It is very freeing, being a clown.
Clowns are fun. Clowns are happiness. Watching a clown is to see someone with a visibly worse life than your own, filled with brightly-colored obstacles and slapstick clumsiness, and you can feel better about yourself by laughing at them.
Clowns are creepy. Clowns possess only the broadest of expressions, with any subtleties covered in greasepaint. Clown faces are the original uncanny valleys, almost-but-not-quite-human and unsettling.
Clowns are unaccountable. Anyone could be under there, doing anything at all. Why, a clown could pass out balloon animals to his own neighbors, or do magic tricks for her own parents, and never be discovered. A clown at a county fair could pretend to fight with a heavy punching bag, punching and missing wildly and getting mad and honking and beating it with a stick and kicking at it and missing and falling down and running away and running back with an ax and hacking at it until exaggerated exhaustion sets in and finally punching it once, feebly, and strutting away like a champion past the cheering, laughing crowds.
And once their deeds are done they can vanish to declown themselves and become anonymous, long before anyone can look in the punching bag to see why it’s dripping red.