Joel Schechter's new book of oral-history interviews with members of the Pickle Family Circus offers an unparalleled journey into the mind of the clown. Audiences are accustomed to seeing clowns, but they rarely hear them think. The Pickle Clowns places a slapstick stethoscope under the fright wig of comic performers like Bill Irwin and captures the pulse of their thought processes, as they invent gags and re-create the trajectory of their most memorable comic inventions.