Stuff You Should Know - How a Flea Circus Works

Episode Date: December 1, 2016

If you've ever seen a flea circus, then count yourself among the few. It's a dying art, but back in the day they thrilled and delighted young and old alike. Learn all about the tiny big tops in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We are coming out to SketchFest this year again for the second year in a row and we are doing a rare Sunday afternoon jam. So that is Sunday, January 15th at 1 p.m. You can come see us live and tickets are gonna go fast. So go to sfsketchfest.com and just click on the little ticket links

or look at the lineup and follow us there. And we can't wait to see everyone. It's one of our favorite cities to perform in. And go to sfsketchfest.com, Oakland, San Francisco. We will see you soon. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant

and there's Jerry Rowland. And that makes this Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. Yeah, who would have ever thought that we could do more than one podcast on fleas? Had I thought about flea circuses, I would have thought that. Yeah, we covered it a lot. I went back and looked just to make sure we weren't being too redundant. Right.

And we just sort of mentioned it briefly, but how delightful to dig in even further. Yeah, I mean, like, there's no way that we really got into it because it's one of, like, the least documented aspects of popular culture I've ever come across, man. And there's so much misinformation and you run across people who act like they know exactly what they're doing. You run across people who act like they know exactly what they're talking about

and then you do more research and you find out they really are wrong in a lot of it. It's really, it was crazy. It was a crazy research. Yeah, and you go to webpages that are solid green with white letters. Yeah. Turn back the clock to 1997. Punctuation. What's that? Yeah, it was a little weird.

But if people take us to task on the accuracy of this one then. We'll be like, you go do better. So, I think we kind of gave it away. The cat's out of the bag and so are its fleas. We're doing flea circuses. We're talking about flea circuses. And they actually, like, I think of flea circuses as fairly old-timey, but I usually think of them as like the 20s or 30s,

maybe even the 40s from, like, that old Tex Avery flea circus cartoon. Sure. But they go way further back than that or even the concept of training fleas in some way, shape, or form goes even further back than that. Yeah, which we'll get to it, but training them is a bit of a misnomer. Yeah, that's a stretch for sure. It's sort of like tying and gluing things to fleas and just let them be fleas.

Yeah, basically, as you will probably come to the same conclusion, flea circuses are really mean. Yeah, they're cruel. No matter how you feel about fleas, they are, yeah, they're cruel. Cruel acts of barbarity. I think that's how they used to bill it, actually. Yeah. Tiny, cruel acts of barbarity.

Come see Professor Longhair in his flea circus, which he torments. But they're small, so who cares? Right. So, 1570s is, if this is accurate, we're all going to go all the way back to a man named Mark Scaliot, who did not have a flea circus, but he was supposedly, in London, one of the first people, or perhaps the first person to use a flea as a prop of some sort. Yeah, to basically show off his skills.

As what? He was a blacksmith. Yeah, he was a smithy, and he made this really, really tiny, intricate collar that he put around a flea, and he said, check this out. Yeah, and everyone knows, I guess, because apparently other people, like watchmakers and stuff, would make little tiny watches as well as gimmicks. But I guess the thing they were trying to show is, the only thing I can think of is, if I can make something this tiny that works,

imagine what a real-size human watch would look like. It would work even better. But he got kind of famous from it, from what I understand. The idea of using fleas caught on. Kind of, well, it took a couple hundred years. Sure. But if you look into fleas and flea circuses, I just took them for granted. I never stopped and thought, why fleas?

But there's actually really good reasons why fleas. And it has to do with, for one, fleas used to be everywhere. Like, no matter where you lived in the world, you shared your living space with fleas. Yes. It's been pretty awful, but apparently it was just a fact of life. So that's one thing. They're ubiquitous. They're easy to come by.

The other one is that fleas are really, really good at jumping. And that actually makes them under the right circumstances really good for this flea circus idea. Yeah. And we, you know, if you really want to itch at yourself, go to listen to the flea episode. Yeah. But they come in a couple of thousand varieties and the ones apparently for circuses are the little flat reddish brown ones, about 2.5 millimeters in length. And they can jump though.

2.5 millimeters. They can jump sometimes as high as eight, nine inches in the air. I saw up to 10. Oh, well, where are you getting your fleas? That was from the Royal Air Force Experimental Station. They apparently set up some equipment in the 60s and were photographing fleas jumping. Oh yeah. I see here that they said that at the start of a jump, a flea jump, they experienced forces

greater than 140 times that of gravity. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. They have these little, what are called elastic cuticles in their legs and they can store a tremendous amount of potential energy in it. And when they release them and they jump, that potential energy turns into kinetic energy. And since it's basically this elastic connector that's really storing the energy, they're

not having to use up a lot of their own. So they can jump like this like thousands of times in an hour. And apparently when they jump, I don't, I'm sure we said something somewhat contradictory in the actual fleas episode, but the relation of their jumps to their body size, compared to humans, would be like us jumping over the Statue of Liberty or something along those lines. Yes, which is very hard to do. Can harder every day, man.

I was kind of thinking about these fleas jumping and like evolutionarily speaking, why? And I guess they're just so small that when a dog goes to scratch or bite at it or whatever animal tries to get the flea off, they can't just be like, well, let me run away as fast as I can because the dog's bite will still get it. So they learned, I think, quite literally how to jump and get the heck out of there very, very quickly in order to survive. And the coolest fleas make the bionic man sound when they jump. Yeah.

If you listen really closely. All the hipster fleas. Right. So I guess we should talk about the main dude though, right? Who we owe, all of us owe a great debt to. I'm not saying his name. You know you got to say his name. This is the 1820s and he was an Italian impresario in London named Louis Bertolotto.

Nice. Bertolotto. Yes. Yeah. There's so many O's and T's. I thought I messed it up. No, I know. It's an unusual name.

Yeah. So he's the guy in London who said, I want to be really famous one day. And my big idea is to take fleas and put them in shows. Yeah. And it worked. It did work. I saw somewhere that the origination of flea circuses was due largely to him. But I didn't really see anybody else cited earlier than him.

You know the watchmaker, the Smithy, Mark. Yeah. Mark the blacksmith. He wasn't doing any kind of shows or tricks. Louis Bertolotto said, you know what, the fleas aren't props. The fleas are going to be the stars in my show. That's right. And I think he may have been the one who had the original idea to do this.

Yeah. I love our own article said, his show was part action, part humor, part social commentary. But I think that was the case. They would, well we might as well talk about what these things did. They would do everything from high wire acts to sword fighting to political and historical reenactments. Yeah. They reenacted the battle of Waterloo dressed in like military garb.

Yeah. They would play soccer or football. Right. They would do high diving. Pretty amazing stuff. The little pools of water. Right. They would pull little chariots and carriages.

Yeah, that was one of the first ones because, you know, I think especially back in the early 19th century, people didn't know everything there is to know about fleas like we do today. Right. So the idea of watching a little tiny, tiny flea, like a three millimeter long flea pulling like a hearse or a chariot or a cart that was, you know, hundreds of times its own weight. Does it get any better? It's going to impress you. Especially if you're a five year old chimney sweep who's owned by the guy who bought you

from your parents. Yeah. Or I actually looked up some flea circuses on YouTube. Yeah. They were just little kids. There was one in I think Denmark in the 1950s that I looked at. I saw that. I'm like in tell fare.

Yeah. People were just delighted. Oh, yeah. I mean, I watched some of the videos too and I noticed that like my hands were clashed together beneath my chin. I think it might have been the perfect post election, uh, YouTubing that I could have done actually. Yeah.

Yeah. They worked pretty well. Uh, so Bertol, uh, sorry, Bertolotto, his, uh, his act was not small. If you think, well, sure, he did this at some county fairs and side shows. Uh, And then his wife made him stop. Yeah. Not true at all.

He actually got really famous for this. Uh, I don't know. I mean, they liken him to Elvis Presley. I don't know if he was that big. I think the point the author's making is like that this guy wasn't some, some like, he wasn't internet famous. He was like famous, famous. Yeah.

Like he traveled the world doing this. Right. It's good for him. Right. Yeah. And he didn't as he traveled the world, people were like, I can do that too. Sure. I'm tired of working.

I want to do this. But it turns out that I, from what I can tell as far as show biz goes, running your own flee circus has got to be one of the more demanding side shows there. There are. Well, sure. I mean, part of the problem is your performers, well, first of all, it says in here, and this is like, again, with this research, you just sort of have to take some of these people at their word, but they say that about one in 10 fleas can even make the cut.

Right. Uh, once you find your, your champion team of the 10%, they're, they're going to die and they're need to be cared for right and traveling all over the world with your prized fleas is precarious. Well, yeah, especially, um, if you're traveling to do shows and colder climbs where there aren't fleas and fleas don't do very well there, your whole troop may die the night before a show. Can you imagine?

No, but apparently it happened a lot. There was a guy I read and I'm not quite sure who it was, but they, uh, he had a, um, a standing gig in, I think Switzerland, maybe, or somewhere somewhat northern Europe and he had to send down, no, she, I'm sorry, she had to send down to Mallorca to get, um, fresh shipments of fleas like every two weeks. Yeah. Because hers just kept, she couldn't keep them alive any longer than it's up there. I have offers from all over the world to take my show, but you're afraid of one thing when

you get out of the country. Can you get fleas? I went to Sweden and I had to send to Mallorca in Spain to get fleas fortnight, every fortnight. Who was that? It was a woman, a sword swallower, right? Uh, was that Professor Tomlin? No, I can't remember her name, but she's like a legendary sword swallower, um, professor testos.

No, professor Chester. No, none of the professors. And that was another thing I noticed from this too, but I couldn't really find the origin. Usually if you had a flea circus from, from like the 19th century to the early 20th century, you, the flea master, build yourself as professor or whatever. Yeah. It's so weird. There's just all these really weird trends, but the, in the history of flea circuses, it

was like one person would come up with an idea and then they go and show it. And for some reason it would attract a bunch of other imitators and that's, that's basically the history of it. I would have built myself as a count. Oh man. You know. That would have broken your crown, but they would have to pay money in the, it says in the 1950s, professor testo said, we pay six shillings a dozen, although there have been

times of shortage when a single flea has cost as much as two shillings. Well, you know, also if you look around today, which I did, I couldn't find anywhere to buy fleas. Oh, sure. You have to send off for them overseas. But I've thought surely there's some weirdo somewhere who's selling fleas to flea circuses and there are none, none whatsoever. Well there is a flea circus in Germany still.

Yeah. At the Munich Oktoberfest. Yeah. Where else would you have one? Right. Oh, it's Mimi Gano. That was her name. The flea circus woman.

Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. So you want to take a little break here? Yeah. All right. Well, let's break. Let's go pick the fleas from our own bodies.

I know. I'm itching or scratching. And maybe we can train them to finish this episode for us, okay? On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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So Chuck, we kind of made it as far as Bertolotto and there's actually a lot of mystery surrounding that guy. Here's the weird thing. Okay. I'm going to confess something to you. Yeah. When I first read this article, I was like, whoa, here's a stinker. Yeah.

I dug in a little further and I was like, ugh, I'm being tortured with research to do a stinker. And then the more I did, the more I did, the more I dug in, I'd find these weird little things that kept popping up that combined create the history or the culture of flea circuses. Yeah. And the more I came upon these little things and put them together, the more I was just totally delighted.

But then I think like you, when I finally hit YouTube and was like, okay, I need to see some of these. And then I was like, I love flea circuses. I could sit here and talk about them all day. Well, we'll try and keep this to 30 to 40 minutes all day. So I just realized I didn't finish my thought that the weird little thing that I found out about Professor Bertolotto, Bertolotto, Bertolotto, Bertolotto, there you go. Thanks, man.

He just vanished. He disappeared. He was like as famous as an astronaut. And then all of a sudden he's gone. And there's a guy who is, I think his name is Andy Rich. He's like basically the foremost flea circus researcher working today. And he found Professor Bertolotto, apparently he moved to Canada and lived out the rest of his life in anonymity.

Wow. Yeah. I have a question. Okay. Why do you always use astronaut as a fame indicator? It's a Simpsons reference. Oh, okay. But Homer was saying somebody was richer than an astronaut.

Gotcha. I was going to challenge you and say name an astronaut. Oh, dude. Jim Lovell? No, no, no. Name a current astronaut. Oh, a current astronaut? We got Mark Kelly and Scott Kelly.

Oh, okay. All right. The twins. Get back off then. Their parents called them Project Jim and I. Oh, that's cute. But they did. I just made that up.

Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, man. That would have been. Surely someone at ASIC. I thought of that. If not, I'm going to trademark it. Yeah.

And then you could blackmail them. Be like, you want this nickname? I know you're richer than an astronaut. All right. So early 1900s, if you're talking imitators over here in the United States, we had a man named William Heckler and he was one of the first dudes over here to be a successful fleamaster. And he did the usual things, made them box and race and juggle, and we're going to tell you some of these secrets, by the way, if you're wondering how these things are accomplished.

Just hang in there. And he said, at one point, he was bringing in $250 a day or performance and a day of performances. A day? Yeah. So many, many performances. And here's the thing. I kind of wondered, because I didn't find it until later in the research, like, well,

how do you see this stuff? But you wouldn't have very many people in there. You'd have like 10 or 15 people crowded around a little table for six to 10 minutes. You'd shuffle them out and bring in the next group. Yes. I saw somewhere that if you were really dedicated to it, I think Cecil Adams wrote it on the straight note, that if you were like a really dedicated performer, you could conceivably do 50, 10 minute performances a day.

So that's basically like 10 hours with a 10 minute break every hour. And if you're not a really dedicated flea master, then just get out of my face. What do you even bother? Seriously, though, I mean, when we talk about how to do this, it will become clear just how much work this must be. Yeah. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about that.

Every flea is different. Like I said, if you believe the research, about 10% of the fleas are fit for the job. And like we mentioned, you don't really train them. What you do is back in the day, you would take either some silken thread or some really thin gold wire, like hopefully you can't even see it. That's sort of the idea. And you tie a little tiny noose of sorts around this flea's neck. And apparently that was really hard to do.

Oh yeah. Because when a flea eats the blood of their master, which is true, we'll get to that again later. But they're next well, so you can't tie it too tight or else they're going to die and your prize flea could die. Or if it's too loose, then the flea goes away and the chariot stays behind and that's no good. No.

And you just hear a tiny bionic man sound. That's right. So that's very hard, number one. Number two, the idea that you have to do that with new fleas every, I would guess probably every few weeks if you're on average. Because fleas, I mean, they live maybe a year. Most fleas live about three or four months. That's an old flea.

So you've got like some star performers and they're just, they're performing, you know, for a few months or whatever. So you're having to basically constantly harness fleas all the time. And again, before you even harness them, you have to sort them. So you have to study and observe the adult fleas, see which ones like to jump. There's an old legend that apparently came from Professor Heckler's son, if not Professor Heckler himself, who said, you put a lid over a jar and you can train them not to jump too high because they'll hit their head on the jar and they don't like to do that.

So they learn not to jump. Then they've passed their first test. It's not clear whether that's actually Hocum or not, but that's for a very long time that's been part of the lore of training fleas. The problem is, I think you said it, fleas can't actually learn anything. They're not really being trained. They're actually being physically restrained in lots of ways, including that harness and starting with the harness.

Well, I don't know though, Professor Heckler, that is, also said, and this was fascinating to me as far as whether or not these fleas can learn anything, he said that he would, to get the best fleas, put them in a glass jar that's too tall for them to jump out. And he said that he would notice the really good fleas would jump up on the side, fart out a little bit of sticky stuff, whatever that is, and then spin the rest of the time trying and trying to hit that identical spot again to grab hold of the sticky stuff, basically a foothold, to be close enough to the top to leap out. Amazing.

Don't know if I believe it. Well, yeah, I mean, he was a showman, a consummate showman. He didn't just basically point and be like, look at the fleas, give me your money, please leave now. You were carrying the show on, right? You had to tell this, you had to help the performance along. You're a professor for God's sake. Right.

When this guy is being interviewed over the years, I can't imagine, he didn't like, ham it up in the interviews as well. So I don't know, like a lot of it's lost to time what was true and what wasn't as far as these old guys go. Yeah, but he, Professor Heckler also said when he was picking them out, he said stodgy ones are broken to the merry-go-round harness, flighty fleas make good dancers. Dances with especially strong legs will become kickers, jugglers, and chariot racers. Yes.

So you've got fleas harness, that's like the first initial thing, but there's other things you need to do to them too, right? You can take that harness and the most basic thing you could do is take that harness and actually hook it up to, like you said, a chariot or a merry-go-round or something like that. And yeah, people will be like, that's pretty neat, that's cool, but I could do that. But you could do other stuff too and a lot of it involves glue, unfortunately. So say like you take a tiny piece of wood or a tiny piece of metal and you glue it to the fleas arms, right?

Yes. And we should say once that happens, that's it, that's never coming off for the rest of the fleas life. Yeah, I mean, do you think they even survived that day? I think so, yeah, I think that they typically survive a few weeks of performing. Okay, so even if they have a little sword glued to their body? Yeah, I just think they live really horrible lives. I mean, basically we as a species should know more about this because if the fleas ever

rise up and become intelligent, like our backs are against the wall for what the flea circus flea masters have done to them. Yeah, glued to the wall. They'll be like, oh, guess who's turned it is. All right, so go ahead. Oh, so you glue a piece of stick or something to their arms and remember already they're harnessed and then you do the same thing to another flea and then you tie their harnesses down and you just kind of tickle them or do something to stimulate them and they start

waving their arms and it looks like they're sword fighting. So that's a really good example of a flea circus, like you're having them do things and then the flea masters like, well, look at this, this is a sword fight. You see they're doing or fencing or something like that, right? And I've trained them to do so. Exactly. Exactly. So there's these things where really it's the interaction between restrained flea, usually

with the prop glued to it, defending itself or responding to some sort of noxious or threatening stimuli. And then the flea master coming in saying, oh, they're fencing, right, or they're walking the high wire or something, or they're, this is Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Yeah, they would play soccer, like I said. So what they would do there is they would get a little piece of cotton wool. They would soak it in something that the flea doesn't like, some odorous, malodorous thing. Yeah, I looked that up like lavender works really well, citronella, cedar oil.

Those are all lovely. That's a shame. But come to think of it, when you see natural flea sprays, that's what's in natural flea spray. Exactly. They would soak it in that stuff and then just the flea would literally just kick at it to get it away like a little soccer ball. Right.

They're either kicking at it to get it away or because they're restrained and when they kick instead of it propelling the flea away, it's repelling the ball away from them. So if you have them just kind of do that back and forth, then yeah, they're playing soccer. What about juggling, Josh? Love it. What you would do there is you would glue a flea on its back basically and then put another little tiny piece of cotton on their legs and they would kick at it trying to get it off and it apparently would just kind of go up and down and spin around like it was

juggling. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. And this is thanks to Heckler in particular in the United States, he really started hitting the county fairs and the carnivals. So it became basically part and parcel with side shows, the flea circus. Like basically any time you went to a decent carnival, there's a flea circus there.

Yeah. And I get the feeling that these professors would try and, they would try and innovate. They would try and come up with new tricks and new things that would delight people because you want to keep people coming back, you know? Right. So that's where you come up with things like the High Wire Act and the Flea Walls when it would appear as if a flea orchestra was playing and fleas were dancing. Yeah.

Because there's other things that fleas respond to too besides Citronella. They respond very well to heat. They just sense heat very well and if it gets too hot, they want to get out of there. So if you apply heat from beneath on say like just, I don't know, a drum head or something like that, they'll all start hopping around. But if they can't get away, if they're harnessed in, then it looks like they're dancing. If you put a little flea orchestra to the side with instruments glued to their arms. At a nice backbeat.

Exactly. Then you have fleas playing music and fleas dancing to it. A flea ball. So this all is delightful and well and good. But what fun is a naked little flea doing these things if you could have a flea dressed up as Napoleon? Right. Right.

And that's what they did. They apparently, historical figures were lampooned. They would supposedly get Mexican nuns who had, quote, nimble fingers, tired and eyes deteriorated. I don't see how that makes any sense. So their nimble fingers grew tired and their eyes deteriorated as they were making these things. Oh, okay.

I thought that was a good quality they look for in a Mexican nun seamstress. Right. How are your nimble fingers feeling? That's kind of tired. They're hired. That's sad, actually, then. Sure. So they would get, apparently, these Mexican nuns to make these tiny little costumes.

And they're still on display today. If you go to, how do you pronounce that in England? I mispronounce everything in England. It's spelled Hertfordshire, so Cambridge. All right. Cambridge, England, I think is where that is. At the Rothschild Zoological Museum, there are two fleas dressed as Mexican fleas on display.

And right in our lovely Edinburgh, Scotland, that we adored so much, had I known that there was a museum of childhood there with a flea wedding party dressed up on display, I would have gone in a second. For sure. But yeah, it was a thing. I think it was already a thing in Mexico. Yeah. And the Flea Circus Masters said, hey, I need to get some of those.

So Chuck, if you have a bunch of fleas and they're making you money, you want to keep them alive, right? Yeah. How would you do that? Well, as we all know, fleas are parasitic bloodsuckers. And so they would just go down to the blood bank and get a bag of blood and let the fleas swim around in it. Yeah.

And they loved it. So what they would do is, and this is like, gives me chills thinking about it, they would roll up their sleeves, stick their arm down there, and let the fleas feed on their bodies. Yeah, a couple of times a day. But apparently, apparently though, it was part of every single show that you would end the show with. And now, since these flea performers have done so great, I shall let them feast on my blood and the crowd would be like, ew, gross, and run out.

I didn't know that. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. But apparently, at least Heckler, but I'm sure others actually did let the fleas feed on them. Yeah. I mean, what's a good flea master to do? Well, feed your fleas blood, either that or have like a, again, a chimney sweep that

you bought from a chimney sweeper to let the fleas feed on. I hope that episode has come out by now, otherwise people are going to be really confused. Or it'll be really delightful when it does come out and they'll be like, oh, that makes sense now. Hey, one more thing about Heckler. So there is a Heckler senior and a junior. And apparently, junior kept it going in Times Square until like the late fifties had a fleas circus going.

And Heckler's fleas circus shows up in a scene in Easy Rider. No way. Yeah. I couldn't figure out what scene. I don't have time to go check, but there's a scene in Easy Rider where in the background, there's Heckler's flea circus. And then they were pushed out of Times Square by peep shows. And then the peep shows were pushed out by Walt Disney.

Yeah. And Giuliani. Yeah. Heckler tried at first to do a pantsless flea circus, but it didn't work very well. Yeah. No one wants that. No. And finally just packed it up.

All right. Well, let's take one final break here and we will talk about another kind of flea circus right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

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So check one thing that I found, I'm pretty sure you found it too, was that when you start looking into flea circuses, some people think that there is never such a thing as flea circuses that used real fleas. Yeah, I thought you were going to say when you start looking into flea circuses, there's no going back and you'll never be the same again. That's definitely true too. Like I unchanged forever. Yeah.

I always thought that flea circuses were a complete ruse and that there were never any real fleas performing. Right. Apparently, no, that's not the case. There have been and indeed ours recently as the nineties, there have been flea circuses that used real fleas following these traditions that we just mentioned. But if you believe that there are plenty of flea circuses out there that don't use any fleas whatsoever, you're right too, because there's both.

Yes. There's the type of flea circus that doesn't use fleas is called a humbug flea circus. Oh, I didn't know that. And it's all stage magic, it's all illusion and it's pretty awesome actually. Yeah, there was a man, a magician named George Tolerton in the 1930s, and he wrote a booklet actually outlining fake flea circuses and skits that you can do wherein you're sort of the... I mean, while the carnival barking was going on in the real flea circuses, you really want to take center stage if you have a fake flea circus as in not only introducing

the deaf-defying feats, but then you are following these fleas jumping around with mimicking it with your eyes and following it around by moving your head around as if the audience is looking at some invisible thing, which they are. Right, right, they are, and you're basically just using your powers of suggestion to get them to think they're seeing what you're saying, right? Yeah. There's almost like basic humbug flea circus there are, right? Sure.

But there's one that started, I guess the genuine stage craft, stage magic humbug flea circus came about from Michael Bentin, who was a goon actually. Right. Go ahead and explain that what it is. The goons showed up in the Monty Python episode, they were the direct predecessor of Monty Python. Right. Spike Milligan and his goons.

Yes, he wasn't a hockey playing goon. No. That's a different thing. Or a goon on Scooby-Doo. Or a goonie. Right. Never say that. Just a regular old goon.

Yeah, Michael Bentin, he was a British performer and entertainer and he in 1950 performed at the, or called the Royal Variety Show, I guess. I think so. And it was a little, you know, fake flea circus, apparently pretty elaborate one. Yeah, because rather than just using like his power suggestion, he was using things like magnets and remote control pumps and mechanical devices to really kind of do this exaggerated simulation of a flea doing stuff going through the circuit of his flea circus. Right.

And he would say have a magnet or a piece of string or something pushing a ball or rather pulling a ball up a hill, an incline, and he would say that this is the flea sisyphus and he's pushing this ball up a hill. Right. Or this is my favorite. This gets me every time. A flea going up on the high dive board. And then so as he's going up the rungs of the ladder, each one gets depressed.

Right. And so you can see the flea s progress up the ladder, gets up to the end of the board, jumps a couple of times so the spring board goes up and down, and then it makes a springing sound as he jumps off. Oh yeah. Right. Exactly. Dives into the water and there's like this huge splash, which a flea could never make

a splash to begin with, but a huge one is just hilarious. Or I like the one, the sand table, they would have a little sandbox and the flea would, the fake flea would invisibly jump around, but it would create a little splash of sand everywhere he jumped all over the place. Right. And again, all with magnets, all fakery. Yeah. But really, really clever.

I get the impression he was not terribly old at the time when he first debuted on TV. And in the grand tradition of flea circuses, some other people saw it and said, I want to do that too. So the humbug flea circus took off and became pretty popular in like the second half of the 20th century. Yeah. I should say popular as far as flea circuses go. Which is to say not very popular.

Right. Popular among weirdos. Yeah. I'm really kind of wondering about this Bertolotto and his fame. Oh, like he might not have been. I don't know. I mean, just because you travel the world, I mean, he could have been traveling the world performing in front of, you know, 60 people a day.

That's not exactly Elvis. True. It's true. This whole thing is under a cloud of suspicion. It is. Yeah, man. It's really tough to figure out the what's from the who's and the when's and the why. And the fleas from the magnets.

Yeah. Yeah. Because once you introduce that humbug hurry into it, everything comes into question. There's actually, though, there is a book that I want to get. It's a, it's a pamphlet basically turned into a book from 1975 that a guy named Tom Palmer wrote. It's called The Famous Flea Act. And it teaches you everything you need to know to do a humbug flea circus.

I just want to read it. Just for funsies. You know, Christmas is coming up. I bet you someone out there will send that to you. I was talking to you. I bet you someone else out there will. Okay, my call to you, the public listening stuff you should know public is another doing this in October fest, but somebody needs to bring this back in a big way.

Well, a woman did in the nineties, but it didn't take for very long. But I mean, it was pretty big in the nineties. Her name was, what is it, Chuck Maria Fernanda Cardoso. Oh, okay. Did you read about her now? You should check out her act. You didn't see the video of it. I don't know.

There's like a seven, eight minute Vimeo of her act and apparently it's just the highlights. So I guess her act was longer and she's a performance artist. So it was, she did it at like different places like she did at the new museum in New York and San Francisco and just kind of some, some pretty neat places, places you wouldn't expect to see a flea circus is what I'm saying, I guess, but she used live fleas in the grand tradition of flea circuses and made a very beautiful, neat, almost Cirque du Soleil-ish flea circus in the nineties. Wow.

Yeah, but there's a video of it or there's plenty of videos, I'm sure of it out there. Just look her up and look for the flea circus video with our thumbs up on it. Yeah. And you know, we kind of joked about this being cruel. It's easy to say this is a flea, so who cares? And I'm sure there are people that get up in arms about using any sort of, you know, mistreating an animal for any kind of insects, animals. Let's just say for this argument for sure, for the entertainment of humans, you know,

there's probably at least one person out there that thinks this is very cruel thing to do. No, there's apparently societies that are dedicated to preventing cruelty to insects in particular. Now there you have it. They have called specifically for flea circuses to be banned outright. And they make a pretty convincing case, especially if you don't allow yourself to stop and remind yourself that these are fleas we're talking about.

But they, you know, they're held in captivity their whole lives, they're held, they're connected by a harness that keeps them held down their entire lives. The tricks that they're performing are actually like stress behaviors, and they die probably prematurely. Yeah. Well, I was, I was what went off on fleas in the flea episode, so I can't really say anything about that. Sure.

I've had bad infestations and I've had no problem grabbing them between my hands and holding them underwater until they slowly drowned. They're like, please just crush me. You say never. You'll drown. You can't crush them. You can crush a flea if you get it's hard fingernails. That's your problem.

You bite your fingernails too much. Yeah. But you try to smash a flea and he just goes, haha, dang. Do you got anything else? You can buy flea circuses ready made flea circuses if you want. Well, that's fun. Yeah. It's like an answer.

Good luck finding fleas is the thing. Right. I think that's it, man. That's flea circuses. Just go watch some flea circus videos on TV or on the computer TV. You're going to love it. Yeah. It's a good way to just dumb it down and check out.

Yeah. It's delightful though, too. Since I said it's delightful, if you want to know, oh, that's right. I got all that order. I was thinking about flea circuses. Yeah. If you want to know more about flea circuses, do it. I just said, and you can also type those words in the search bar how stuff works.

And since I said it's delightful before, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this what the writer called it, which is pick me for listener mail. Thanks from a teacher. Okay. It's hard to resist. Sure. Josh, Chuck and Jerry, I'm finally writing to you all. I've been listening to stuff you should know for years.

I think I've listened to nearly every episode, even the ones from the dark days, when the discussion lasted fewer than 10 minutes and Josh was still looking for his perfect podcasting partner. My sister introduced me to you, so if you pick this for listener mail, please do be extremely cool if you give my sister Laura a shout. Wow, that is really nice of you, Chuck. It is. You're feeling very generous.

Regardless, I've been meaning to email my thanks and praise for your work. I was a high school English teacher in Illinois, but recently relocated to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I've been moved on to become a community college professor. Oh, nice. Ooh, a professor. Maybe she could train fleas. Your podcast has been a great supplemental teaching tool, not to mention a guaranteed way to keep my mind occupied during long road trips to and from undergraduate and graduate

school or while running with my dog. I've used the episode on book banning several times while teaching to kill a mockingbird or informing students about ban book week. I've also used the episode about police interrogation during a unit featuring Walter Dean Meyers' novel Monster about a boy who is on trial for a crime he may not have committed. That sounds good. It does. And more recently, I used a listener mail about the benefits of hunting as an example

of how to structure an argument. Okay, let's hear that. I want to hear that argument. Oh, we'll show up to write back in. Okay. The students got a laugh out of Josh's comments about waiting for the deer to fall over and collect the dead bodies instead of actually killing the animal. Anyway, I really enjoyed the show.

Look forward to new episodes every week if teaching doesn't work out for some reason. I think podcasting would be a pretty great career. And that is from Sarah Amato, Professor Amato. And shout out to Laura. Yep, her sister. Laura Amato or whatever her name is. Shout out. I'm not presuming they have the same last name.

Huh? I'm a modern guy. Yeah, you are. Anyway. You have a beard. Thanks for teaching and doing what you do, Professor. Yeah, and thanks for writing in. Smart thinking with the subject line.

Great. It worked. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm at JoshMClark at Twitter. And you can also follow the official SYSK podcast on Twitter. You can hang out with Chuck at CharlesWChuckBrian on Facebook or facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com.

And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.