So, the original column was written in 1982, but when did scylla reply?
It says the reply was via the Internet, so I’m assuming many years afterward.
scylla, can you enlighten us?
P.S. I think you did a very good job enlightening Cece, and I thought he was a litttle too defensive.
every year at Oktoberfest in Munich! It was still there this year and although it’s probably 20 years since I last visited it, I thought the fleas were alive and fed by the trainer as described. It certainly seemed real and I must have “suspended my disbelief” as I remember being very impressed.
I’ve never seen a Flea Circus , although I’d love to. I know that you can use your search engine to find Flea Circuses on the internet, but I haven’t seen them, so I can’t say whether they were for real or not. But I do have a couple of comments:
1.) Both the Catholic comic book Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact (back in the 1960s) and the Paradox Press The Big Book of Freaks (1996) do an illstrated story of how Flea Circuses work that are so incredibly similar in what they say and how they say it that they MUST come from the same source, which I suspect is Bill Ballantine’s 1958 bookWild Tigers and Tame Fleas, which I haven’t read. These describe in very complete (and identical) detail how to train fleas for the flea circus. It all has the air of plausibility, but so would any sideshow patter (Ballantine worked as a clown and circus guy, as well as a writer. He knew whereof he wrote, but I;'m not sure he wouldn’t also spin a few tales: William Ballantine (disambiguation) - Wikipedia )
2.) The American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Invertebrates used to have an exhibit on flea circuses from the 1960s until they redid the Hall of Invertebrates in the 1990s. Their presentation featured enlarged pictures of tethered fleas and a few pieces of Flea Circus equipment. The descriptions agreed with the above items, so either there’s quite a bit of truth in that descriptioon, or else the curator responsible was taken in by Ballantine.
3.) I know that back in my youth there was a "game’ called “Flea Circus” that featured little ellipsoidal magetic “fleas” doing tricks. I thought this was just a bit of clever toymaking. I never would’ve thought that this was, is Scylla is correct, a recreation of what most flea circuses actually were.
I saw a flea circus the first and only time at an Oktoberfest thirty years ago. It was in a tiny trailer and the proprietor could get about six people in at a time. I’d bet it was the same guy you saw, justin.
I remember hearing somewhere that the main reason human fleas were used is because they are much larger than dog or cat fleas.
Benny Hill once did a skit about a flea circus where all the props were rigged and no real fleas were used. Pretty funny. I don’t see how anyone would accept anything like that as an actual performance. As mentioned by Cecil, real fleas actually did perform.
I had to rub my eyes when I saw Cecil speaking in all seriousness of “training fleas”. Scylla’s response was excellent. That column is one of the most ill-informed Straight Dopes I’ve read.