This book examines the cultural and commercial legacies of one of America's most beloved and bedeviled figures. It exposes how the circus clown has uniquely occupied, variously and sometimes simultaneously, positions of both corporate power and consumer resistances to that power.

In the 1920s a distinct American clown separated from the classical European tradition; a hundred years later, the surprise deployment of the clown in the 2020 U.S. election showed the profound insistence of this cartoonishly garish figure, inspiring both delight and horror. The American clown, a century old and still reliably popping up in and against marketing campaigns and financial fiction.

From reliable sales symbol to benevolent brand ambassador of recommissioned military technologies; from national hero to relic of economic prosperity vengefully murdered during recessions; from Depression-era figure inviting of collective pathos to Reagan-era icon of relentless bootstrapism; from Ronald McDonald to Pennywise(s) to “killer clown” hoaxes aplenty: this book pulls 139 instances of clowns and their commercial traces into frame in order to understand how the circus clown has shifted throughout the past century. In theorizing capitalist folklore, the author explores the symbolic exchange of these two concepts which has shaped the culture we have arrived at now, with socioeconomic referents of value warping into the intersecting shadows of cryptocurrency and post-truth politics.