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Down Clown

By Stacey Vanek Smith,
Cardiff Garcia
Published September 17, 2018 at 4:04 PM CDT
Pricilla Mooseburger, one of the characters created by Tricia Manuel, a veteran clown who's seen her industry hurt by menacing depictions in popular culture.
Tricia Manuel
Pricilla Mooseburger, one of the characters created by Tricia Manuel, a veteran clown who's seen her industry hurt by menacing depictions in popular culture.

They were, once upon a time, a fixture in circus tents and at birthday parties, but today demand for clowns is down. Fewer people are interested in becoming clowns. Membership in the biggest clown associations has fallen.

Part of the problem is with the image of clowns projected in movies, cartoons, and books: instead of being fun, they're weird, or creepy, or downright menacing.

Faced with that kind of portrayal, clowns are looking for ways to counter this decades-long narrative. Stacey and Cardiff speak to one of them.

Music: "Big Top Parade", "The Nicest Dragon"

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Business & Education
Stacey Vanek Smith
Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.
See stories by Stacey Vanek Smith
Cardiff Garcia
Cardiff Garcia is a co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money podcast, along with Stacey Vanek Smith. He joined NPR in November 2017.
See stories by Cardiff Garcia
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