HOW YOUR BRAIN WORKS

This becomes interesting as an explanation of how so many teens and twenty somethings only know clowns as something that is supposed to be feared.

With fewer people attending live circus performances, and producers hiring fewer skilled clowns, the chances that someone has the first-hand experience of seeing a talented professional circus clown in actual performance is astronomically slim.

The far greater majority of people "know" what a circus clown is from film and television, which (even when the aren't mining the "scary clown" trope) are as likely to accurately depict a circus clown as a James Bond film is to accurately depict a female nuclear physicist.