The century that featured two world wars, mass murder, and nuclear terror was also a century in which clowns ceased to be comic. So Donald McManus suggests in his book about clowns who face their own deaths: suicides, mock executions, and hangings. No wonder the book is titled No Kidding! That phrase is a translation of the Swiss clown Grock's “Sans blââgue!”—words through which the popular circus artist indicated “to his audience the potentially serious nature of his comic turns,” according to McManus (11).