Jenkins 1
Ruby Jenkins
Dr. Adam Davis
English 365 - Folklore
20 October 2010
The Life of the Carnival;
Carnie Lore and the People who Bring Life to the American Carnival.
Over the past century and a half the idea of the carnival has manifested itself many different ways—whether it be by watching the train-traveling circus of Barnum and Bailey make its way across the country as early as 1872, the Ripley’s Believe It or Not crowd watching the fabulous Mr. Ripley display and explain his findings from across the globe, or by watching Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas. People flock to the idea of a festival, a chance to win a prize, spend a day with their family, to get a chance to tug the bearded woman’s beard, or to ditch your family to catch the strip show happening in tent four. When I began this project, I recalled the large street celebrations of my past, thinking that it would be fun to examine the ways that people remember carnivals. However, the more I researched and did my field work, the more I learned about the complex and intricate lives of the people who worked at these carnivals. My project focuses first on a history and explanation of who are Carnies, where they work, and how they have changed over the past 50 years. Focus specifically on American carnivals, and my research was conducted with people from ages 20 – 60. The topic of my research is the lore surrounding carnivals. One of the scholars I modeled my research after is Donald J. Ward, past director of Comparative Folklore and Mythologies studies at UCLA from 1978 to 2004.
Carneys are not the easiest group of people to define. Carneys (also spelled carnie and carny) are typically defined as a group as the “men” who work at carnivals.[1] Kevin Morra has been a carney for the past twenty years of his life and writes a blog entitled Diary of a Carny under the name “Who Cares?” Morra’s blog has provided the invaluable first-hand insight into the world of carnies that my paper conveys. In one entry Morra states his feelings about the term ‘carney.’ He writes, “I don’t like being called carny, and neither do most that have been out here for awhile, we prefer being called ‘Show People.’ The public will always call us Carnies though so that’s how I will address us here.”[2] The term ‘carney’ may not be the most appropriate to use based on this comment. However, the term is so embedded in their culture, and used so perfectly in combination of Morra’s complex relationship with his work (which will be explored further later in this paper), that I will use it in this paper. However, carnies work at all the manifestations of a carnival, whether it is a fair, freak show, sideshow, at-show or circus. A fair is typically an economic institution, with the primary goal of boosting the economy of a certain area and promoting and selling goods from that particular area. The freak shows and “at-shows” were generally a part of a larger sideshow at a even larger carnival or circus, but are in and of themselves different from each other. The side show “describes a particular kind of show or exhibit that developed in the mid-1800s under the guidance of P. T. Barnum and others; it featured dancing girls, magic acts, and especially human oddities (known as ‘freaks’ in the business).”[3] Freak shows are usually traveling displays of human deformities that are a result of a medical condition, genetics, or fakery (for example bearded ladies, giants, dwarfs, Siamese twins, etc). The “at-shows” display “feats of strength and athletic prowess such as weightlifting, boxing, and wrestling.”[4] The “at-shows” have recently developed into the world of professional wrestling. Carneys also include the people who own and maintain the rides at carnivals as well as the people who sell the food there.
The history of the carney goes back centuries. However, my examination of their folk group spans roughly the last hundred years. Carnies have a wide range of places where they can work. Traveling shows still exist, as well as the opportunity to appear at fairs such as state fairs. Cirque du Soleil, Barnum and Bailey’s, and numerous other circuses are not only profitable institutions but also legal and well paying. On August 18th 2010 an article was published on Statesman.com interviewing a husband and wife human cannonball duo. According to the article there are only ten human cannonballs in the entire world.[5] These big circuses have become very institutionalized, yet the traveling carnies that my blog fieldwork focuses on show similar discontent within the smaller carnie arenas. As stated earlier, Kevin Morra writes a blog on blogspot.com called “Diary of a Carny.” This blog began in April 2006 and seems to have been abandoned in 2008. One of the entries dated December of 2006 begins,
I find it ironic that my Carny life should end just as the curtain lowers on the Carny Culture of today, it's last dying exhale.
The hard living, road happy people of yesterday are few and far between now, replaced with clean cut, drug free, South Africans or others the shows can import for cheap. Most of the big shows are owned by corporations now, not families anymore.[6]
Interestingly enough, the previous quote suggests that Morra is about to leave the carnie world, however his blog continues for another two years. The last entry he writes in 2008 does not express the same lament that this one does. Instead his last entry laments a carnie romance that ended with a girl named Sarah, whom he dated for two years despite their significant age difference. However, he expresses contempt at the out-side hires later throughout his blog:
Gone are the days when you worked your way up, season after season, sweating in the sun, setting up, tearing down, learning every inch of the ride until you got to the point you could "feel" when something was wrong. When you had "proved" yourself, you became the foreman.[7]
Beyond the importation of labor, he likens the change in carnie culture from the past fifty years to the change at the turn of the century.
I suppose it was the same at the turn of the century, when the industrial age came along and mechanical rides replaced the sideshow tents and girlie shows, fortune tellers, tattoo artists, and soon dominated the Midway. I'm sure the Carnies of that era felt much the same way.[8]
I attempted to contact Kevin Morra to ask further questions, however, he has yet to respond to my email. This community of outliers seems to bond and feel a sense of comfort in their travel-based lives by knowing that the carnie life is not for everyone and that being a carnie means being a part of something greater. In one particularly reflective entry, dated October 2, 2006, Morra writes that although he doesn’t have the white picket fence that his brothers have, “if you truly want to be unhappy, try doing what other people think you should be doing.” He also writes that a
Carnival is a good place to hide, no one really gives a shit who you "really" are. You can give a fake name, fake SSN, I know all the tricks. No one will find you if you don't want to be found, and no one in Carny land will ask too many questions.[9]
However, in a blog dated April 2007 he records a problem in the changing economy of the carnie.
Here's the problem, a major one for the new guys that have bought the Carnival world. They require background checks on new employee's, drug testing, and valid government ID…The new "Rules" the corporation has put in place lock Carnies out in the cold, most of them can't pass a drug test, or a background check, sad but true. Locking them out was the intention. The corporation wants to really "Clean" things up they say, like they're so much fucking better, spare me.
As stated earlier, Morra’s relationship with his job, as many carnies, is a complicated one. Morra seems to transverse the philosophical territory between hating the injustice of pay and social exclusion and taking pride in this aspect of his work. In one entry dated April 2006, he criticizes the book Memoirs of a Sword Swallower, in which he writes,
His book is a quaint romanticized version of what Carny life was like in the forties and it’s bullshit. I’ll tell you why. Most of the people were treated and payed like dogs, even worse than they are nowadays, so I highly fucking doubt that the characters he describes in his book felt all that romantic about it. They were just barely surviving, and I’m willing to bet that they would rather have been doing something else, but they were misfits, and couldn’t last at anything else in the normal world. I’m not just talking about the freaks in his book, I’m also talking about the other Carnies too.[10]
The discontent with pay and lodging is repeated throughout his entries. He also writes about the rough life of carnies. He writes about drug use (specifically marijuana when he directly refers to ‘shake’ at one point, which is the tail-end, stems of a bag of marijuana)[11] and alcohol, as well as talking about fights he has been in.
In addition to this, he also writes about the experience of sex on the carnival lot. His blog frequently laments all of the one-night-stands he had and all the children that he could have that he will never know. Like all of his blog, he writes about his sex life with a distant, removed, and remorseful tone. About one one-night-stand he writes, “we finally ended up at a motel fucking the night away. In the wee hours of the morning I told her I needed to go get cigarettes, and I never went back…I didn’t give a shit about her. That’s the way I was in those days. A fucking prick.”[12] The same callous, yet, remorseful language and attitude is used when describing “lot lizards.” “Lot lizards” are women who have had the worst end of the carney experience possible. Women who “are runaway girls…working on a ride, getting paid shit, and trying to survive off shake…[and] four dollars a day in change.” He writes about one specific woman he remember who had “fucked and sucked her way across the country on the Carnival, that’s how she survived, that and shake.”[13] This sad picture of a woman destroyed by a life of poverty is not the first thing that non-carnies tend to think of when picturing carneys. As desperate a picture as lot lizards create Morra does not condemn just the carny world for these conditions. In the entry So You Wanna Be A Carny, he records a story of one summer when he left the carnival to hitchhike on his own. He wrote,
I met every kind of weirdo you can fucking imagine that summer. I found it interesting how some seemingly “Normal People” act when they think they will never see you again and that no one gives a shit about you. I had “seemingly nice” old guys wanting to suck my cock, wanting me to suck their cock, all the while showing me pictures of their wife and kids, talking about what a good life they had. I spent a lot of hours riding in vehicles with “normal looking” fucking weirdoes. I returned to the Carnival after that summer. It’s a lot safer, and it’s home.[14]
“Diary of a Carny” seems to be a fairly well read blog in the carnie community. Kevin Morra was interviewed on the Ballycast.com website in 2008. Ballycast is a blog promotes itself as “Ballycast! Blog and Podcast of the Carnival, Sideshow, and Burlesque with Wayne Keyser, Robin Marx, and Donnie Kerr.”[15] The blog posts interviews with current entertainers as well as living past entertainers. This blog represents an interesting insight into the relatively current world of carnies. One interview dated February 4, 2008 is an interview with Lady Aye of the Pyrate Sister’s Bump ‘n Grind House. The interview introduced Lady Eye as a woman
who’s cooked up a unique combination of burlesque and side show arts. She does the glass walking and straight jacket strip tease, block head , and more. Her associates do the stripping, and sometimes a narrator ties it all together framed as a 1950s b-movie horror flicks in a magical combination called the Bump ‘n Grind House.[16]
The same page of story announcements contains an interview with The Amazing Vanteen, a promotion of the website of the exploits of Vanteen, the magician of 40 years who died in 2006. Later on the page there is a “carny food recipe” for a Long Island iced tea, which calls for a “scant jigger” of several of the ingredients. The entire Ballycast website contains over 40 interviews with various carnies who have been working in the business for decades. This archive of interviews shows the continuation of the carnie folk tradition despite the vast changes it has undergone over the past century. Ballycast (as well as wikipedia) also has a glossary list of “carny terms,” or terms used only by carnies. This cant is an important part of the construct of the carnie identity and will be explored later in this paper.
As stated earlier, carnies are a group who turn profit off their status as outliers from society. They do this not only by being physiologically different from the majority of society (such as “freaks”), but also by having a different lifestyle than non-carneys. Circuses and carnivals traditionally travel through part of the year, but tend to have a home base when they settle for part of the year. Carnivals and fairs abide by seasons, traveling in the summer and dissipating in the winter. In his article, “The Carny in the Winter”, Donald J. Ward analyzed the Los Angeles carnie folk group during the off (or winter) season. His main informant’s name was Ronald Burke, a carney (as is his father). Ward’s article reports that the carneys are male, can vary in age from young to elderly, but that most of them are middle aged. His article says that their backgrounds in education and social standing vary, and that while different all the carnies he interviewed enjoy their way of life.[17] Ward also reports that the carneys are able to sell anything, and that they have a unique language in which to communicate with other carnies so that non-carnies does not understand. This language, called “carnie” has frequently been referred to as “Z-Latin” or “carney Pig Latin.”[18] The cause of this titling is because the base construct of this language is as follows: