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, 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, 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 Roland is recovered, naked but alive. Eduardo has no memory of being a clown. Kylie realizes Egon was spared because he is not a laugher, and the team sets out to find the other victims.
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 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.
