clown disguise but conceals itself as a giant lamprey-like creature inside a clown-shaped ticket booth at the Coney Island fun house. The leader uses tentacles tipped with feather-like appendages to tickle victims into laughing against their will.
The entities can also transmit their condition through a jack-in-the-box proxy, bypassing direct contact entirely. The only known cure for a turned victim is the capture of all members of the nest, including the ring leader. When a victim is consumed, they are not destroyed; the clowns transport and store them, releasing them at the Coney Island base once the nest is trapped. Recovered victims are found naked and retain no memory of their ordeal.
A ghostly clown appears as a boss in the video game Extreme Ghostbusters: Code Ecto-1 but does not share the lamprey appearance of these entities.
Leonard Bates
The first victim shown in the episode is Leonard Bates, a tax accountant who missed a late bus and was stalked down an alley by the first clown. Bates reappears in the later episode "Till Death Do We Start," where, approaching 40 and newly single, he has quit his job and sold his apartment on the Upper West Side to buy a house on Long Island, only to be menaced by a ghost bride summoned by a wishing well on the property.
Production
There are two versions of the episode.1 When it first aired, an animation error left a clapboard visible for a single frame during the scene in Ecto-1 where the team discusses the vampire analogy. Later airings removed the clapboard and corrected the error.
In the final act, Egon carries a special proton pack with floodlights and a modified blaster. Production Supervisor Shannon Muir identified the device as the "Field Projector." Early in the script process there was consideration of introducing new equipment to replace proton packs, and the piece is part of the deluxe gear marketed with the Egon Spengler toy. According to Muir, the director added its use to the episode and it was not in the original script.2
References and homages
The clowns draw heavy visual inspiration from the 1988 film Killer Klowns from Outer Space. When Kylie reads the first victim's clothing she riffs on "Something wicked this way comes," a line from Macbeth and the title of a Ray Bradbury novel. Eduardo blames Bigfoot for the disappearance, a creature the original team encountered in "Camping It Up" in The Real Ghostbusters. After the first clown is trapped, his "Send in those clowns" line nods to the song "Send In the Clowns," and during the Laugh Riot bust he taunts a clown as "Krusty," a likely reference to Krusty the Clown from The Simpsons. Garrett later calls another clown "Emmett Kelly," after the American performer known for the clown figure "Weary Willie."
When Egon presents his findings, a calendar behind his desk first shows January with weekdays matching January 1998, then changes a moment later to May with weekdays matching May 1997.
At the end of the episode Kylie notes that Egon is not a laugher. In The Real Ghostbusters he did laugh on occasion, including in "Stay Tooned," where he laughs while telling Winston Zeddemore he is barking up the wrong tree. Earlier in this episode the head vampire's tickling attack nearly overcomes Kylie, establishing that while she claims not to be a laugher, she is at least ticklish.
Episode navigation
Previous episode: Home Is Where the Horror Is. Next episode: The Unseen.
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Spook Central, "Killjoys." https://www.spookcentral.tk/egb_ep_killjoys.htm
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Ghostbusters HQ, "Classic GBHQ Interview with Shannon Muir," August 1997. Muir on the Field Projector: "It's the deluxe equipment Egon is marketed with... Its original name was 'Field Projector,' for what it's worth... The director added the use of this equipment to the episode, it wasn't originally scripted. These weapons were designed early on because I think they were considering moving away from using the proton guns in favor of different equipment on the show."
