In September 1986, Watchmen was first published by DC Comics as part of a 12-issue miniseries, released monthly until October 1987. In the comic, the character Rorschach tells a joke about Pagliacci ...

On September 6th, 2016, Twitter user @McCartyConnor [3] replied to the tweet with "hey," @reganslatic replied with "no" and @McCartyConnor responded, "I'm literally the guy in the pic" (shown below).