Young - Bunk

Great Attraction Just Arrived at Concert Hall. Handbill for Joice Heth exhibition, 1835.

What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending. If William Dean Howells was instinctively right when he said this to his fellow novelist Edith Wharton, then the hook of the modern hoax has been to separate the tragedy from that American happy ending. Recently the hoax, at least after the nineteenth century that Wharton and Howells had just seen turn, pretends every tragedy is far worse than it really isif only to make the scripted ending, no matter how apocalyptic it may be, all the happier. Once the hoax meant to honor, now it embraces horror; once it sought to praise, today the hoax mostly traffics in pain.

Yet across the nineteenth century, the honor and horror of the hoax briefly blended into humorof a species we might call dark. Nineteenth-century America regularly reveled in the contradictions of what famed showman P. T. Barnum called humbug , his many audiences taking pleasure in hoaxing and being hoaxed. What folks wanted was a showand not necessarily an especially good one. Take the Feejee Mermaid, which Barnum bought and displayed starting in 1842: the exhibit was nothing more than a monkeys upper bodyhead, arms, torsosewn together with a fishs tail, looking nothing like the beautiful images used to advertise it. Those who paid to see the humbug surely experienced a number of things, not least of which was a feeling of being fooled, but also a not unpleasant realization at how foolish they had been to be so eager. How could I have believed in mermaids? Viewers betrayal mixed with being humbled, both a wish and a form of curiosity- curiosities being Barnums name for the array of exhibits, freaks, and humbugs presented in his rather elegant American Museum, bought from its former proprietor in 1841.

Of course there would have been a quite different reaction had Barnum marketed his humbug as, say, the Massachusetts Mermaid. (Turns out he had, in fact, earlier tried out a far less successful Dorchester Mermaid!) The advertisement promises exoticnessseen in Barnums phonetic spelling of the island of Fijithat both preys on and plays with provinciality. The name Feejee Mermaid also suggests not just where this is found, or what could be found there, but an idea, however subtle, that this ugly, dried-up, black looking, and diminutive specimen, as Barnum later put it, The Mermaid worked exactly because it provided that mix of shame and superiority that constitutes the humbug.