Photos

This picture (like one or two that will follow it) is from the Canadian National Exhibition and celebrates my love for circuses, fairs, & carnivals – anything with a midway where you can ride on rides and shoot air guns at paper targets to win stuffed toys. A “carny,” as it is sometimes known.

The carny is all about fun and good times, but it’s a tainted, slightly corrupt kind of good time. There’s no doubt that carnies have an unwholesome side that is both tempting and scary. Carny workers have traditionally lived as outsiders (with their own lexicon), and anything outside the mainstream of society is automatically threatening on a fundamental psychological level. Hell, even the name “carny” comes from the Latin word for “meat” (“carne,” although the exact derivation is uncertain) – not the most reassuring point of reference.

Part of this aspect of the carny, I suspect, comes from the fact that it serves the human id, that side of ourselves that wants desperately to be free from the constraints that our conscience and self-preservation normally put on us. After all, it is the place where you tempt death on rides that make you scream, where you shoot guns at targets, where you get childish rewards like huge toys, and where you eat all the unhealthy food the world has to offer.

The carny’s dark side has made it a natural setting for tales of horror and the supernatural. Amongst the best I will note two. First, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury’s classic tale of a magic circus that comes to town and is up to no good at all. (It’s a setting he used more than once, for instance in the story The Ocotober Country.) Second, Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932), is a film starring genuine sideshow freaks. That seems like exploitation until you examine the story being told, in which it is the “normal” humans, with their superior attitudes toward the sideshow performers, who are the real freaks. (Freaks is also the source of the famous line “one of us,” transformed into a hypnotic chant representing the bonding of society’s outsiders, in the Ramones song Pinhead:

gabba gabba,
we accept you,
we accept you,
one of us).

And for whatever it may tell us about ourselves, the dark sideshow version of the carny has made something of a comeback in recent years, for instance in the Carnival Diablo.

So here’s a salute to the carny. Great times, bad food, and scary rides. Haunted houses, stuffed toys, and overpriced hot dogs. Everything you need.