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The vaudeville term for when you pick everyone’s pockets before leaving town is “fireball show” because it’s big and flashy and distracts the rubes but you can’t maintain it for long because people get wise to your carnie schemes.
A Man Eating Chicken Bit is when you tell everyone they can see A MAN-EATING CHICKEN but it’s better expressed as A Man, Eating Chicken and everyone feels bummed you robbed them of a dime but you tell them wait till they trick their friend into being robbed for a quarter—gotcha!
There’s a surprising amount of slang related to sex acts done with ladies in the dancing show, a Fan Dance implies the dancer is only wearing fans she’s holding and is therefore flashing you which is an early antecedent to stripping
The Girl With The Whooping Cough was a play cut by censors for ‘French Dialogue’ that wasn’t in the script which is a sort of carnie Nod And Wink you do with local authorities cuz you won’t have gambling or non educational nudity or indecent reference
The ‘Talkies’ are despised because you used to have a Cartoonists who live drew animation while telling a story. My friends carnie dad taught me one that involved a music stand, a light bulb and a woman what got her pants around her ankles. The first cigarette I smoked was his.
The beauty of the trick (and his wife was in on the bit) is you have someone pretend to be a surprised censor and scold them and they protest their innocence and flip the picture back up and make a joke about whether the censor is getting any & so on. You should check detractors
Because the reason you *don’t* trust a carnie of any fucking sort is they’re only showing you part of the show and they’re telling you just past the curtain, where people in on the game are, it’s in that tent, pay a nickel, ask for Bobs Your Uncle & Wink while patting yr pockets
Because like “Follow the Ball” the trick to the slight of hand in 3 Cup Monte (or any variant is that watching for the ball going into the cup is how you pocket the ball) because they’re a Mark and you Chalkmark the back of their vest if they look rich so they get pickpocketed
Because you have to use a lot of doubletalk especially around sexual matters which conveniently have significant regional hard to nail down variation but Mediterranean Countries refer to different acts of Sodomy and Debauch*
*Sodomy isn’t necessarily gay, just nonreproductive
*Sodomy isn’t necessarily gay, just nonreproductive
So someone looking for a Greek treatment may be asking for frottage or sodomy in our contemporary common parlance—and taking them to the wrong one well, look, we set this up and you don’t have to *do it* just y’know we went to all this trouble and you are party to a crime...
Because the number one carnie trick is your sense of trust—because they only cheat non-carnies who aren’t in on their carnie games but they told you that! But you know carnies only let carnies in on the game—and they gave you that handjob for 3 run arounds and a saw buck...
And that’s after the Mirror Dance—two ‘twins’ (sometimes a mother daughter duo) dance mirror movements before a vacant mirror stand and you cut the lights when they lean in to kiss the mirror. Like you had a great night, here have a drink! Have 3!
So when you wake up in the morning and you now know what a Mark is you find yourself surrounded by empty bottles of top shelf liquor—the good stuff—and those bottles would’ve served in New York City (and restaraunts don’t sell the bottles and you don’t make rot gut) and, thing is
They tell you the Sodomy, Crimes, Diabolism you got into in that Bender & you can work off the tab you rolled up real fast! Just do the geek show, here have a shot! Don’t worry we’ll put it on your tab, who’s counting it’s just a Geek Show, Sparrow Mumbling’s Honorable as Mummery
So, the trick is a Geek bites the head off live chickens to work off the debt you didn’t really get an exact figure for but we are shaking dust and you need to work next town because those Marks aren’t near as smart as you...
