Often, the best cure for an ailing relationship is a sense of rediscovery. The best way to achieve it is usually for a couple to engage in a new activity, like going on a vacation, discovering a new hobby, or battling a crazed Vietnam veteran played by Alan Alda. So Blythe Danner and Heath Lamberts, playing a gentle-hearted but troubled hippie couple, discover in To Kill A Clown. Renting a beachside cottage from the cane-toting Alda, the pair try to repair their four-year-old marriage by spending time alone, a task impaired by the frequent appearance of Alda and his unfriendly Doberman pinschers. After a drunken night in which Lamberts, in an attempt to demonstrate his advanced miming abilities, gets only as far as smearing whipped cream on his face, Alda offers to improve his quality of life. At dawn, the two embark on a "head game" that has Alda playing angry drill sergeant to Lamberts' goof-off new recruit, and assigning him the Sisyphean task of moving a group of heavy rocks from his yard to the beach. All seems to go well enough, until Alda takes Lamberts to task for his unbuttoned shirt, saying, "This country is founded on buttons. The United States Of America is what it is because of buttons." Failing to find the logic in Alda's words, Lamberts begins to suspect that playing military-themed games with a badly injured Vietnam vet might not be such a good idea. His suspicions are confirmed when Alda has the young couple's car towed away. "You know there are dogs with a vocabulary of 100 to 200 words?" Alda tells Danner and Lamberts. Soon they discover that "kill" is one of those words, as the situation escalates from a "head game" to a "try to kill the hippies game." But Lamberts demonstrates that Alda's work hasn't been entirely in vain, by moving a final rock on top of his host's head, cueing an upbeat theme song from acclaimed British R&B organist Georgie Fame.
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