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Speaker 1: in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, we're also looking
Speaker 1: at you. Oakland. We are coming out to Sketch Fest
Speaker 1: this year again for the second year in a row,
Speaker 1: and we're doing it rare Sunday afternoon jam, so that
Speaker 1: is Sunday, January at one pm. You can come see
Speaker 1: us live and tickets are gonna go fast, So go
Speaker 1: to s F Sketch Fest dot com and just click
Speaker 1: on the little ticket links or look at the lineup
Speaker 1: and follow us there and we can't wait to see everyone.
Speaker 1: It's one of our favorite cities to perform in and
Speaker 1: uh go to s F Sketch Fest dot com Oakland,
Speaker 1: San Francisco. We will see you soon. Welcome to stuff
Speaker 1: you should know from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Speaker 1: Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Roland and that
Speaker 1: makes this stuff. You should know the podcast. Yeah, who
Speaker 1: would have ever thought that we could do more than
Speaker 1: one podcast on fleas? Had I thought about flea circuses,
Speaker 1: I would have thought that. Yeah, we covered it a
Speaker 1: tiny little bit. I went back and looked just to
Speaker 1: make sure we weren't being too redundant, and uh, we
Speaker 1: just sort of mentioned it briefly. But how delightful to
Speaker 1: dig in even further. Yeah, I mean, like, there's no
Speaker 1: way that we really got into it because it's one
Speaker 1: of like the least documented aspects of popular culture I've
Speaker 1: ever come across, man, And there's so much misinformation, and
Speaker 1: you run across people who act like they know exactly
Speaker 1: what they're talking about, and then you do more research
Speaker 1: and you find out they really are wrong in a
Speaker 1: lot of it. It's it's really it was crazy. It
Speaker 1: was a crazy research. Yeah, and you go to web
Speaker 1: pages that are solid green with white letters punctuation. What's that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a little weird, but yeah, people take us
Speaker 1: to task on the accuracy of this one. Then we'll
Speaker 1: be like you, you go do better. So um, I
Speaker 1: think we kind of gave it away. The cats out
Speaker 1: of the bag, and so are it's fleas. We're doing
Speaker 1: flee circuses. We're talking about flee circuses, and they actually,
Speaker 1: like I think of police circus is fairly old timey,
Speaker 1: but I usually think of him as like the twenties
Speaker 1: or thirties, maybe even the forties from like that old
Speaker 1: tech savery flee circus cartoons or um. But they go
Speaker 1: way further back than that, or even the concept of
Speaker 1: of training fleas in some way, shape or form goes
Speaker 1: even further back than that. Yeah, which will we'll get
Speaker 1: to it. But training them as a bit of a misnomer, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a stretch for sure. It's sort of like tying
Speaker 1: and gluing things to fleas and just let them be fleas. Yeah, basically,
Speaker 1: as you will probably come to the same conclusion, flee
Speaker 1: circuses are really mean. Yeah, they're cruel. No matter how
Speaker 1: you feel about flease they are. Yeah, they're cruel, cruel
Speaker 1: acts of barbarity. I think that's how the East to
Speaker 1: buille it. Actually, Yeah, tiny cruel acts of barbarity comes
Speaker 1: see Professor long Hair and his flee circus which torments
Speaker 1: but they're small, so who cares? Right? Uh? So fifteen
Speaker 1: seventies is uh. If this is accurate, we're all gonna
Speaker 1: go all the way back to a man named Mark
Speaker 1: Scalliot who uh did not have a flee circus, but
Speaker 1: he was supposedly in London one of the first people,
Speaker 1: or perhaps the first person to use a flee as
Speaker 1: a prop of some sort. Yeah, to basically show off
Speaker 1: his skills as what as a he was a blacksmith. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a smithy. And he made like this really
Speaker 1: really tiny intricate caller that he put around to flee
Speaker 1: and he said, check this out. Yeah, and everyone was.
Speaker 1: I guess because this apparently other people, uh like watchmakers
Speaker 1: and stuff would would make little tiny watches as well
Speaker 1: as gimmicks. But I guess the thing they were trying
Speaker 1: to show is the only thing I can think of
Speaker 1: is if I can make something this tiny that works,
Speaker 1: imagine what a real size human watch would look like.
Speaker 1: It would work even better. But he got kind of
Speaker 1: famous from it from what I understand, and the idea
Speaker 1: of using fleas called on kind of kind of well,
Speaker 1: it took a couple of hundred years. But if if
Speaker 1: you look into fleas and flee circuses, like I just
Speaker 1: took him for granted, I never stopped and thought why fleas,
Speaker 1: But there's actually really good reasons why fleas, and it
Speaker 1: has to do with For one, fleas used to be everywhere,
Speaker 1: Like no matter where you lived in the world, you
Speaker 1: shared your living space with fleas, which must have been
Speaker 1: pretty awful. But apparently it was just a fact of life.
Speaker 1: So that's one thing. They're ubiquitous, they're easy to come by.
Speaker 1: The other one is that fleas are really really good
Speaker 1: at jumping, and that actually makes them, under the right circumstances,
Speaker 1: really good for this flee circus idea. Yeah, and we
Speaker 1: we you know, if you really want to itch yourself, uh,
Speaker 1: go to listen to the fleet episode. Um. But they
Speaker 1: come in a couple of thousand varieties, and the ones,
Speaker 1: apparently for circuses are the little flat, reddish brown ones
Speaker 1: about two point five millimeters in length, and um, they
Speaker 1: can jump though two point five millimeters. They can jump
Speaker 1: sometimes as high as eight nine inches in the air.
Speaker 1: I saw it to ten. Oh, well, where you getting
Speaker 1: that was from? The Royal Air Force experimental station. They
Speaker 1: apparently set up some equipment in the sixties and we're
Speaker 1: photographing fleas jumping. Oh yeah, see here that they said
Speaker 1: that um, at the start of a jump, a flea jump,
Speaker 1: they experienced forces greater than a hundred and forty times
Speaker 1: out of gravity. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. They have these
Speaker 1: little um what are called elastic cuticles in their legs
Speaker 1: and they can store a tremendous amount of potential energy,
Speaker 1: and when they release them and they jump, that potential
Speaker 1: energy turns into kinetic energy. And since that it's basically
Speaker 1: this elastic um connector that's really storing the energy, they're
Speaker 1: not having to use up a lot of their own.
Speaker 1: So they can jump like this, like thousands of times
Speaker 1: in an hour. And apparently when they jump. I don't
Speaker 1: I'm sure we said something somewhat contradictory in the actual
Speaker 1: Fleas episode, but the relation of their jumps to their
Speaker 1: body size, um, it compared to humans of like us
Speaker 1: jumping over the Statue of Liberty or something along those lines,
Speaker 1: which is very hard to do, ken harder every day. Man.
Speaker 1: I was kind of thinking about these fleas jumping and
Speaker 1: like evolutionarily speaking why, And I guess they're just so
Speaker 1: small that when a dog goes to scratch or bite
Speaker 1: at it, or whatever animal tried to get the fleet off,
Speaker 1: they can't just be like, well, let me run away
Speaker 1: as fast as I can, because the dog's bite will
Speaker 1: still get it. So they learned, I think, quite literally,
Speaker 1: how to jump and get the heck out of there
Speaker 1: very very quickly in order to survive. And the coolest
Speaker 1: fleas make the Bionic Man sound when they jump if
Speaker 1: you listen really close. All the hipster fleas, right. Uh so,
Speaker 1: I guess we should talk about the main dude though, right,
Speaker 1: who we owe all of us owe a great debt too.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying his name, you know, you've got to
Speaker 1: say his name. This is the eight teen twenties, and
Speaker 1: uh he was an Italian impresario in London named Louis
Speaker 1: Berte Lotto nice. Yes, yeah, there's so many ohs and
Speaker 1: t s. I thought I messed it up. No, I
Speaker 1: know it's a it's an unusual name. Yeah. So he's
Speaker 1: the guy in London who said, uh, I want to
Speaker 1: be really famous one day, and my big idea is
Speaker 1: to take fleas and put them in shows. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it worked. It did work. I saw somewhere that the
Speaker 1: the origination of flee circuses it was um due largely
Speaker 1: to him. But I didn't really see anybody else sighted
Speaker 1: earlier than him. You know, the watchmaker, the smithy, Um Mark, Mark,
Speaker 1: the blacksmith. He wasn't doing any kind of shows or tricks.
Speaker 1: Louis Berte Lotto Um said, you know what, the fleas
Speaker 1: aren't props. The fleas are going to be the stars
Speaker 1: in my show. That's right, And I think he may
Speaker 1: have been the one who had the the original idea
Speaker 1: to do this. Yeah, I love our own article said
Speaker 1: his show was part action, part humor, part social commentary.
Speaker 1: But I think that was the case. You know, they would, uh,
Speaker 1: well we might as well talk about what these things did.
Speaker 1: They would do everything from high wire x to uh
Speaker 1: sword fighting too, uh. Political and historical re enactments. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They re enacted the Battle of Waterloo dressed dressed in
Speaker 1: like military garb. Yeah. They would play a soccer or football. Uh.
Speaker 1: They would do um, high diving, pretty amazing stuff, the
Speaker 1: little pools of water. They would a little chariots and carriages. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was one of the first ones. Because you know,
Speaker 1: I think, especially back in the early nineteenth century, people
Speaker 1: didn't know everything there is to know about fleas like
Speaker 1: we do today. So the idea of watching a little, tiny,
Speaker 1: tiny flee, like a three millimeter long flee pulling like
Speaker 1: a hearse or a chariot or a cart um that was,
Speaker 1: you know, hundreds of times its own weight. Any better,
Speaker 1: it's gonna it's gonna impress you, especially if you're a
Speaker 1: five year old Chimney sweet who's owned by the guy
Speaker 1: who bought you from your parents. Yeah. Or I actually
Speaker 1: looked up some flea circuses on YouTube. Uh there were
Speaker 1: just little kids. There was one and I think Denmark
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties that I looked at. I saw
Speaker 1: that and like in Telfair, Yeah, people were just delighted.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean I watched some of the videos too,
Speaker 1: and I noticed that, like my hands were classed together
Speaker 1: beneath my chin. I think it might have been the
Speaker 1: perfect post election uh youtubing that I could have done. Actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: it worked pretty well. Uh so Bert sorry, Bert, his
Speaker 1: uh his act was not small if you think, well,
Speaker 1: sure he did this at some county fairs and sideshows
Speaker 1: uh and then his wife made him stop. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: true at all. He actually got really famous for this.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean they likened him to Elvis Presley.
Speaker 1: I don't know if he was that big. I think
Speaker 1: the point the authors making is like that this guy
Speaker 1: wasn't some some like, he wasn't Internet famous, he was
Speaker 1: like famous famous, Like he traveled the world doing this.
Speaker 1: It's good for him, right, Yeah, And he didn't. As
Speaker 1: he traveled the world, people were like, I can do
Speaker 1: that too. Tired of working, I want to do this.
Speaker 1: But it turns out that from what I can tell,
Speaker 1: as far as showbiz goes, running your own flee circus
Speaker 1: has got to be one of the more demanding side
Speaker 1: shows there there are. Well sure, I mean part of
Speaker 1: the problem is your performers. Well, first of all, it
Speaker 1: says in here and this is like again with this research,
Speaker 1: you just sort of have to take some of these
Speaker 1: people at their word. But they say that about one
Speaker 1: in tin fleas can even make the cut, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: Once you find your your champion team of they're they're
Speaker 1: gonna die and there need to be cared for and
Speaker 1: traveling all over the world with your prized fleas is precarious. Well, yeah.
Speaker 1: Especially um, if you're traveling to do shows and colder
Speaker 1: climbs there aren't fleas, and fleas don't do very well there.
Speaker 1: Your whole troop may die the night before a show.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine? But apparently it happened a lot. There
Speaker 1: was a guy I read and I'm not quite sure
Speaker 1: who it was, but they he had a a standing
Speaker 1: gig in I think Switzerland maybe or somewhere somewhat northern Europe,
Speaker 1: and he had to send down No she I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: she had to send down to Majorca to get um
Speaker 1: fresh shipments of fleas like every two weeks because hers
Speaker 1: just kept She couldn't keep them alive any longer than Yes,
Speaker 1: I have offers from all over the world to take
Speaker 1: my show, but you're afraid of one thing when you
Speaker 1: get out of the country, can you at fleas? I
Speaker 1: went to Sweden and I had to send to ma
Speaker 1: Yorka in Spain to get fleas fortnite every fortnight. Who
Speaker 1: was that? It was a woman a sword swallower right? Uh?
Speaker 1: Was that Professor Tomlin? No, I can't remember her name,
Speaker 1: but she's like a legendary sword swallower. Um professor tests No,
Speaker 1: Professor Chester. No, none of the professors, And that was
Speaker 1: another thing I noticed from this too, but I couldn't
Speaker 1: really find the origin. Apparently, if you had a flee
Speaker 1: circuses from from like the nineteenth century to the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century, you the flea master, build yourself as professor
Speaker 1: or whatever. So there's just all these really weird trends.
Speaker 1: But the in the history of flee circuses, it was
Speaker 1: like one person would come up with an idea and
Speaker 1: then they go and show it and for some reason
Speaker 1: it would attract a bunch of other imitators, and that's
Speaker 1: that's basically the history of it. I would have built
Speaker 1: myself as account oh man, you know, that would have
Speaker 1: broken new ground. But they would have to pay money.
Speaker 1: And this says in the nineteen fifties professors still said
Speaker 1: we pay six shillings a dozen, although there have been
Speaker 1: times of shortage when a single flea has cost as
Speaker 1: much as two shillings. Well, you know, also, if you
Speaker 1: look around today, at which I did, I couldn't find
Speaker 1: anywhere to buy fleas. You have to send off for
Speaker 1: um overseas um. But I've thought, surely there's some weirdo
Speaker 1: somewhere who's selling fleas to flee circuses and there are none,
Speaker 1: none whatsoever. Well, there is a flee circus in Germany. Still, yeah,
Speaker 1: at the Munich October Fest. Where else would you have one?
Speaker 1: Oh it's Mimi Gono, that was her name, the flee circus,
Speaker 1: uh woman? Okay, yeah, alright, so you wanna take a
Speaker 1: little break here, Yeah, all right, well let's break. Let's
Speaker 1: go pick the fleas from our own bodies. I know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm itching or scratching. Then maybe we can train
Speaker 1: them to finish this episode for us. So, Chuck, we
Speaker 1: we kind of made it as far as Bertie Lotto,
Speaker 1: and there's actually a lot of mystery surrounding that guy.
Speaker 1: Here's the weird thing. Okay, I'm going to confess something
Speaker 1: to you. When I first read this article, I was like, well,
Speaker 1: here's a stinker. Then I dug in a little further
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, I'm being tortured with research
Speaker 1: to do a stinker. And then the more I did,
Speaker 1: the more I did, the more I dug in, I'd
Speaker 1: find these weird little things that kept popping up that
Speaker 1: combined create the the the history or the culture of
Speaker 1: flea circuses. And and the more I came upon these
Speaker 1: little things and putting them together more the more. I
Speaker 1: was just totally delighted. But then I think, like you
Speaker 1: when I when I finally hit YouTube and it was like, okay,
Speaker 1: I need to see some of these. Then I was like,
Speaker 1: I love flee circuses. I could sit here and talk
Speaker 1: about him all day. Well, we'll try and keep this
Speaker 1: all day. So I just realized I didn't finish my thought.
Speaker 1: The um the weird little thing that I found out
Speaker 1: about Professor bar Lolo, thanks man Um, he just vanished,
Speaker 1: he disappeared. He was like as famous as as an astronaut,
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden he's gone. And there's
Speaker 1: a guy um who is uh. I think his name
Speaker 1: is Andy Rich. He's like basically the foremost Flee circus
Speaker 1: researcher working today. And he found Professor Berto Lotto. Apparently
Speaker 1: he moved to Canada and lived out the rest of
Speaker 1: his life and anonymity. Wow, yeah, I have a question.
Speaker 1: Why do you always use asked not as a fame indicator,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's as Simpsons reference. It's Homer was saying,
Speaker 1: somebody who's richer than an astronat. I was gonna challenge
Speaker 1: you and say, name an astronaut. Oh, dude, Jim Lovell No, no, no,
Speaker 1: name a current astronaut. Oh current astronat We got Mark
Speaker 1: Kelly and Scott Kelly. Okay, alright, t get back off.
Speaker 1: Then her their parents called them Project Jim and I,
Speaker 1: oh that's cute. But they think they not just made
Speaker 1: that up? Oh really? Yeah? Oh man, that would have
Speaker 1: been surely someone as I thought of that. If not,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna trade market. Uh yeah, and then you could
Speaker 1: blackmail them. I feel like you want this nickname. I
Speaker 1: know you're richer than an astro. Alright, So early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: if you're talking imitators over here in the United States,
Speaker 1: we had a man named William Heckler, and he was
Speaker 1: one of the first dudes over here to be a
Speaker 1: successful fleamaster. And uh he did the usual things, made
Speaker 1: them box and race and juggle. And we're gonna tell
Speaker 1: you some of these secret it's by the way. If
Speaker 1: you're wondering how these things are accomplished, just hang in there. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he said at one point he was bringing in
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty dollars uh day or performance in
Speaker 1: a in a day of performances, a day. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: many many performances. And here's the thing if lee I
Speaker 1: kind of wondered I was, because I didn't find it
Speaker 1: until later in the research, like, well, how do you
Speaker 1: see this stuff? But you wouldn't have very many people
Speaker 1: in there. You'd have like ten or fifteen people crowded
Speaker 1: around a little table for six to ten minutes. You
Speaker 1: would shuffle them out and bring in the next group. Yes,
Speaker 1: I saw somewhere that if you were really dedicated to it.
Speaker 1: I think Cecil Adams wrote it on the on the
Speaker 1: Street dope that if you were like a really dedicated performer,
Speaker 1: you could conceivably do fifty ten minute performances a day.
Speaker 1: So that's basically like ten hours with a ten minute
Speaker 1: break every hour. And if you're not a really dedicated
Speaker 1: flea master, then just get out of my face. What
Speaker 1: do you even bother? Seriously, though, I mean is when
Speaker 1: we talk about how to do this, it will become
Speaker 1: clear just how much work this must be. Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: well let's talk a little bit about that. Um, every
Speaker 1: flee is different. And like I said, uh, if you
Speaker 1: believe the research, about ten percent of the fleezer fit
Speaker 1: for the job, and it's like we mentioned, you don't
Speaker 1: really train them. What you do is back in the day,
Speaker 1: you would take either some silken thread or some really
Speaker 1: thin gold wire, like hopefully you can't even see it,
Speaker 1: that's sort of the idea, and you tie a little
Speaker 1: tiny noose of sorts around this fleezer neck. And apparently
Speaker 1: that was really hard to do because when a fleet
Speaker 1: eats the blood of their master, which is true, we'll
Speaker 1: get to that again later, but their next well, so
Speaker 1: you can't tie it too tight or else they're gonna
Speaker 1: die and your prize flee could die. Or if it's
Speaker 1: too loose, then the flea goes away and the chariot
Speaker 1: stays behind, and that's no good. And you just hear
Speaker 1: a tiny bionic man sounds right, So um, that's very hard.
Speaker 1: Number one. Number two the idea that you have to
Speaker 1: do that with new fleas every I would guess probably
Speaker 1: every few weeks if you're on average, because fleas, I
Speaker 1: mean they live maybe a year. Most fleas live about
Speaker 1: three or four months. So you've got like a some
Speaker 1: star performers and they're just they're performing, you know, for
Speaker 1: a few months or whatever. So you're having to basically
Speaker 1: constantly harness fleas all the time, and and again before
Speaker 1: you even harness them, you have to sort them. So
Speaker 1: you have to study and observe the adult fleas see
Speaker 1: which one's like to jump. Um. There's an old legend,
Speaker 1: uh that apparently came from Professor Heckler's son, if not
Speaker 1: Professor Heckler himself, who said, um, you you put a
Speaker 1: lid over a jar, and you can train them not
Speaker 1: to jump too high because they'll hit their head on
Speaker 1: the jar and they don't like to do that. So
Speaker 1: they learned not to jump. Then they've passed their first test.
Speaker 1: It's not clear whether that's actually hocum or not, but um,
Speaker 1: that's for for a very long time, that's been part
Speaker 1: of the lower of training fleets. The problem is, I
Speaker 1: think you said it, please can't actually learn anything. They're
Speaker 1: not really being trained. They're actually being physically restrained in
Speaker 1: lots of ways, including that harness and starting with the harness. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know, though, Heckler. Professor Heckler that is also said,
Speaker 1: and this was fascinating to me as far as whether
Speaker 1: or not these fleas can learn anything. He said that
Speaker 1: he would to get the best fleas, put them in
Speaker 1: a glass jar. Uh, that's too tall for them to
Speaker 1: jump out. And he said that he would notice the
Speaker 1: really good fleas would jump up on the side, fart
Speaker 1: out a little bit of sticky stuff, whatever that is,
Speaker 1: and then spend the rest of the time trying and
Speaker 1: trying to hit that identical spot again to grab hold
Speaker 1: of the sticky stuff basically a foothold to be close
Speaker 1: enough to the top to leap out. Amazing. I don't know,
Speaker 1: hope I believe it. He well, yeah, I mean he
Speaker 1: was a showman, consummist, showman, Like he didn't just basically
Speaker 1: point and be like, look at the fleas, came your money,
Speaker 1: please leave now, Like you were like carrying the show on, right,
Speaker 1: you had to tell this this this, You had to
Speaker 1: help the performance along, your professor, for god's sake, right,
Speaker 1: when this guy is being interviewed over the years, I
Speaker 1: can't imagine he didn't like ham it up in the interviews.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, like a lot of it's lost
Speaker 1: too to time, what was true and what wasn't as
Speaker 1: far as these these old guys go. Yeah, but he uh,
Speaker 1: Professor Heckler also said when he was picking them out,
Speaker 1: and he said, stodgy wins are broken to the merry
Speaker 1: go round harness flight he fleas make good dancers. Those
Speaker 1: with especially strong legs will become kickers, jugglers and chariot racers. Yes,
Speaker 1: so you've got you've got fleas harness. That's like the
Speaker 1: first initial thing, but there's other things you need to
Speaker 1: do to them. To write. You can take that harness,
Speaker 1: and the most basic thing you could do is take
Speaker 1: that harness and actually hook it up to, like you said,
Speaker 1: a chariot or or or a merry go round or
Speaker 1: something like that. And yeah, people will be like, that's
Speaker 1: pretty neat, that's cool. But before I could do that,
Speaker 1: you know, but you could do other stuff too, and
Speaker 1: a lot of it involves glue unfortunately. So say like
Speaker 1: you take a tiny piece of um of wood or
Speaker 1: a tiny piece of metal and you glue it to
Speaker 1: the flea's arms, right, Yes, and we should say once
Speaker 1: that happens, that's it. That's never that's never coming off
Speaker 1: for the rest of the fleas life. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: do you think they even survived that day? I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that they typically survive a few weeks of performing. Okay,
Speaker 1: so even if they had a little sword glued to
Speaker 1: their body. Yeah, I think they live horrible lives. I
Speaker 1: mean basically, we as a species should know more about
Speaker 1: this because if the fleas have a rise up and
Speaker 1: become intelligent, like our backs are against the wall for
Speaker 1: what the flee circus flea masters have done to them
Speaker 1: glued to the wall, they'll be like, oh, guess whose
Speaker 1: turn it is? Alright, so go ahead, Oh so you
Speaker 1: you um, you glue a piece of stick or something
Speaker 1: to their arms, and remember already they're harnessed. And then
Speaker 1: you do the same thing to another flee and then
Speaker 1: you tie their harnesses down and you just kind of
Speaker 1: tickle them or do something to stimulate them, and they
Speaker 1: start waving their arms and it looks like the sword fighting.
Speaker 1: So that's a really good example of a flee circus.
Speaker 1: Like you're you're having them do things, and then the
Speaker 1: flea masters like, well, look at this, this is a
Speaker 1: sword fight, everybody see they're doing or fencing or something
Speaker 1: like that, right, and train them to do so exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: So there's there's these things were Really it's the interaction
Speaker 1: between a restrained flee, usually with the prop glued to it,
Speaker 1: defending itself or responding to some sort of noxious or
Speaker 1: threatening stimuli and then the flea master coming in and saying, oh,
Speaker 1: they're they're fencing, or they're walking the high wire something
Speaker 1: or there. This is Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they would play soccer. Like I said, So, what they
Speaker 1: would do there is they would get a little piece
Speaker 1: of cotton wool. Uh, they would soak it in something
Speaker 1: that the fleet doesn't like, some odorous, malodorous thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I looked that up. Like lavender works really well, citranilla,
Speaker 1: cedar oil, those are all lovely. That's the shame. But
Speaker 1: come to think of it, when you see natural flee sprays,
Speaker 1: that's what's in natural flee spray exactly. So they would
Speaker 1: soak it in that stuff and then uh, just the
Speaker 1: flee would literally just kick at it to get it
Speaker 1: away like a little soccer ball. Right, they're either kicking
Speaker 1: at it to get it away or because they were
Speaker 1: restrained and when they kick, instead of it propelling the
Speaker 1: flea away, it's repelling the ball away from them. So
Speaker 1: if you have them this kind of do that back
Speaker 1: and forth, then yeah, they're playing soccer. What about juggling, Josh,
Speaker 1: love it what you do there is he would glue
Speaker 1: a flee to its on its back basically and then
Speaker 1: put another little tiny piece of cotton and their legs
Speaker 1: and they would kick at it trying to get it off,
Speaker 1: and it apparently would just kind of go up and
Speaker 1: down and spin around like it was juggling. Amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like this is this is uh thanks to Heckler
Speaker 1: in particular in the United States. Um, he really started
Speaker 1: hitting the county fairs and um, the the the carnivals,
Speaker 1: so it became basically part and parcel with the with
Speaker 1: sideshows the circus. Like basically, anytime you went to a
Speaker 1: decent carnival, there's a flea circus there. Yeah. And I
Speaker 1: get the feeling that these professors would try and they
Speaker 1: would try and innovate, They would try and come up
Speaker 1: with new tricks and new things that would delight people,
Speaker 1: because you want to keep people coming back, you know, right,
Speaker 1: So that's where you come up with things like the
Speaker 1: the hype Howire act and the flea walls when it
Speaker 1: would appear as if a fleet orchestra was playing and
Speaker 1: fleas were dancing. Yeah, because there's there's other things that
Speaker 1: fleas respond to. Two besides um citronella. They respond very
Speaker 1: well the heat. They can sense heat very well, and
Speaker 1: if it gets too hot, they want to get out
Speaker 1: of there. So if you apply heat from beneath on
Speaker 1: say like uh just um, I don't know, a drumhead
Speaker 1: or something like that, they'll all start hopping around. But
Speaker 1: if they if they can't get away, if they're harnessed in,
Speaker 1: then it looks like they're dancing. If you put a
Speaker 1: little flea orchestra to the side with instruments glued to
Speaker 1: their their arms at a nice backbeat exactly, then you
Speaker 1: have fleas playing music and fleas dancing to it. A
Speaker 1: fleet ball. Uh. So this all is delightful and well
Speaker 1: and good. Um, but what fun is a naked little
Speaker 1: flee doing these things? If you could have a flee
Speaker 1: dressed up as Napoleon, right, And that's what they did.
Speaker 1: They apparently historical figures were lampooned. Uh. They would supposedly
Speaker 1: get Mexican nuns who had quote nimble fingers tired and
Speaker 1: eyes deteriorated. I don't see how that makes any sense.
Speaker 1: So they're these they they're nimble fingers grew tired in
Speaker 1: their eyes deteriorated as we're making these things. Okay, I
Speaker 1: thought that was that was a good quality they look
Speaker 1: for in a Mexican nun. Seems stress. How are your
Speaker 1: nimble fingers feeling? That's kind of tired. They're tired. That's sad.
Speaker 1: Actually then, so they would get apparently these Mexican nuns
Speaker 1: to make these tiny little costumes, and um, they're still
Speaker 1: on display today if you go to uh, how do
Speaker 1: you pronounce that name? England? Mispronounced everything in England. It's
Speaker 1: spelled Hertfordshire show Cambridge, all right, Cambridge, England. I think
Speaker 1: it's where at the Rothschild Zoological Museum there are two
Speaker 1: fleas dressed as Mexican fleas on display, and right in
Speaker 1: our lovely Edinburgh, Scotland that we adored so much. Had
Speaker 1: I sped at home, had I known that there was
Speaker 1: a museum of childhood there with a flea wedding party
Speaker 1: dressed up on display, I would have gone in a second.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it was a thing. I think it was
Speaker 1: already a thing in Mexico, and the flea circus masters
Speaker 1: said hey, I need to get some of those, so chuck,
Speaker 1: if you have a bunch of fleas and they're making
Speaker 1: you money. You want to keep them alive, right, how
Speaker 1: would you do that? Well, as we all know, fleas
Speaker 1: or parasitic blood suckers. Uh. And so they would just
Speaker 1: go down to the blog bank and get a bag
Speaker 1: of blood right right, and let the fleece swim around
Speaker 1: in it. Yeah, and they loved it. Know what they
Speaker 1: would do is and this is like, it gives me
Speaker 1: chills thinking about it. They would roll up their sleeves
Speaker 1: and stick their arm down there and let the fleas
Speaker 1: feed on their bodies. Yeah, a couple of times a day.
Speaker 1: But apparently apparently though it was part of every single
Speaker 1: show that you would end the show with. And now,
Speaker 1: since these fleet performers have done so great, I shall
Speaker 1: let them least on my blood, and the crowd would
Speaker 1: be like you gross? That makes sense. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: part of stage pattern, but apparently at least Heckler, but
Speaker 1: I'm sure others actually did let the fleece feed on them. Uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, what's a good flea master to do? Well,
Speaker 1: feed your fleas blood Either that or have like again,
Speaker 1: a chimney sweep that you bought from a chimney sweeper
Speaker 1: to let the Fleece feed on. I hope that the
Speaker 1: episode has come out, but it's going to be really confused. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or it'll be really delightful when it does come out
Speaker 1: and they'll be like, oh that makes sense now. Hey,
Speaker 1: one more thing about Heckler. So there was a Heckler Sr.
Speaker 1: And Junior, and apparently Junior kept it going in Times
Speaker 1: Square until like the late fifties had a flee circus going,
Speaker 1: and Heckler's flee Circus shows up in a scene an
Speaker 1: Easy Rider. No way. Yeah, I couldn't figure out what's scene.
Speaker 1: I didn't have time to go check, but there's a
Speaker 1: scene an Easy Rider where in the background there's Heckler's
Speaker 1: flee Circus. And then they were pushed out of Times
Speaker 1: Square by peep shows, and then the peep shows were
Speaker 1: pushed out by Walt Disney and Giuliani. Yeah, Heckler tried
Speaker 1: at first to do pants less flee circus, but it
Speaker 1: didn't work very well. Yeah, no one wants and finally
Speaker 1: just packed it up. All right, Well, let's take one
Speaker 1: final break here and we will talk about another kind
Speaker 1: of flee circus right after this. So check one thing
Speaker 1: that I found. I'm pretty sure you found it too,
Speaker 1: was that when you start looking into flee circuses, some
Speaker 1: people think that there is never such a thing as
Speaker 1: flee circuses that used real fleas. Yeah, I thought you
Speaker 1: were going to say, when you start looking into flee circuses,
Speaker 1: there's no going back, you'll never be the same again.
Speaker 1: That's definitely your like, unchanged forever. Yeah. I always thought
Speaker 1: that flee circuses were a complete ruse and that there
Speaker 1: were never any real fleas performing, right, Apparently, No, that's
Speaker 1: not the case. There have been, and indeed, ours recently
Speaker 1: as the nineties, there have been flee circuses that you
Speaker 1: real fleas following these traditions that we just mentioned. But
Speaker 1: if you believe that there are plenty of flee circuses
Speaker 1: out there that don't use any fleas whatsoever, you're right too,
Speaker 1: because there's both. Yes, there's the type of flee circus
Speaker 1: that doesn't use fleas is called a humbug flee circus.
Speaker 1: It's all it's all stage magic, it's all illusion, and
Speaker 1: it's pretty pretty awesome. Actually. Yeah. There was a man,
Speaker 1: a magician named George Tollerton in the nineteen thirties, and
Speaker 1: he wrote a booklet actually um outlining fake flee circuses
Speaker 1: and skits that you can do wherein you're sort of
Speaker 1: the I mean, while the carnival barking was going on
Speaker 1: in the real flee circuses. Um, you you really want
Speaker 1: to take center stage if you have a fake flee
Speaker 1: circus as then not only introducing the death defying feats,
Speaker 1: but then you are are following these fleas, jumping around
Speaker 1: on with mimicking it with your eyes and following it around,
Speaker 1: you know, by moving your head around as if the
Speaker 1: audience is looking at some invisible thing, which they are, right, right,
Speaker 1: they are, and you're basically just using your powers of
Speaker 1: suggestion to get them to think they're seeing what you're saying. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the most like basic humbug flee circus there are, right,
Speaker 1: But there's one in that that started like that. I
Speaker 1: guess the genuine stagecraft stage magic um humbug flee circus
Speaker 1: came about from Michael Benteen, who was a goon actually, right,
Speaker 1: remember that explain that the goons showed up in the
Speaker 1: Monty Python episode. They were the direct predecessor of Monty Python,
Speaker 1: Spike Milligan and his goons. Yes, he wasn't a hockey
Speaker 1: playing goon. That's a different thing. Or a goon on
Speaker 1: Scooby Doo or a goony, right, just a regular old goon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Michael Benty and he was a British performer and entertainer
Speaker 1: and he uh in nineteen fifty performed that the UH
Speaker 1: called the Royal Variety Show. I guess I think so.
Speaker 1: And it was a little, you know, fake flee circus
Speaker 1: apparently pretty elaborate one, yeah, because rather than just using
Speaker 1: like his um power of suggestion, he was using things
Speaker 1: like magnets and remote control pumps and mechanical devices to
Speaker 1: really kind of do this exaggerated simulation of a flee
Speaker 1: doing stuff going through the circuit of his flee circus. Right.
Speaker 1: So he would say, have a magnet or a piece
Speaker 1: of string of something or something pushing a ball or
Speaker 1: rather pulling a ball up a hill an incline, and
Speaker 1: he would say that this is the uh, the flee
Speaker 1: sysiphus and he's pushing this ball up a hill, right
Speaker 1: or um, this is this is my favorite. This gets
Speaker 1: me every time a flee going up on the high
Speaker 1: dive board and then so as he's going up there,
Speaker 1: the wrongs of the ladder, each one gets depressed right,
Speaker 1: so you can see the fleece progress up. The ladder
Speaker 1: gets up to the end of the board, jumps a
Speaker 1: couple of times, so the springboard goes up and down,
Speaker 1: and then it makes a springing sound as he jumps
Speaker 1: off right exactly dives into the water, and there's like
Speaker 1: this huge splash, which a fleet could never make a
Speaker 1: splash to begin with, but a huge one. It's just hilarious.
Speaker 1: Or I like the one the sand table. They would
Speaker 1: have a little sandbox in the fleet with the fake
Speaker 1: fleet would invisibly jump around, but it would create a
Speaker 1: little splash of sand everywhere. He dropped all over the
Speaker 1: place and again, all with magnets, all fake ery. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but really really clever. I get the impression. He was
Speaker 1: not um, not terribly old at the time when he
Speaker 1: first debuted on tv UM, And in the grand tradition
Speaker 1: of flee circuses, some other people saw it and said,
Speaker 1: I want to do it too, So the Humbug flee
Speaker 1: circus took off and became pretty popular, and like the
Speaker 1: second half of the twentieth century, I should say popular
Speaker 1: as far as flee circuses go, which is to say,
Speaker 1: not very popular, right, popular among weirdos. Yeah, I'm really
Speaker 1: kind of wondering about this burta Lotto and his fame,
Speaker 1: like he might not have been I don't know. I
Speaker 1: mean just because you travel the world. I mean, he
Speaker 1: could have been traveling the world performing in front of
Speaker 1: you know, sixty people a day. That's not exactly Elvis.
Speaker 1: It's true. This whole thing is under a cloud of suspicion,
Speaker 1: is yeah. Man, it's really tough to figure out the
Speaker 1: what's from the who's, and the winds and the why
Speaker 1: and the fleas from the magnets. Yeah. Yeah, because once
Speaker 1: you introduced that humbug ury into it, everything comes into question.
Speaker 1: There was, actually, though, there was a book that I
Speaker 1: want to get. It's a it's a pamphlet basically turned
Speaker 1: into a book from that a guy named Tom Palmer wrote.
Speaker 1: It's called the Famous Flee Act, and it teaches you
Speaker 1: everything you need to know to do a humbug flee circus.
Speaker 1: I just want to read it just for funzies. You know,
Speaker 1: Christmas is coming up. I bet you someone out there
Speaker 1: I'll send that to you. I was talking to you.
Speaker 1: That's just someone else out there. Well okay, uh my
Speaker 1: call to you. The public listening stuff you should know
Speaker 1: public is Ano. They're doing this in October Fest. But
Speaker 1: somebody needs to bring this back in a big way. Well,
Speaker 1: a woman did in the nineties, but it didn't take
Speaker 1: for very long. But I mean it was pretty big
Speaker 1: in the nineties. Um. Her name was h what is it, Chuck,
Speaker 1: Maria Fernanda Cardoso. Okay, did you read about her? No,
Speaker 1: you should check out her act. You didn't see the
Speaker 1: video of it. No, there's like a seven eight minute
Speaker 1: vimeo of her and apparently it's just the highlights, So
Speaker 1: I guess their act was longer, and she's a performance artist,
Speaker 1: so um it was. She did it at like different places,
Speaker 1: like she did at the New Museum in New York
Speaker 1: and um, San Francisco and just kind of some some
Speaker 1: pretty neat places places you wouldn't expect to see a
Speaker 1: flee circus, is what I'm saying. I guess. But she
Speaker 1: used live fleece in the grand tradition of flee circuses
Speaker 1: and uh made a very beautiful, neat almost circutus, so
Speaker 1: laish flee circus in the nineties. Yeah, but there's a
Speaker 1: video of it, or there's plenty of videos. I'm sure
Speaker 1: of it out there. Um, just flick her up and
Speaker 1: look for the flee circus video with with our thumbs
Speaker 1: up on it. Yeah, and you know, we kind of
Speaker 1: joked about this being cruel it. Um, it's easy to
Speaker 1: say this is a fleece and who cares. But I'm
Speaker 1: sure there are people that get up in arms about
Speaker 1: using any sort of you know, mistreating and animal for
Speaker 1: any kind of or insects, animals. Let's just say for
Speaker 1: this argument, for sure, for the entertainment of humans. You know,
Speaker 1: there's probably at least one person out there that thinks
Speaker 1: this is a very cruel thing to do. Know, there's uh,
Speaker 1: there's apparently um societies that are dedicated to preventing cruelty
Speaker 1: to insects in particular, and they have called specifically for
Speaker 1: flea circuses to be banned outright. And they make a
Speaker 1: pretty convincing case, especially if you don't allow yourself to
Speaker 1: stop and remind yourself that these are fleas we're talking about.
Speaker 1: But they you know, they're held in captivity their whole lives.
Speaker 1: They're held um, they're connected by a harness that keeps
Speaker 1: them held down their entire lives. The tricks that they're
Speaker 1: performing are actually like stress behaviors. Um, and uh, they
Speaker 1: die probably prematurely. Yeah, well as what went off on
Speaker 1: fleas in the fleet episode, So I can't really say
Speaker 1: anything about that. Sure, I've had bad infestations and I've
Speaker 1: had no problem grabbing them between my hands and holding
Speaker 1: them underwater until they slowly drowned. Right, They're like, please
Speaker 1: just crush me, and you say, never drown. You can't
Speaker 1: crush them. You can crush a flee if you get
Speaker 1: it's hardy fingernails, that's your problem. You butt your fingernails
Speaker 1: too much. Yeah, but you try to smash a flee
Speaker 1: and he just goes dying. Do do do do? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Anything else? Um, you can buy flee circuses, ready made
Speaker 1: flea circuses if you want. Well that's fun. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: like an ant form. Good luck finding fleas is the thing, right,
Speaker 1: and I think that's it. Man, that's a flea circuses.
Speaker 1: Just go watch some flee circus videos on TV or
Speaker 1: on the computer TV. You're gonna love it. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a good way to just dumb it down and check out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's delightful though too. Uh, since I said it's delightful
Speaker 1: if you want to know, that's right, I got all order.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about Flee circuses. Yeah, if you want
Speaker 1: to know more about Flee Circus, it's do what I
Speaker 1: just said, and you can also type those words in
Speaker 1: the search part. How stuff works. And since I said
Speaker 1: it's delightful, before it's time for a listener mail, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna call this what the writer called it, which is
Speaker 1: pick me for listener mail. Thanks from a teacher. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's hard to resist. Josh, Chuck and Jerry, and finally
Speaker 1: writing do you all. I've been listening stuff you should
Speaker 1: know for years. I think I've listened to nearly every episode,
Speaker 1: even the ones from the Dark Days when the discussion
Speaker 1: lasted fewer than ten minutes and Josh was still looking
Speaker 1: for his perfect podcasting partner. My sister introduced me to you.
Speaker 1: So if you pick this for listener mail, please do
Speaker 1: be extremely cool. If you give my sister Laura a
Speaker 1: shout wow, that is really nice. If you, Chuck, is
Speaker 1: you're feeling very generous regardless, I've been meaning to email
Speaker 1: my thanks and praise for your work. I was at
Speaker 1: high school english teacher in Illinois, but reesely relocated Chattanooga, Tennessee,
Speaker 1: where I've been moved on where I've moved on to
Speaker 1: become a community college professor. Uh. A professor. Maybe she
Speaker 1: could train police. Uh. Your podcast has been a great
Speaker 1: supplemental teaching tool, not to mention, a guaranteed way to
Speaker 1: keep my mind occupied during long road trips to and
Speaker 1: from undergraduate and graduate school or while running with my dog.
Speaker 1: Us the episode on book banning several times while teaching
Speaker 1: to Kill a Mockingbird or informing students about Banned book Week.
Speaker 1: I've also used the episode about police interrogation during a
Speaker 1: unit featuring Walter dean Myer's novel Monster, about a boy
Speaker 1: who was on trial for a crime he may not
Speaker 1: have committed. That sounds good, it does, uh. And more recently,
Speaker 1: I use a listener mail about the benefits of hunting
Speaker 1: as an example of how to structure an argument. Let's
Speaker 1: hear that. I want to hear that argument. We'll schefs
Speaker 1: are right back in. Uh. The students got a laugh
Speaker 1: out of Josh's comments about waiting for the deer to
Speaker 1: fall over and collecting the dead bodies instead of actually
Speaker 1: killing the animal. Anyway. Really enjoyed the show. Look forward
Speaker 1: to new episodes every week. If teaching doesn't work out
Speaker 1: for some reason, I think podcasting would be a pretty
Speaker 1: great career. Uh. And that is from Sarah Amato, Professor Amato,
Speaker 1: and uh shout out to Laura yep, her sister, Laura
Speaker 1: Amato or whatever her name is. Shout out not presuming
Speaker 1: they have the same last name. My modern guy you
Speaker 1: are anyway, you have a beard. Thanks for teaching and
Speaker 1: uh doing what you do, Professor. Yeah, and thanks for
Speaker 1: writing in Smart Thinking with the subject line. If you
Speaker 1: want to get in touch with us, you can tweet
Speaker 1: to us. I'm at josh um Clark at Twitter, and
Speaker 1: you can also follow the official s Y s K
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Speaker 1: you Should Know. You can send us an email to
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