Article: Act in American traveling carnivals
Geek shows were an act in traveling carnivals and circuses of early America and were often part of a larger sideshow.
The billed performer's act consisted of a single geek, who stood in the center ring to chase live chickens. It ended with the performer biting the chickens' heads off and swallowing them. The geek shows were often used as openers for what are commonly known as freak shows. It was a matter of pride among circus and carnival professionals not to have traveled with a troupe that included geeks. Geeks were often alcoholics or drug addicts, and paid with liquor – especially during Prohibition – or with narcotics. In modern usage, the term "geek show" is often applied to situations where an audience is drawn to a performance or show where the performance consists of a horrific act that the crowd finds distasteful but ultimately entertaining. It may also be used by a single person in reference to an experience that he or she found humiliating but others found entertaining.
References in pop culture
Freaks (1932) is a horror film with a long history of controversy because it used real carnival performers. In its original release, it became the only MGM film ever to be pulled from cinemas before completing its domestic engagements.
In the film noir classic Nightmare Alley (1947), based on the 1946 novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham, Tyrone Power plays a sideshow barker in a seedy carnival which includes a geek biting the heads off live chickens. Power's character later succeeds as a charlatan mentalist, but then descends into alcoholism and is reduced to falsely portraying a geek as a means of survival in another sideshow. (Bradley Cooper plays the same character in the 2021 remake.) In one of Gresham's non-fiction books, Monster Midway, he further details the process of making an alcoholic or a drug addict perform a geek act in exchange for a fix.
Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man", from the 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, makes a reference to the geek in its third verse. It is directed at the 'straight' Mr Jones, who is unable to come to terms with the counter-culture youth revolution around him:
You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, "How does it feel
To be such a freak?"
And you say, "Impossible"
As he hands you a bone.
In the 1975 Robertson Davies novel World of Wonders, the narrator, Paul, tells how as a boy he was kidnapped and molested by a Willard, a carnival magician. Paul eventually becomes a world-famous illusionist, while Willard is reduced to geeking.
In the television show Starsky and Hutch (1976), Huggy tells Starsky and Hutch that the guy they are looking for, Monty Voorhees, used to be a geek. Starsky explains geeks to Hutch. He also claims that the geeks formed a union in 1932, which he then admits he made up. "Well, suppose all they paid you in was chicken heads." (“Bounty Hunter”, Season 1, Episode 22)
The artist Joe Coleman bit the heads off white rats as part of his stage act as Doctor Momboozo in the 1980s. He primarily did a 'Human Bomb' show, self-detonating at the end, but also performed with the rodents for his turn as a geek.
The 1990 Troma film Luther the Geek revolves around a geek named Luther, who eventually becomes a murderer who bites the heads off his victims.
A geek show figures in the Katherine Dunn novel Geek Love (1989). Crystal Lil, the debutante mother of the freaks, met their father while performing as a geek during her summer break from university. Aloysius, the proprietor of the traveling circus, comments that college boys often toured as geeks during their summer breaks, but at the sight of the lovely Crystal Lil and her eagerness they made an exception. During a recounting of her time as a geek, Crystal remarks on how damaged her teeth were from biting the heads off chickens.
In the 1993 Beavis and Butt-Head episode "At the Sideshow", Beavis and Butt-Head go to a carnival, run afoul of the staff, and are forced to join the sideshow as Siamese twin chicken geeks.
In the 1995 X-Files episode "Humbug", real-life sideshow performer The Enigma portrays a mostly-mute geek named "The Conundrum." True to the classical view of circus or even other sideshow performers about them, one of the sideshow workers calls The Conundrum "neither highly trained nor professional, just...unseemly." In true geek form, The Conundrum's willingness to eat anything plays a crucial role in resolving the episode's plot.
In the 1998 Simpsons episode "Bart Carny", Homer and Bart are asked to perform in a geek show to pay off a debt: "You just bite the heads off the chickens and take a bow".
In Marvel Noir, Norman Osborn has his henchmen all employed from various sideshow attractions. Adrian Toomes was a former Geek, and seems to have lost all conscience, as he devoured Ben Parker.
In the film The Wizard of Gore there is a show that opens with "The Geek" (played by Jeffrey Combs) eating maggots and then biting the head off a rat.
In the first two episodes of American Horror Story: Freak Show, there is a geek named Meep (played by Ben Woolf) who performs in the Freak Show biting heads off of baby chickens. He is eventually wrongfully arrested and murdered by the other inmates in prison.
In HBO's 2003 television series Carnivàle, Ben Hawkins' father, Henry Scudder, deserted the Austro-Hungarian Army and fled to America where he eventually succumbed to alcoholism and worked as a sideshow geek at Hyde and Teller's carnival.
References External links
detailed article on the Circus Geeks |
Source: Log in Advertisement geek (n.)
"sideshow freak," by 1911, U.S. carnival and circus slang, perhaps a variant of
geck, geke
"a fool, dupe, simpleton" (1510s), apparently from Dutch
gek or Low German geck,
from an imitative verb found in North Sea Germanic and Scandinavian meaning "to croak, cackle," and also "to mock, cheat" (Dutch
gekken , German gecken , Danish gjække , Swedish gäcka ). Compare gowk .
Green's Dictionary of Slang
credits "one Wagner, of Charleston, West Virginia, who had a celebrated touring snake-eating act" as the popularizer of the name for the particular style of "wild man" act in which a performer (often suggested to be something sub-human) would eat or bite apart live snakes, bugs, chickens, etc.
At the highest point in the street was an empty store room in front of which, perched upon a large box, was a showman who was frantically calling in husky voice and waving hands, “He eats ‘em alive, he eats ‘em alive! O, yes, gentlemen, come right in and see the ‘Wild man from Samar’ — from the deep jungles of the far off Philippines! He eats rats, bugs and snakes alive! He eats ‘em alive, he eats ‘em alive! Only ten cents to see the wild man — walk right in, etc.” […]
Inside the empty store room were a dozen people gazing at the wild man who was confined in a cage in the rear end under a dim light, while a second showman stood just in front of this cage expatiating upon the wonderful nature and shocking habits of the untamed creature before them. The wild man had rather long red hair and beard, and was clad in an old coffee sack, and at frequent intervals would seize a whisp of straw from the pile on which he was seated and go through the motion of eating it, or would search in the straw as if for live food such as had been described as being his favorite diet by his master at the door. But finding none, he would fly into a fury and seize the cage as if to tear his way out. Then the keeper would cry out to the crowd to stand back — “Back, back gentlemen! Iloilo is dangerous when angry — don’t you see the crowd angers him? He’s hungry — we have not given him his supper yet — the supply of snakes gave out this afternoon — he's furious!” and striking the cage with a large iron poker he shouted, “Down Ilo, down!”
“Iloilo” having been successfully calmed, the exhibition went on for a short while till the last of the sightseers departed and the officers were left alone with the showman at the door. Stepping down from his box he exclaimed to the keeper inside, “Well, Bill, I guess the show's over in this town,” and invited them inside.
There, as soon as they had agreed to close the exhibition, the wild man caught the cage (an old hickory crockery crate painted black) and pitched it off over his head, and asked for a bottle of beer, several of which he consumed before he clothed himself and disappeared.
[Chaplain C.Q. Wright, “The Wild Man from the Philippines”
The Sailor’s Magazine , July 1913.]
By 1949 it was also defined as "any disliked person." In the 1970s the term gained currency as an insult for a kind of worthless, wimpy but pretentiously macho person, popularized by the catchphrase of pro wrestler "Classy" Freddie Blassie (1918-2003) who described all his enemies as "pencil neck geeks." Blassie had picked up the word when he began wrestling as a circus performer in the 1930s. After his retirement he released a novelty record titled
Pencil Neck Geek
, which became a hit on the Dr. Demento Show.
You see, if you take a pencil that won't hold lead,
Looks like a pipe cleaner attached to a head,
Add a buggy whip body with a brain that leaks,
You got yourself a grit eatin', pencil neck geek.
[Song "Pencil Neck Geek." By Johnny Legend (Martin Margulies) and Pete Cicero, 1977.]
By 1980, geek was used in teenager slang in reference to a "weird person" or a "studious person" and perhaps influenced by
freak
in this sense. The original freak show origins of the word were still widely known and the concept was colored by these associations, such as a geek being unclean, uncouth, disfigured, violent, etc. Throughout the 1980s the term was always used insultingly, even by studious people and tech-lovers; often interchangeable with
wuss , dork , dipshit , etc.
I could not believe Bob Mack’s review of the new Danzig LP,
How the Gods Kill
[Spins, August ’92]. It’s not right for you to say that Glenn Danzig is a “comic book-collecting geek born in Jersey.” He is much more than that. He does what he believes in and believes in what he does. I collect comic books, and I am not a geek. Bob Mack, I hope you die at the hands of Lucifer.
Chris Allen Fort Worth, Texas
[Letter to the editor from SPIN Magazine, Nov. 1992.]
In the popular 1984 film
Sixteen Candles
, Anthony Michael Hall's girl-crazy, tech-loving, socially despised character was only credited with the name "The Geek" and the term's popularity was boosted. The film
Revenge of the Nerds
was released the same summer, featuring similar character types, which circumstance likely contributed to
geek and nerd
becoming more or less synonymous.
From c. 1989 the appellation became neutral in college slang, taking on a sense of "a person having knowledgeability or capability." In the 1990s it was often paired with another word (
film geek, computer geek
, etc.) and no longer necessarily used with a sense of disparagement.
also from 1911 geek (v.)
"become excessively enthusiastic" about a particular topic, c. 1990, typically with
out (adv.); from geek (n.). geek out vi.
To temporarily enter techno-nerd mode while in a non-hackish context, for example at parties held near computer equipment. [Eric S. Raymond, "The New Hacker's Dictionary," 1996]
also from c. 1990 Entries linking to geek freak (n.1)
1560s, "sudden and apparently causeless turn of mind," of unknown origin. Perhaps it is from a dialectal survival of a word related to Middle English
friken
"to move nimbly or briskly," from Old English
frician
"to dance" [OED, Barnhart]. There is a
freking
attested in mid-15c., apparently meaning "capricious behavior, whims." Or perhaps from Middle English
frek
"eager, zealous, bold, brave, fierce" (see
freak (n.2)).
The sense of "capricious notion" (1560s) and that of "unusual thing, fancy" (1784) preceded that of "abnormally developed individual or production" (first attested in
freak of nature
, 1839, which later was popular in variety show advertisements for bearded ladies, albinos, etc.; compare Latin
lusus naturæ
, which was used in English from 1660s). As "drug user" (usually appended to the name of the drug) it attested by 1945. The sense in
health freak , ecology freak
, etc. is attested from 1908 (originally
Kodak freak "a camera buff"). Freak show
is attested from 1887.
gowk (n.)
"cuckoo," early 14c., from Old Norse
gaukr , from Proto-Germanic *gaukoz
(source also of Old English
geac
"cuckoo," Old High German
gouh ); compare gawk
. The meaning "fool" attested from c. 1600.
These words are like mushrooms growing on the same stump: they are members of one rootless family. [Anatoly Liberman, "Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology," writing of
gawk , gowk , geek , etc.] nerd out gawk geeky
See all related words (
6 ) > Advertisement Trends of geek
adapted from books.google.com/ngrams/. Ngrams are probably unreliable.
More to Explore out
expressing motion or direction from within or from a central point, also removal from proper place or position, Old English ut "out, without, outside," from Proto-Germanic *ūt- (Old Norse, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Gothic ut, Middle Dutch uut, Dutch uit, Old High German uz, German
gawk
"stare stupidly," 1785, American English, of uncertain origin. Perhaps [Watkins] from gaw, a survival from Middle English gowen "to stare" (c. 1200), from a Scandinavian source akin to Old Norse ga "to heed," from Proto-Germanic *gawon, from PIE *ghow-e- "to honor, revere, worshi
eccentric
early 15c., "eccentric circle or orbit," originally a term in Ptolemaic astronomy, "circle or orbit not having the Earth precisely at its center," from French eccentrique and directly from Medieval Latin eccentricus (noun and adjective), from Greek ekkentros "out of the center" (
Nimrod
The word came to mean "geek, klutz" by 1983 in teenager slang, for unknown reasons....
flake
"thin flat piece of snow; a particle," early 14c., also flauke, flagge, which is of uncertain origin, possibly from Old English *flacca "flakes of snow," or from cognate Old Norse flak "flat piece," from Proto-Germanic *flakaz (source also of Middle Dutch vlac, Dutch vlak "flat,
tun
"large cask," especially one for wine, ale, or beer, Old English tunne "tun, cask, barrel," a general North Sea Germanic word (compare Old Frisian tunne, Middle Dutch tonne, Old High German tunna, German tonne), also found in Medieval Latin tunna (9c.) and Old French tonne (dimin
person
c. 1200, persoun, "an individual, a human being," from Old French persone "human being, anyone, person" (12c., Modern French personne) and directly from Latin persona "human being, person, personage; a part in a drama, assumed character," originally "a mask, a false face," such a
labyrinth
c. 1400, laberynthe (late 14c. in Latinate form laborintus) "labyrinth, maze, great building with many corridors and turns," figuratively "bewildering arguments," from Latin labyrinthus, from Greek labyrinthos "maze, large building with intricate passages," especially the structu
luxury
c. 1300, "sexual intercourse;" mid-14c., "lasciviousness, sinful self-indulgence;" late 14c., "sensual pleasure," from Old French luxurie "debauchery, dissoluteness, lust" (12c., Modern French luxure), from Latin luxuria "excess, extravagant living, profusion; delicacy" (source a
rise
Middle English risen, from Old English risan "to rise from sleep, get out of bed; stand up, rise to one's feet; get up from table; rise together; be fit, be proper" (typically gerisan, arisan; a class I strong verb; past tense ras, past participle risen), from Proto-Germanic *us-
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updated on October 23, 2023
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