Freak shows
Freak shows should be included in Stand Up USA because they have been a unique and significant aspect of American comedy for over one hundred years.

Freak shows are a form of live entertainment, typically part of a circus, amusement park, or vaudeville act. Viewers are invited to look at performers who have unusual physical qualities or talents (e.g. conjoined twins). They gained notoriety in the nineteenth century, when a growing middle class with expendable income sought new forms of entertainment. As a result, the exploitation of people with rare disabilities and deformities became a widely accepted part of American entertainment culture.

Freak shows appealed to a wide audience thanks to the accessibility of the humour, particularly among illiterate spectators. They are a demonstration of the superiority theory of humour, emphasised by Plato, Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes. This type of humour requires minimal former education or understanding but is essentially universally understood. Its premise relies on audiences being amused by the misfortunes of others and in turn, acting as a confirmation of their own heightened self esteem. It also plays upon the incongruity theory of humour as the ordinary expectations of entertainers or the physicality of humans is distorted and therefore perceptively comedic — in many ways an ‘aesthetic of astonishment.’
Stand Up USA examines persecuted minority groups like African Americans, immigrants, and women, yet fails to acknowledge the unfair treatment of the disabled community as objects of humour. Today, the notion of billing a subject a ‘freak’ is as offensive as saying ‘retard’ or ‘moron’ to a member of the mentally disabled community, yet they were once a mainstream part of American humour. The exploitive and degrading work of the acts was manufactured by popular sideshow owners like Clyde Ingalls, who once said that “freaks are what you make them” – reminiscent of minstrel shows which similarly mocked the most vulnerable members of society.
“Freaks are what you make them. Take any peculiar looking person, whose familiarity to those around him makes for acceptance, play up that peculiarity and add a good spiel and you have a great attraction.”
– Cylde Ingalls (Bogdan, p. 95)
Some of the largest and most prominent sideshows in the United States, including the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus and P.T Barnum’s American Museum sought out ‘strange’ acts for people to gawk and laugh at, and recruited them through whatever means necessary. Members often joined involuntarily, either because they were contracted by their parents, or lacked access to other job opportunities due to their condition.
Take Myrtle Corbin, who joined the show circuit at age 13 as ‘the four legged girl from Texas’ (her two pelvises meant Corbin was born with four individual legs). Her success led to many attempting to create false reproductions in other shows. For example, Chang and Eng Bunker were taken from their home in then Siam and publicised as ‘Siamese Twins,’ and performed backflips and played badminton for audiences until their contract ended upon turning twenty-one. Other disorders popularly exhibited included dwarfism, gigantism, hereditary hypertrichosis (werewolf syndrome) as well as various types of mental disabilities.

The popularity of freak shows largely declined due to the medicalisation of many of the abnormalities, which ended the mystery and easy appeal that the shows previously offered. These shows offer valuable insight into the attitudes, comedy preferences, and tolerance of Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They should be recognised in Stand Up USA.
– Dana, Cait, & Rémy, Tuesday 11AM, Group 5.
References
- Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
- Michael Chemers, Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show, New York: Springer, 2016.
