A “bozo,” as lots of people in the US know, is a person who’s not regarded as the most competent or capable of the bunch. Some of this comes from the character “Bozo the Clown.” Bozo was created in the 1940s as a character in a children’s book and a record album kids could listen to while following along in the book. Bundling a book and a record together was a new idea, and it was quite a hit. It was so popular, in fact, that when televisions began to be sold later in the 40s, one of the first shows on the air featured Bozo. Television was also quite a hit, and by 1956 there were “networks” — broadcast stations that shared the same programming. And there was Bozo again, leading the way as one of the first nationwide franchise programs.
The way it worked in the beginning, though, was that each station paid for the rights to a Bozo program, but then staged their own show with their own Bozo the Clown. For instance, there was one in Boston, and a different one in Chicago. Each Bozo had the same clown suit and makeup. There were even Bozo programs outside the US — and not just in English-speaking countries. There was even one in Thailand. Playing Bozo was the first step in some fairly prominent television careers. Willard Scott, who was a famous weather personality on the Today show in the US, began as a Bozo (and some might say he never progressed past that).
But “bozo” didn’t originate with the 1946 book and record combination; it was already a word in the 1920s. It just meant “some guy”, and didn’t have any connotation of clowns or clownish behavior. It was slang, but well enough accepted that it appeared in places like Colliers Magazine: “Joe is the bozo which I write all them letters to from France” (1921). The main difference may be that “a bozo” is just descriptive, but “Bozo the Clown” is the character’s name — and it seems to be the source of all the modern connotations of “bozo.”
Nobody really knows where “bozo” came from in the first place, but there are some possibilities. In some parts of the US back a century or so, “bo” was a casual way of greeting someone (as in “hi, bo”). “Bo” supposedly came from “hobo”, and “bozo” might have come from “bo.” Or it might be from Spanish, where there’s a word “bozal” that means stupid. That would tie right into the clown factor, but on the other hand, “bozo” was around for a long time before Bozo the Clown. It might even have come from Italian word “bozzo” (bastard), although the Italian pronunciation would sound more like “bot-zo” — and since “bozo” was slang, and much more likely to be spoken than written, that story might not be right either.
It’s also possible that “bozo”, which became a name, started out as a name too. “Bozo Petrovitch” seems to have been a fairly well-known journalist around the turn of the 20th century, and at about the same time “Bozo Gopcevic” was in the news — he lived in San Francisco, and claimed to be the rightful heir to the throne of Serbia. By the way, his ambitions came to nothing when World War I broke out, because after that there wasn’t a Serbian throne to be an heir to. There’s some conjecture that in the same way “Paddy” was an all-purpose nickname for anyone from Ireland, “Bozo” might have been what people in the early 1900s called central European immigrants. Maybe.
In the end, the origin of “bozo” remains a mystery, while the origin of “Bozo” is not only well documented, but part of US media history. Bozo the Clown was probably the inspiration for Ronald McDonald, the original “Hamburger Clown!”
