How Do Clown Cars Work (and how many clowns can fit in a tiny car) -This is the question of the day.
Anyone that has been to the circus has probably seen the iconic clown car from which many different clowns come out, one after the other. If not, it is not hard to explain: a seemingly tiny car is driven to the center of the stage, and somehow dozens of clowns, with full costumes and props, come out of it. Clown cars are a genuine piece of American culture, yet there are so many questions about this entertaining stunt that have gone unanswered.
The Main One Is – How Do Clown Cars Work?
The short answer – without going into many details – is quite simple. There are different variations, but the most basic principle is that it’s not that hard to fit a bunch of people in a car when you don’t plan to drive it very far.
Let’s do some basic math calculations here. A compact car, of the types that are usually used in this act (MINI Cooper, Volkswagen Beetle, or FIATs), has about 3000 liters of internal space. An average adult man takes up about 100 liters of volume, but it can be significantly smaller. Now, of course, you can’t fit 30 people into that space, since you can’t pack humans in perfectly with no empty space, need to account for the props and customs, and leave space for the driver to maneuver. But if you strip out the internals of the car (like the seats, dashboard, etc), pad the floor and walls so the people can lie down, and pack them in tight, you can probably fit more than a dozen people in there pretty easily.
It wouldn’t be comfortable, and you probably couldn’t drive the car for more than a very short distance – but it will work.
After all the internal parts of the car are removed, the windows of the car are painted, and the driver is sitting on a milk crate with only a small window to see through. This makes the car ready to fit the maximum number of clowns in it.
So Basically, there is no hidden door or magic happening here, and all the clowns you see climbing out of the car are legitimately packed in there. Greg DeSanto, executive director of the Clown Hall of Fame and Research Center, told Car and Driver, “There’s no trick to the clown-car gag. There are no trap doors in the stadium floors, and the cars are real cars.”
This leads to another question:
Why Does This Act Looks So Impossible on Stage?
Now that we learned how do clown cars work, and realized there is no magic or trick here, the next question is how they make it seem so impressive. The answer is that they use several different visual tricks to make it look more impressive – like any skilled performer does.
The first thing is that they paint the car to look like a toy car, and present it on a large and mostly empty stage, or filled with some other props that are usually oversized, to mess with our sense of proportion. Oversized headlights and taillights can make the front and back appear to be smaller. Another way to create this illusion is by including several other clowns on stage as the car is arriving, usually dressed as traffic cops and road workers, and having them do their act while the car is in motion, and subtly slip closer to the crowd once the clowns start to come out of it, making the stage look even bigger.
The performers usually wear baggy clothes, often with expanding foam hoops and padding which compresses down in the car but makes it look bigger once they get out. A common tactic in this sort of performance is for the last person to come out of the car to wear an animal costume, like a giraffe with a telescoping neck, so it looks huge when the outfit is fully deployed.
When the clowns come out of the car, they will perform a routine where each one will slowly (and dramatically) extract himself from the vehicle. It has to be entertaining enough that people stay engaged, but the act should be long enough to make it feel like the amount of clowns in the car is never-ending, and they are coming out of it forever.
Since everything the performers are doing is on full display, it is not a real “trick”, rather a well-designed act made to look impressive, even though the process is pretty straightforward.
How Many Clowns Fit Inside a Clown Car?
This is another common question. If there is no magic here, how many clowns can actually fit in the car?
A simple volume calculation will give us the answer. The average height of a standard clown is 5 feet 8 inches, meaning each one is around 3 cubic feet in volume. The clown car has something like 120 cubic feet of free volume inside it, so the basic mathematic result is that 40 clowns are able to fit inside that car.
Having said that, it is obvious that this is not the actual number, as the clowns do not fill 100% of the volume inside the car, some of the room is used for props and customs, and they need to have some basic comfort. this makes the answer a bit lower – and typically between fourteen to twenty-one clowns can fit in a clown car, this is according to DeSanto (of the International Clown Hall of Fame).
History of the Clown Car Act
The clown car trick is older than you may think. Credible sources vary on exact details, but most point to the first clown car appearing in the early 1950s. While Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey are the best-known circuses, the clown car stunt was actually started by the lesser-known Cole Bros. Circus and clown Bob Strehlau, better known by his stage name Juggles the Clown.
During the 1950s, Lou Jacob from the Ringling Bros Circus first popularized his version of the clown car act by cramming in a customized 23 inches tall car and performing a solo act instead of stuffing a bunch of clowns along with him.
The clown car act is not only in the circus but also often being used in films and TV shows. A clown car is featured noticeably in Mel Brooks’ remake of the film To Be or Not To Be, which premiered in 1983. This is not Brook’s most well-known movie, but it did start the trend of clown car parodies on the big and small screen.
In 2013 at the French town of Castries, 31 clowns squeezed themselves in a Citroën 2CV car and broke the world record.
How Do Clown Cars Work – To Sum It Up
While we’re at it, let’s answer one last often wondered question regarding clown cars. Why is the sad clown crying?
The answer – because he was stuck deep in the clown car when one of them farted.
Have a nice day folks!