In Casper, Few Know Their Own Merrily Johnston Is America’s Clown Of The Year 

CASPER — Merrily Johnston is 65, but she dresses in absurd clothes, wears gaudy makeup, and ties her auburn hair in pigtails. 

Her job demands it — she’s a clown.

She’s Clowns of America International’s (COAI) reigning Clown of the Year, in fact, which is kind of like saying she’s the Oscar winner of clowns.

Although at the Life Care Center, a retirement community in south Casper, her celebrity was unrecognized.

“How’s everyone doing today?” said Merrily, effusing at a recent event for a group of 80-and-ups.

The only response from the audience was the sound of labored breathing. Maybe their hearing aids were turned down. 

It could also be that their attention was divided, as a favorite classic Western had just come on the meeting room television.

“Oh, this is ‘The Rifleman!'” said a woman named Jackie, 85, her focus entirely on the 1958 series starring Chuck Connors. “This is a good show.”

The moment underscores something unsettling about Johnston’s profession: you can be the Meryl Streep of clowns and most people still wouldn’t know the difference.

Growing up in a house with seven children, attention was something she learned to generate, and she liked the challenge.

That Smile

She was raised on a diet of "I Love Lucy" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and she understands that entertainment comes from the body as much as the line.

“Well, I’MMMMM really happy to be here!” she told her crowd, stretching the words with an exaggerated grin.

Coming from Merrily the Clown, it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration.

She has large cheekbones and naturally high eyebrows that give her a look of constant delight. 

But the feature that sticks out most is her smile — the real one, without makeup — which she holds so wide and for so long it’ll make your own cheeks ache just looking at her.

That smile is the outward expression of something clowns have a name for.

“You can put on the makeup and the costume,” said Bob Gretton, director of membership for Clowns of America International. “But if you don’t have the heart— the desire to go out and make people happy — you don’t have anything. 

"And Merrily’s got it.”

It’s the type of heart that will even win over the 80-and-up demographic.

Merrily makes Jackie a long-stem rose and a princess crown. A man named Ricky gets a sword. Her sartorial presence is infectious. Soon, the elderly enact a performance of their own.

“I now em-princess,” Ricky said, dubbing his sword on Jackie’s shoulder. 

“Then I’m your problem now,” she responded.

Now Jackie’s excited, but she has a different fantasy in mind, inspired perhaps by all the action playing out on ‘The Rifleman.’ She flips her long-stemmed rose upside down to challenge Ricky to a sword fight. 

“I love the imagination,” Merrily enthused, then leaned in with a wink to tell Ricky, “You’ll be safe, I don’t put thorns on my roses.”

In some ways, this whole thing began with a balloon Merrily never got.

Where It Began

Reflecting on her origins as a clown, Merrily remembers an evening in Vancouver, Washington, 28 years ago. 

She was on a dinner date with her husband, but her attention kept drifting toward another man — a clown twisting latex into animals at the other end of the restaurant.

She watched from afar before deciding to get in line herself. 

“My husband was like, 'Oh my gosh, please tell me you’re not really going to do that,’” she recalled. “I waited in line a while and finally he just said, ‘That's enough. We got to go.’”

She didn’t end up with a balloon that day, but the embarrassment was her husband's alone. Their marriage didn’t last. Her interest in clowns did.

“That’s when I said I should just learn how to make those and I can make them whenever I want,” she said.

Merrily sought out mentorship, and apprenticed with a Ringling Brothers performer who drilled her in skits, timing, and physical comedy. She learned to face paint by attending conventions. 

This year, nearly three decades after that night in Vancouver, her dedication to the craft was recognized with the community’s  highest honor when she stood in Nashville to accept the award for “Clown of the Year.”

“It’s definitely a huge deal,” she said. “It’s really amazing — 2026 is my year.”

In Casper, Wyoming, however, she doesn’t always look like a huge deal.

‘Carpet Clown’

The day after working the room at the assisted living facility, Merrily unpacked a palette of face paint and a brush box at a birthday party in Casper’s Science Zone.

Of all her talents, the most magical may be her ability to calm rambunctious 3-year-olds, who tore through the Zone’s interactive exhibits before falling into a hushed, reverent line for Merrily’s chair.

It felt ritualistic, as though the children were getting painted and blessed for battle. 

One by one, they climbed solemnly onto her stool. She dashed elaborate designs on their small faces before sending them back out into the exhibit transformed. 

“I don’t know how she does that with these kids, their wiggly bodies,” said Kendra Mickelson, referring to the uncharacteristic stillness of her 3-year-old son, Hans, who stared up at Merrily with the wide unblinking eyes of a goldfish.

Merrily is what the industry calls a “carpet clown,” a term inherited from 19th-century circuses, where performers rolled out a carpet for skits between ring acts. 

Early performers always fell into two archetypes: the richly painted whiteface clown, who projected authority and order; and the red-nosed auguste clown, who misbehaved and made a mess of things.

Merrily is a bit of both.

“You look weird,” a young girl told Merrily during the party. 

“THANK YOU!” answered Merrily, a flash of Carol Burnett in the response. “That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard today.”

Sliding Down The Pecking Order

Face painting and balloons are the bread-and-butter of today’s carpet clowns. But there are a growing number of outside artisans encroaching on the trade.

“There’ll be 20‑year‑olds at these same events doing face paints and balloons, making the exact same salary that we’re making,” Gretton said. “They just don’t feel it’s worth the effort to learn makeup and comedy and (traditional) skills.”

Whether or not makeup and tradition are high priority at your average 3-year-old's birthday party is another question.

“I didn’t know there was going to be a clown here, but as far as I can tell, the kids like it,” said one child’s grandparent, Cindy Brooks, with a take-it-or-leave-it shrug.

According to Gretton, clowns have slid in the cultural hierarchy. At festivals, fairs and events, they play second fiddle to other performers.

“I get phone calls [from event planners] saying we’ve got a moon bounce, pony rides, we’ve got a magician. And we want you to come too — but we can’t pay you,” said Gretton, who was himself Clown of the Year in 2009 and still performs as Bunky the Clown.

“They’re paying everybody else but clowns. That's where we are in the pecking order,” he said.

Most clients who hire clowns stick to basics — balloons and face paint — skipping the cost of full comedy or magic routines. Merrily says that leaves some of her skills underused and at risk of growing rusty.

It raises the question of whether they belong in a larger market. There are even bigger questions facing the industry as a whole.

What’s At Stake If Clowns Go Away?

Even as clowning has lost relevance, it continues to evolve. 

Its latest incarnations reveal what the art has always been for, and what’s at stake if it continues to fade.

In the Depression era, new standard bearers emerged in the tramp and hobo clowns, who shifted the archetype from a purely comic figure into something more human. 

Ironically, these down-on-their-luck figures represented the high-water mark for American clown culture, symbolized by Lou Jacobs, a Ringling Bros. performer memorialized on a U.S. postage stamp in 1966.

Today, the lineage continues in a new form.

The “care clown” is emerging as the new archetype focused on therapeutic interaction. They visit children’s hospitals, pediatric wards or refugee centers, using improvisation and magic tricks to help cope with hardship.

Gretton recalls a recent visit to a care facility when in character as Bunky the Clown when he spotted an elderly woman slumped in her wheelchair. 

He folded a napkin into a paper rose and slipped it onto her tray. She looked up at him and said thank you. 

“The nurses rushed over to me afterward and said, ‘That’s the first thing she’s spoken in two years,’” they told him.

For clowns like Bunky and Merrily, moments like those are what justify everything else, including the wear and tear.

“There’s been times when I wake up in the middle of the night because my arms and fingers are aching and going numb,” said Merrily, explaining what can happen after a weekend of back-to-back parties and festivals.

To get through, she leans on her foundational instinct: find the joke within, even if the humor is a little dark.

“I am going to keep going as long as I can, hopefully right up until I die,” she said. “But I joke that I don't want to die during a gig, because people wouldn’t find that funny.”

For now, she’s helping others extend their longevity, and sometimes it's the smallest gesture that does the trick.

Small Kinds Of Magic

At the Life Care Center in Casper, Merrily struggled to make inroads with a woman named Dycke, who was in an off mood and declined her balloons. 

Maybe she was upset by the reminder that she's not as old as she thought. She said she was 103.

“No, Dycke, that’s next year. You’re always a year ahead of yourself,” her caregiver explained for the fourth time that day. "You’re 102, remember?”

She was also bothered because she wasn’t able to attend the funeral of her grandmother, who passed away last Tuesday, as Dycke tells it.

Whatever the cause of her mood, Merrily finally lifted it.

Dycke wouldn’t take a balloon, but she’d take a hug. In parting, Merrily bent down and placed a gentle kiss on Dycke’s liver-spotted skull. 

Dycke looked up through her clouded eyes and smiled. 

“You make a lot of people happy here,” Dycke said, forgetting for a moment all of life’s concerns.

Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.