Clown Panic

Decoder Ring

Slate Podcasts

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2018

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Pepsi Max. Christmas is great, but there's loads of ways to make it better.
0:08.0	Like sneaking some chili into the gravy for some extra oint, or building a playlist that will even get your
0:14.8	none up on the table or just cracking open an ice cold Pepsi Max.
0:20.1	Christmas.
0:23.0	Better with Pepsi Max.
0:27.0	Our town has no.
0:30.0	Our town has no entertainment whatsoever. We have nothing for anybody to do except for a mall with a
0:38.0	roses, a family dollar, and two shoe stores in it. That's all we have in our town. There's maybe eight red lights in our
0:45.2	whole town. So then what actually happened? Like how did you get the idea?
0:49.5	Actually it was for entertainment for my six year old. It's maybe two weeks before Halloween.
0:55.8	She's seen all the stuff about them and she heard that there was some in our town.
1:01.2	So my little girl wanted us to go find one and see if we could get a
1:08.0	picture of it and sell it to her. That was the whole reason for the purchase of the cost him was to just go take a picture,
1:14.8	bring it home, and show it to her.
1:18.1	Not too terrorizing anybody, you know, that was what was said, but no, that's not what it was all about so Walmart's full of
1:25.0	costumes so I grab 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
1:36.9	wife snap a picture okay well I'm sitting in the car a cop's driving by he pulls up in front of her car turns his lights on gets out and he goes
1:46.8	to take his gun out and I'm like man I'll go peacefully you know it doesn't have to be
1:52.3	like that.
1:53.8	And it actually got very, very hostile.
1:58.5	Did he think you were up to something?
2:00.6	Like, oh, I was treated like a murder? Was he freaked out no he just wanted to be the first cop in
	...

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