Hipsters Note: “PBR” Means Something Entirely Different Outside Williamsburg Bars

Message to New Yorkers, how about this year you don’t try tackling the rodeo clown when he runs into the stands? As the Daily News explains, it’s part of the show:

Flint Rasmussen is more than a rodeo clown.

As the barrelsman for the Professional Bull Riders, Rasmussen, 40, fills gaps in the competition by singing, cracking jokes, heckling the audience, running, jumping, tumbling, hurling T-shirts and souvenirs into the crowd, and dancing to “Thriller” and “Sexyback.”

“You’re in Madison Square Garden and you’re expecting all these cowboys,” says Rasmussen, “and I’m out here doing Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake.”

The riders are wrangling bulls at the Garden through today, so I donned one of Rasmussen’s spare cowboy hats to learn his act. He spared me the bulls, not the workout.

On the packed dirt trucked onto the arena floor, I fumbled my way through a series of jumps and a kickin’ cowboy dance that Rasmussen seamlessly segued into a moonwalk.

“Anybody can do moonwalk in slick shoes on a stage,” he told me, “but not in soccer shoes on the dirt.”

In Rasmussen’s act, the arena becomes an obstacle course. The obstacles are the bulls, barrels, the riding area’s 7-foot fences and even audience members. Rasmussen has even been known to leap the fence and sprint up through the Garden’s stands – a trip that left me winded by the second tier.

Last year, he says, a wayward fan tried to tackle him, but most of the danger is bovine. “I’m having fun in a place where everything else that’s going on is very dangerous and very serious,” says Rasmussen.