Yep yep, it is important to research the history of anything before incorporating it into your fashion. So if I may, I will give people who may not know where to begin some springboards.
(context note: I am not an LP but I am intersex and have studied clowning and travelling show history for a bit, largely because of being intersex and that being the only place I could find any history of people like me)
Reminder to all that disabled folks were not allowed to exist in public from 1867 to 1974 and that's why Freakshows were the only way we could control even a little bit of the exploitation--and not reliably, because it really depended on your luck in re how your parents and family felt about you (many were sold to freakshows as children by their parents, for example) and also how the freakshow ran itself, and also who your fellow performers were and what kinds of relationships you got into, and so on and so on and so on; but like... for a long while, the choices were Freakshow performer... or being shut up in an attic... or drowned at birth... or locked up in a hospital and probably experimented on, because of the Ugly Laws making it so we were no longer human persons!
Reminder to all that BIPOC actually were exhibited as zoo animals like literally. I'm putting this here bc Human Zoos are connected to travelling shows and I see a concerning number of people fantasising about being a human in an alien zoo and like... white baby you can't be talking like that.
Comedians even today are often struggling with mental illness, and many die from it--because we still have a very dehumanising way of treating people that are funny, even when they're able-bodied and white and male. At best, we largely do not let comedic actors stop doing comedy, even when they want to. This is so common that the trope of "suicidally depressed comedian" has been a thing for like, hundreds of years. This is the remnant of the dehumanization visited upon fools and jesters of hundreds of years ago (in the west. I want to emphasise in the west, because I do not presume to speak for parts of human history I don't know about).
While many professional clowns and comic actors were just that--professional actors ("commedia dell'arte" means "the profession of comedian")--there was, and is, still a tendency to force anyone odd-looking or odd-behaving into a performance role. And it's a complex thing, because oftentimes performing was the only job available, and it WAS a job that gave you independence and money and some control over WHEN and HOW people were allowed to stare at you, when other jobs or simply not having a job did not do that. So there were some that found it empowering, and some that felt exploited and would have rather been at a non-performance job, and some that were outright exploited by able-bodied managers or parents etc.
For example, In times past, I would have been a Bearded Lady, and I would have definitely had some very mixed feelings about whether exhibiting myself and forcing people to at least pay me to stare was empowering or demeaning. Yet the alternatives would have largely been worse, especially if I had lived during the time of the Ugly Laws. Even now I have very mixed feelings about being able to be seen outwardly as "normal". And the person above me has very strong feelings that are different, so, you know, no group of people is a monolith and no group of people is going to have the same opinion--especially on such a complex problem that has so many different moving parts contributing to the whole situation. Especially on a problem that is experienced slightly differently by everyone lumped into that group (even if we have very little in common beyond "different than the norm").
And even with the parts of clowning and comedy that aren't about laughing AT someone (which... maybe don't have that as your sense of humour?? punch up not down, people); it's important to get into the habit of looking up the history of things before incorporating them into your fashion. Fashion is a language and what you say matters. You do not exist in a vacuum. "But I don't wanna" Tough. You exist in the world and are part of history yourself. You too are taking up space and represent something. You too are having a conversation with all the art that came before you. So speak deliberately.
