Geek show

Geek Shows were an act in traveling 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 center ring to chase live chickens. It ended with the performer biting the chicken's heads off and swallowing them. The Geek Shows were often used as openers for what are commonly known as freak shows.

Today

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 is found disdainful but ultimately entertaining by masses. It may also be used by a single person in reference to an experience which he or she found humiliating but others found entertaining. It is used in derision.

References in pop culture

A geek show figures in the Katherine Dunn novel Geek Love. 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 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".

Bob Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man, from the 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, makes a reference to the geek. 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 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 the is a show that opens with "The Geek" (played by Jeffrey Combs) eating maggots and then bite the head off a rat.

External links

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