Clown Panic
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2018
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn. Sign up now to listen and support our work.
Decoder Ring is a podcast about cracking cultural mysteries. Every month host Willa Paskin,Slate’s TV critic, takes on a cultural question, object, idea, or habit and speak with experts,historians and obsessives to try and figure out where it comes from, what it means and why it Matters.
Today: The clown has existed in various forms for thousands of years, what changed and made us suspect and fear them? The modern birthday clown is a very recent invention, by going back into the history of clowns and clowning we see that clowns are far more complex and capable of far more expression than the kids entertainment of Bozo and Ronald McDonald. How those complex figures transformed into obligatorily sunny commercial mascots may also explain why they are increasingly seen as sinister today.
Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at slate.com/podcastfaqs for easy instructions. Members subscribed via Apple Podcasts get automatic access—no setup required.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Our town has no entertainment whatsoever. |
| 0:05.0 | We have nothing for anybody to do except for a mall with a roses, a family dollar, and two shoe stores in it. |
| 0:14.0 | That's all we have in our town. There's maybe eight red lights in our whole town. |
| 0:19.0 | So then what actually happened? |
| 0:21.4 | Like, how did you get the idea? |
| 0:23.5 | Actually, it was for entertainment for my six-year-old. |
| 0:26.1 | It's maybe two weeks before Halloween. |
| 0:29.0 | She's seen all the stuff about them, and she heard that there was some in our town. |
| 0:35.0 | So my little girl wanted us to go find one and see if we could get a picture of it |
| 0:41.7 | and show it to her. That was the whole reason for the purchase of the costume was to just go take a |
| 0:46.7 | picture, bring it home, and show it to her. Not to terrorize anybody. That was what was said, |
| 0:53.9 | but no, that's not what it was all about so walmart's full of costumes |
| 0:58.5 | so i grabbed the one i go home i change clothes and i go to just a random stop sign i'm going to get out let my wife snap a picture. Okay, well, I'm sitting in the car. |
| 1:13.5 | A cop's driving by. He pulls up in front of our car, turns his lights on, gets out, and he goes to |
| 1:19.9 | take his gun out. And I'm like, man, I'll go peacefully, you know, it doesn't have to be like that. |
| 1:26.6 | And it actually got very, very hostile. |
| 1:30.3 | Did he think you were up to something like... |
| 1:33.3 | I was treated like a murderer. |
| 1:36.3 | Was he freaked out? |
| 1:38.3 | No. He just wanted to be the first cop in Middlesboro to arrest a clown. |
| 1:55.5 | If you close your eyes and picture a clown, what do you see? What pops into your head first? |
| 2:00.5 | Maybe you see someone with a white face and a red nose, big feet, who's always making balloon animals. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.