The circus

Back in the 1970s, I saw an issue of Time magazine with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin on the cover with the headline “The wild man of Africa.” Something about that headline bothered me.  In hindsight, I realize that it sounds like an attraction in a circus sideshow!

I’m in an opera group, and it involves some acting as well as singing.  One year we were having an evening of acting exercises and one of them was to pretend to be freaks in a sideshow.  So I pretended to be the Wild Man of Africa!

The Toronto District School Board has some good night school courses.  I’ve taken their acting courses several times.  They have some interesting challenges:  once I had to do a pantomime with an invisible prop, so I pretended to jump on a pogo stick!  Another time I was in a group of three where we had to put together a pantomime so that the audience would guess the setting, so we pretended to be in a circus!  I was a lion tamer, someone else was a tightrope walker, but I don’t remember what the third one was.  At the end of our turn, we’d each take a deep bow with a theatrical flourish!

Ever see the movie Freaks?  It’s a controversial 1930s thriller directed by Tod Browning, set in a community of sideshow freaks.  There was a report that a pregnant woman in the audience got so freaked out that she miscarried, but maybe that was a publicist’s invention.  What makes it especially disturbing is the real-life freaks in the cast. (Apparently they had a good time making the movie.) It might have become a box-office hit, but MGM chickened out and removed it from circulation.  They put a statement at the beginning that was supposed to reassure the audience but today rather adds to the disturbing effect: with the advances in eugenics, they promise, “freaks” will become a thing of the past. (Some dwarfs would be murdered in the Nazi Holocaust!) On the contrary, today there are more freaks than ever because fewer of them are dying young!  And the more freaks there are of each type, the less freakish they seem…

There’s one scene in it where a conventional Hollywood beauty marries a dwarf in the group, and the other freaks give her a party and chant “Gaba-gaba, one of us!” (Later she tries to poison him and grab his inheritance, so the freaks disfigure her, and we see her head on a chicken’s body!) I’ve mentioned that I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I’ve joined a Facebook group for Aspies.  One newcomer to the group posted that he’d just been diagnosed with Aspergers, so I posted “Gaba-gaba, one of us!”

Our parents mostly kept us away from disturbing comic books. (No Conan the Barbarian for us!) But there was one that sneaked through.  It was in the Classics Illustrated series of book adaptations, which they did approve of.  This issue adapted Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs.  Hugo wrote it during his Second Empire exile on the Channel Islands, when he had nothing but good things to say about the United Kingdom in his letters, but in this book he casts a rather critical eye on English society.

  

It’s about a young man in England around 1700 whose face in childhood was deliberately disfigured to give him a grotesque look, including a permanent “smile.” He gets adopted by a mountebank and becomes a star on the medicine-show circuit, viewing his disfigurement as good fortune because it’s given him a way to escape the poverty all around him.  But then it turns out he’s the long-lost heir to an aristocratic title, and it turns into what Hollywood calls a “fish out of water” story.  The climax has him making his first speech in the House of Lords where he states his big ideals, a bit like Charlie Chaplin at the end of The Great Dictator, but the other lords take it as uproarious comedy! 

I’ve read the book, and it’s rather top-heavy with symbolism. (Hugo had that tendency.) It’s the sort of thing where his mountebank mentor is named Ursus (Latin for bear), he has a pet wolf called Homo (Latin for wolf), and he’s also raising a blind girl called Dea (Latin for goddess). I re-read the comic book a few years ago, and it’s still rather disturbing.  Paradoxically, Norman Nodell’s illustration gets to me because it’s a bit artless and blunt rather than stylish. (I think someone said that it’s the artless bluntness of the movie Night of the Living Dead that makes it so terrifying!) The cover shows people gawking at the title character, and it’s like they’re the real freaks!  Paul Leni also made a silent movie of it, and Conrad Veidt’s portrayal of him inspired Bob Kane to create Batman’s sardonic enemy The Joker!

Freak shows aside, have I ever been to the circus?  I remember going to the Canadian National Exhibition back in 1975, and they put on a circus show in the Ontario Place Forum. (They had stuff like a fire twirler and a unicyclist on a tightrope.) Did you know that that famous circus march music was originally March of the Gladiators, by a Czech composer called Julius Fucik?