Hi everyone, It's Josh and for this week's s Y s K Selects, I've chosen How Flee Circuses Work. It's actually one of my all time favorite episodes. By the time we recorded it, there was a ten percent chance that I still didn't know whether Flee circuses are actually real or illusions tricks of the imagination. It was a thrilling experience, to say the least. I hope you enjoyed this episode because it was a fun one to do. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast on 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 Flee Circuses, I would have thought that, Yeah, we covered it a tiny little bit. I went back and looked just to make sure we weren't being too redundant, and uh, 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 talking about, and then you do more research and you find out they really are wrong in a lot of it. It's it's really it was crazy. It was a crazy research. Yeah, and you go to web pages that are solid green with white letters and turned back to tone punctuation. What's that. Yeah, it was a little weird, but yeah, people take us to task on the accuracy of this one. Then we'll be like you, you go do better. So, um, I think we kind of gave it away. The cats out of the bag, and so are it's fleas. We're doing flee circuses. We're talking about flee circuses, and they actually, like I think of flee circus is fairly old timing, but I usually think of him as like the twenties or thirties, maybe even the forties, from like that old tech savery flee circus cartoons or um. But they go way further back than that, or even the concept of of training fleas in some way, shape or form goes even further back than that. Yeah, which will We'll get to it. But training them as 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, flee circuses are really mean. Yeah, they're cruel. No matter how you feel about fleas, they are. Yeah, they're cruel. Cool acts of barbarity. I think that's how they used to buill it. Actually, yet tiny cruel acts of barbarity comes see Professor long Hair and his flee circus whitchy torments. But they're small, so who cares? Right? Uh So fifteen seventies is uh if this is accurate, we're all going to go all the way back to a man named Mark Scalliot who uh did not have a flee circus, but he was supposedly in London, one of the first people, or perhaps the first person to use a flee as a prop of some sort. Yeah, to basically show off his skills as what as a he was a blacksmith. Yeah, he was a smithy and he made like this really really tiny intricate caller that he put her on to flee and he said, check this out. Yeah, and everyone was I guess because this apparently other people, uh like watchmakers and stuff would 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, and the idea of using fleas called on kind of kind of well, it took a couple of hundred years. But if if you look into fleas and flee circuses like 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, which must have 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 flee circus idea. Yeah, and we wed you know, if you really want to itch yourself, uh, go to listen to the fleet episode. UM. But they come in a couple of thousand varieties and the ones apparently for circuses are the little flat, reddish brown ones about two point five millimeters in length, and um they can jump though two point five millimeters they can jump sometimes as high as eight nine inches in the air. I saw it to ten where you getting your fleas? That was from the Royal Air Force Experimental Station. They apparently set up some equipment in the sixties and we're photographing fleas jumping. Oh yeah, see here that they said that UM, at the start of a jump, a fleet jump, they experience forces greater than a hundred and forty times out of gravity. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. They have these little um what are called elastic cuticles in their legs and they can store a tremendous amount of potential energy and when they release them and they jump, that potential energy turns into connect energy. And since that it's basically this elastic um 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, um it compared to humans to be like us jumping over the statue of Liberty or something along those lines, which is very hard to do. It 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 fleet 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 really, 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 if you listen really close. All the hipster fleas, right, uh so, I guess we should talk about the main dude though, right, who we owe all of us owe a great debt too. I'm not saying his name, you know, you've got to say his name. This is the eighteen twenties and he was an Italian I presario in London named Louis Berte Lotto. Nice. Yes, Yeah, there's so many ohs and t s. I thought I messed it up. No, I know it's a it's an unusual name. Yeah. So he's the guy in London who said, uh, 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 the origination of flee circuses it was um due largely to him. But I didn't really see anybody else cited earlier than him. You know, the watchmaker, the smithy Um Mark, Mark, the blacksmith. He wasn't doing any kind of shows or tricks. Louis Bertelotto Um 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 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. You know, they would uh well we might as well talk about what these things did. They would do everything from high wire x to sword fighting too. Uh. Political and historical re enactments. Yeah, they re enacted the Battle of Waterloo dressed dressed in like military garb. Yeah. They would play a soccer or football. Uh. They would do um high diving, pretty amazing stuff, little pools of water, a little chariots and carriages. Yeah, that was one of the first ones because you know, I think, especially back in the early nineteenth century, people didn't know everything there is to know about fleas like we do today. So the idea of watching a little, tiny, tiny flee like a three millimeter long flea pulling like a hearse or a chariot or a cart um that was you know, hundreds of times its own weight does get any better. It's gonna it's gonna impress you, especially if you're a five year old um chimney sweet who's owned by the guy who bought you from your parents. Yeah. Or I actually looked up some flea circuses on YouTube. Uh, there were those little kids. There was one and I think Denmark in the nineteen fifties that I looked at, I saw that, and like in Telfair, people were just delighted. Oh yeah, I mean I watched some of the videos too, and I noticed that, like my hands were classed together beneath my chin. I think it might have been the perfect post election uh youtubing that I could have done. Actually, yeah, it worked pretty well. Uh so Bert, sorry Bert? 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. I don't know. I mean they likened him to Elvis Presley. I don't know if he was that big. I think the point the authors making is like that this guy wasn't some some like, he wasn't Internet famous, he was like famous famous, Like he traveled the world doing this. It's good for him, right, yeah, And he didn't. As he traveled the world, people were like, I can do that too. I'm tired of working. I want to do this. But it turns out that from what I can tell, as far as show biz goes, running your own flea 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 ten fleas can even make the cut, right. Uh, once you find your your champion team of they're they're gonna die and there need to be cared for 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 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? But apparently it happened a lot. There was a guy I read and I'm not quite sure who it was, but they he had a 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 Majorca to get um fresh shipments of fleas like every two weeks because hers just kept she couldn't keep them alive any longer than 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 Majorca in Spain to get fleas fortnite 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. Apparently, if you had a flee circuses from from like the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, you the flea master, build yourself as professor whatever. So weird, there's just all these really weird trends. But the in the history of flee 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 account Oh man, you know that would have broken a new ground. But they would have to pay money, and that says in the nineteen fifties 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, at which I did, I couldn't find anywhere to buy fleas. You have to send off from overseas um. But I've thought, well, surely there's some weirdo somewhere who's selling fleas to flee circuses and there are none, none whatsoever. Well there is a flee circus in Germany still, yeah, at the Munich October Fest. Where else would you have one? Alright, 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. Then maybe we can train them to finish this episode for us. So chuck, we we kind of made it as far as Berto Lotto, And there's actually a lot of mystery surrounding that guy. Here's the weird thing. Okay, I'm gonna confess something to you. When I first read this article, I was like, well, here's a stinker. Then I dug in a little further and I was like, oh, I'm being tortured with research to do a stinker. And then the more I did, the more I did, the more I again, I'd find these weird little things that kept popping up that combined create the the the history or the culture of flee circuses. And and the more I came upon these little things and put them together more the more I was just totally delighted. But then I think, like you when I when I finally hit YouTube, it was like, okay, I need to see some of these. Then I was like, I love flee circuses. I could sit here and talk about them all day. Well, we'll try and keep this minutes all day. So I just realized I didn't finish my thought. The um, the weird little thing that I found out about Professor Barlo Dolore you thanks man Um. He just vanished, he disappeared. He was like as famous as as an astronaut, and then all of a sudden he's gone. And there's a guy um who is uh. I think his name is Andy Rich he's like basically the foremost flee circus researcher working today. Hey, and he found Professor Barte Lotto. Apparently he moved to Canada and lived out the rest of his life and anonymity. Wow. Yeah, I have a question. Okay, why do you always use astronaut as a fame indicator? It's uh think it says Simpson's reference. It's Homer was saying somebody was richer than an astronaut. I was going to challenge you and say, name an astronaut. Oh, dude, Jim Lovell No, no, no, name a current astronaut. Oh current astronaut. Well you got Mark Kelly and Scott Kelly. Okay, all right, the twins get back off. Then her their parents called them Project Jim and I. That's cute. But they did not just made that up? Oh really? Yeah? Oh man, that would have been surely somewhat thought of that. If not, I'm going to trade market. Uh yeah, And then you could blackmail them. I feel like you want this nickname. I know you're richer than an astro Alright, So early nineteen hundreds, 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 flea master. And uh, he did the usual things, made them box and race and juggle. And we're gonna tell you some of these secrets. By the way, if you're wondering how these things are accomplished, just hang in there. Uh. And he said at one point he was bringing in two hundred and fifty dollars uh day or performance in a in a day of performances a day. Yeah, so many many performances. And here's the thing I Philip, I kind of wondered I was 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 ten or fifteen people crowded around a little table for six to ten minutes. You would shuffle them out and bring in the next group. Yes, I saw somewhere that if you were really dedicated to it, I think Cecil Laden Road it on the on the straight dope, that if you were like a really dedicated performer, you could conceivably do fifty ten minute performances a day. So that's basically like ten hours with a ten 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 as when we talk about how to do this, it will become clear just how much work this must be. Yeah, alright, well let's talk a little bit about that. Um, every flee is different. And like I said, uh, if you believe the research, about ten percent of the fleezer fit for the job. And it's 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 fleas neck. And apparently that was really hard to do because when a fleet eats the blood of their master, yeah, which is true. We'll get to that again later, but their next well, so you can't tie it too tight or else they're gonna die and that your prize flee could die. Or if it's too loose, then the flea goes away and the chariot stays behind, and that's no good and you just hear a tiny bionic man sound. That's right. So um, 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 three or four months. It's an old flee. So you've got like a 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 us fleas all the time and and again before you even harness them, you have to sort them. So you have to study and observe the adult fleas see which one's like to jump. Um. There's an old legend, uh that apparently came from Professor Heckler's son, if not Professor Heckler himself, who said, Um, you 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 learned not to jump, then they've passed their first test. It's not clear whether that's actually hocum or not, but um, that's for for a very long time. That's been part of the lower 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, Heckler, 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. Uh, 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 spend 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. I don't know if I believe it. He well, yeah, I mean he was a showman, consummist. Showman like you didn't just basically point and be like, look at the fleas, came your money, please leave now, like you were like carrying the show on. Right, you had to tell this this this, You had to help the performance along, your 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. So I don't know, like a lot of it's lost too to time, what was true and what wasn't as far as these these old guys go. Yeah, but he Professor Heckler also said when he was picking them out, and he said, stodgy wins are broken to the merry go round harness. Flighty fleas make good dancers. Those with especially strong legs will become kickers, jugglers and chariot racers. Yes, so you've got you've got fleas harness. That's like the first initial thing. But there's other things you need to do to him to write. 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 or or a merry go round or something like that. And yet people will be like, that's pretty neat, that's cool. But before I could do that, you know, but you could do other stuff too, and a lot of it involves glue unfortunately. So say like you take a tiny piece of um of would or a tiny piece of metal and you glue it to the fleas arms, right, and we should say, once that happens, that's it. That's never that's never coming off for the rest of the fleas life. Yeah, I mean, do you think they even survive 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, okay, I think they live horrible lives. I mean, basically, we as a species should know more about this because if the fleas of a rise up and become intelligent, like our backs are against the wall for what the flea circus flea masters have done to them glued to the wall, they'll be like, oh, guess whose turn it is? Alright, so go ahead, Oh so you you, um, 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 flee 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 the sword fighting. So that's a really good example of a flee circus. Like you're you're having them do things, and then the flea masters like, well, look at this, this is a sword fight. Everybody see they're doing or fencing or something like that, right en, I've trained them to do so exactly exactly. So there's there's these things where really it's the interaction between a restrained flee, 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 and saying, oh, they're they're fencing, or they're walking the high wire something or there. 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. Uh. They would soak it in something that the fleet doesn't like, some odorous, malodorous thing. Yeah, I looked that up. Like lavender works really well, sit, tranella, cedar oil, those are all lovely. That's a shame. But come to think of it, when you see natural flee sprays, that's what's in natural flee spray exactly, so they would soak it in that stuff and then uh, just the fleet 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 were restrained and when they kick, instead of it propelling the flee away, it's repelling the ball away from them. So if you have them this kind of do that back and forth, then yeah, they're playing soccer. What about juggling, Josh, love it. What you do there is you would glue a flee to its 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 apparently would just kind of go up and down and spin around like it was juggling. Amazing. Yeah, and like this is this is uh thanks to Heckler in particular in the United States. Um, he really started hitting the county fairs and um, the the the carnivals. So it became basically part and parcel with the with sideshows the fleet circus. Like basically anytime 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 the high high Wire Act and the flea walls. When it would appear as if a fleet orchestra was playing and fleas were dancing. Yeah, because there's there's other things that fleas respond to. Two besides um citronella, they respond very well the heat. They can 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 uh just um, I don't know, a drumhead or something like that, they'll all start hopping around. But if they 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 their arms at a nice backbeat exactly, then you have fleas playing music and fleas dancing to it. A flea ball. Uh. So this all is delightful and well and good. Um, but what fun is a naked little flea doing these things? If you could have a flee dressed up as Napoleon, right, And that's what they did. They apparently historical figures were lampooned. Uh. 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 they're these they they're nimble fingers grew tired in their eyes deteriorated as we're making these things. Okay, I thought that was that was a good quality they look for an a Mexican nun seems dress right, How are your nimble fingers feeling? That's kind of tired? They're tired. That's sad. Actually. Then, so they would get apparently these Mexican nuns to make these tiny little costumes, and um, they are still on display today if you go to Uh, how do you pronounce that in England? I mispronounced everything in England. It's spelled Hertfordshire show Cambridge, all right, Cambridge, England. I think it's where that 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, 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. 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, how would you do that? Well, as we all know, fleas or parasitic blood suckers. Uh. And so they would just go down to the blood bank and get a bag of blood right right, and let the fleece swim around in it. Yeah, and they loved it. And know what they would do is and this is like it gives me chills thinking about it. They would roll up their sleeves and 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 fleet performers have done so great, I shall let them feast on my blood and the crowd would be like you gross, that makes sense. Yeah, it was part of stage pattern, but apparently at least Heckler, but I'm sure others actually did let the fleas feed on them. Uh yeah, I mean, what's a good flee 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 the episode has come out, but people are going to be really confused, yeah, 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 was a Heckler Sr. And Junior, and apparently Junior kept it going in Times Square until like the late fifties had a flee circus going, and Heckler's flee circus shows up in a scene an Easy Rider. No way. Yeah, I couldn't figure out what's scene. I didn't have time to go check. But there's a scene an Easy Rider where in the background there's Heckler's flee circus, and then they were pushed out of Times Square by peep shows. And then the peep shows were pushed out by Walt Disney and Julie Annie. Yeah, Heckler tried at first to do pants less flee circus. Well 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 flee circus right after this. So check. One thing that I found I'm pretty sure you found it too, was that when you start looking into flee circuses, some people think that there is never such a thing as flee circuses that used real fleas. Yeah. I thought you were going to say, when you start looking into flee circus is there's no going back and you'll never be the same again. That's definitely true too, Like I'm changed forever. Yeah. I always thought that flee 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 flee circuses that used real fleas. Following these traditions that we just mentioned. But if you believe that there are plenty of flee circuses out there that don't use any fleas whatsoever, you're right too, because there's both. Yes, there's the type of flee circus that doesn't use fleas is called a humbug flee circus, and it's all it's all stage magic, it's all illusion, and it's pretty pretty awesome. Actually, yeah, there was a man, a magician named George Tollerton in the nineteen thirties, and he wrote a booklet actually um outlining fake flee circuses and skits that you can do. We're in you're sort of the I mean, while the carnival barking was going on in the real flee circuses. Um, you you really want to take center stage if you have a fake flee circus, because then not only introducing the death defying feats, but then you are are following these fleas, jumping around with mimicking it with your eyes and following it around, you know, 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, that's the most like basic humbug flee circus there are, right, sure, but there's one in that that started like that. I guess the genuine stagecraft stage magic um humbug flee circus came about from Michael Benteen, who is a gooon actually right, remember, then explained that what it is the goons showed up in the Monty Python episode. They were the direct predecessor of Monty Python, Spike Milligan and his goons. Yes, he wasn't a hockey playing goon, that's a different thing, or a goon on Scooby Doo or a goony, right, just a regular old goon. Yeah, Michael Benty And he was a British performer and entertainer and he uh in nineteen fifty performed that the h called the Royal Variety Show. I guess I think so. And it was a little you know, fake flee circus apparently pretty elaborate one, yeah, because rather than just using like his power of suggestion, he was using things like magnets and remote control pumps and mechanical devices to really kind of do this exaggerated simulation of a flee doing stuff going through the circuit of his flea circus right, So he would say, have a magnet or a piece of string of something or something pushing a ball or rather pulling a ball up a hill an incline, and he would say that this is the uh, the flea sisyphus and he's pushing this ball up a hill right or um, this is this is my favorite. This gets me every time a flee going up on the high dive board. And then so as he's going up there, the wrongs of the ladder, each one gets depressed, right, so you can see the fleas progress up the ladder gets up to the end of the board, jumps a couple of times, so the springboard goes up and down, and then it makes a springing sound as he jumps off right exactly dives into the water, and there's like this huge splash, which a fleet could never make a splash to begin with, but a huge one. It's just hilarious. Or I like the one the sand table. They would have a little sandbox in the fleet with the fake fleet would invisibly jump around, but it would create a little splash of sand everywhere. He dropped all over the place and again all with magnets, all fakery, Yeah, but really really clever. I get the impression he was not um not terribly old at the time when he first debuted on tv UM and in the grand tradition of flee circuses, some other people saw it and said, I want to do that too, So the Humbug Flee circus took off and became pretty popular and like the second half of the twentieth century. Yeah, I should say popular as far as flee circuses go, which is to say, not very popular, right, popular among weirdos. Yeah. I'm really kind of wondering about this Burt to Loto and his fame, like he might not have been I don't know, I mean just because he traveled the world. I mean, he could have been traveling the world performing in front of you know, sixty people a day. That's not exactly Elvis. It's true. This whole thing is under a cloud of suspicion, is Yeah. Man, it's really tough to figure out the what's from the who's in the winds and the why and the fleas from the magnets. Yeah. Yeah, because once you introduced that humbug ury into it. Everything comes into question. There was, actually, though, there was a book that I want to get. It's a it's a pamphlet basically turned into a book from that a guy named Tom Palmer wrote. It's called the Famous Flee Act and it teaches you everything you need to know to do a humbug flee circus. I just want to read it just for frenzies. You know, Christmas is coming up. I bet you someone out there, I'll send that to you. I was talking to you. No, that just someone else out there. Well okay, uh 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. Um. Her name was what is it, chuck, Maria Fernanda Cardoso. Did you read about her? You should check out her act. You didn't see the video of it. There's like a seven eight minute video of her act and apparently it's just the highlights, so I guess her act was longer and she's a performance artist, so um it was she did it at like different places like she did at the New Museum in New York and um, San Francisco and just kind of some some pretty neat places places you wouldn't expect to see a flee circus, is what I'm saying. I guess. But she used live fleece in the grand tradition of flee circuses and uh made a very beautiful, neat almost circutus so laish flee circus in the nineties. Yeah, but there's a video of it, or there's plenty of videos, I'm sure of it out there. Um, just lock her up and look for the flice circus video with with our thumbs up on it. Yeah. And you know, we kind of joked about this being cruel it. Um, it's easy to to say this is a flee so who cares. But I'm sure there are people that get up in arms about using any sort of you know, mistreating and animal for any kind of or 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. Know, there's uh, there's apparently um, societies that are dedicated to preventing cruelty to insects in particular. There you haven't, and they have called specifically for flee 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, um, 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, um, and they die probably prematurely. Yeah, well as what went off on fleas in the fleet episode. So I can't really say anything about that. Sure, I've had bad infestations and I had no problem grabbing them between my hands and holding them underwater until they slowly drowned. Right, They're like, please just crush me, and you say, never drown. You can't crush them. You can crush a fleet if you get it's hard eat finger nails, that's your problem. You butt your finger nails too much. Yeah, But you try to smash a flee and he just goes dying. Do do do do do do Yeah, anything else? Um, you can buy flee circuses ready made flee circuses if you want. Well, that's fun. Yeah, um like an ant. Good luck finding fleas is the thing, right, And I think that's it. Man, that's a flee circuses. Just go watch some Flee circus videos on TV or on the computer TV. You're gonna love it. Yeah, it's a good way to just dumb it down and check out. Yeah, it's delightful though too. Uh. Since I said it's delightful if you want to know, that's right, I got all the order I was thinking about flee circuses. If you want to know more about Flee circus's do what I just said. And you can also type those words in the search part how stuff works. And since I said it's delightful. Before it's time for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this what the writer called it, which is pick me for listener mail. Thanks from a teacher. Okay, it's hard to resist, Josh, Chuck and Jerry. And finally writing to you all. I've been listening 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 ten minutes and Josh was still looking for his perfect pot casting partner, my sister introduced me to you. So if you picked this for listener mail, please do be extremely cool. If you give my sister Laura a shout, well, that is really nice. If 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 at high school english teacher in Illinois, but recently relocated Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I've been moved on where I moved on to become a community college professor. Uh, a professor. Maybe she could train please. 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. Views the episode on book banning several times while teaching to Kill a Mockingbird or informing students about Banned Book Week. I've also used the episode about police interrogation during a unit featuring Walter Dean Myer's novel Monster, about a boy who was on trial for a crime. He may not have committed that sounds good. It does, and more recently, I use a listener all about the benefits of hunting as an example of how to structure an argument. Let's hear that. I want to hear that argument. We'll shows are right back in. The students got to laugh out of Josh's comments about waiting for the deer to fall over and collecting the dead bodies instead of actually killing the animal. Anyway, Really enjoy 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 uh shout out to Laura yep, her sister, Laura Amato or whatever her name is. Shout out not presuming they have the same last name. A modern guy 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 word. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm a josh um Clark at Twitter and you can also follow the official s Y s K podcast on Twitter. Can hang out with Chuck at Charles W. Chuck Brian on Facebook or Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know if you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts How Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hi everyone, It's Josh and for this week's s Y s K Selects, I've chosen How Flee Circuses Work. It's actually one of my all time favorite episodes. By the time we recorded it, there was a ten percent chance that I still didn't know whether Flee circuses are actually real or illusions tricks of the imagination. It was a thrilling experience, to say the least. I hope you enjoyed this episode because it was a fun one to do. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast on 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 Flee Circuses, I would have thought that, Yeah, we covered it a tiny little bit. I went back and looked just to make sure we weren't being too redundant, and uh, 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 talking about, and then you do more research and you find out they really are wrong in a lot of it. It's it's really it was crazy. It was a crazy research. Yeah, and you go to web pages that are solid green with white letters and turned back to tone punctuation. What's that. Yeah, it was a little weird, but yeah, people take us to task on the accuracy of this one. Then we'll be like you, you go do better. So, um, I think we kind of gave it away. The cats out of the bag, and so are it's fleas. We're doing flee circuses. We're talking about flee circuses, and they actually, like I think of flee circus is fairly old timing, but I usually think of him as like the twenties or thirties, maybe even the forties, from like that old tech savery flee circus cartoons or um. But they go way further back than that, or even the concept of of training fleas in some way, shape or form goes even further back than that. Yeah, which will We'll get to it. But training them as 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, flee circuses are really mean. Yeah, they're cruel. No matter how you feel about fleas, they are. Yeah, they're cruel. Cool acts of barbarity. I think that's how they used to buill it. Actually, yet tiny cruel acts of barbarity comes see Professor long Hair and his flee circus whitchy torments. But they're small, so who cares? Right? Uh So fifteen seventies is uh if this is accurate, we're all going to go all the way back to a man named Mark Scalliot who uh did not have a flee circus, but he was supposedly in London, one of the first people, or perhaps the first person to use a flee as a prop of some sort. Yeah, to basically show off his skills as what as a he was a blacksmith. Yeah, he was a smithy and he made like this really really tiny intricate caller that he put her on to flee and he said, check this out. Yeah, and everyone was I guess because this apparently other people, uh like watchmakers and stuff would 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, and the idea of using fleas called on kind of kind of well, it took a couple of hundred years. But if if you look into fleas and flee circuses like 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, which must have 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 flee circus idea. Yeah, and we wed you know, if you really want to itch yourself, uh, go to listen to the fleet episode. UM. But they come in a couple of thousand varieties and the ones apparently for circuses are the little flat, reddish brown ones about two point five millimeters in length, and um they can jump though two point five millimeters they can jump sometimes as high as eight nine inches in the air. I saw it to ten where you getting your fleas? That was from the Royal Air Force Experimental Station. They apparently set up some equipment in the sixties and we're photographing fleas jumping. Oh yeah, see here that they said that UM, at the start of a jump, a fleet jump, they experience forces greater than a hundred and forty times out of gravity. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. They have these little um what are called elastic cuticles in their legs and they can store a tremendous amount of potential energy and when they release them and they jump, that potential energy turns into connect energy. And since that it's basically this elastic um 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, um it compared to humans to be like us jumping over the statue of Liberty or something along those lines, which is very hard to do. It 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 fleet 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 really, 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 if you listen really close. All the hipster fleas, right, uh so, I guess we should talk about the main dude though, right, who we owe all of us owe a great debt too. I'm not saying his name, you know, you've got to say his name. This is the eighteen twenties and he was an Italian I presario in London named Louis Berte Lotto. Nice. Yes, Yeah, there's so many ohs and t s. I thought I messed it up. No, I know it's a it's an unusual name. Yeah. So he's the guy in London who said, uh, 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 the origination of flee circuses it was um due largely to him. But I didn't really see anybody else cited earlier than him. You know, the watchmaker, the smithy Um Mark, Mark, the blacksmith. He wasn't doing any kind of shows or tricks. Louis Bertelotto Um 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 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. You know, they would uh well we might as well talk about what these things did. They would do everything from high wire x to sword fighting too. Uh. Political and historical re enactments. Yeah, they re enacted the Battle of Waterloo dressed dressed in like military garb. Yeah. They would play a soccer or football. Uh. They would do um high diving, pretty amazing stuff, little pools of water, a little chariots and carriages. Yeah, that was one of the first ones because you know, I think, especially back in the early nineteenth century, people didn't know everything there is to know about fleas like we do today. So the idea of watching a little, tiny, tiny flee like a three millimeter long flea pulling like a hearse or a chariot or a cart um that was you know, hundreds of times its own weight does get any better. It's gonna it's gonna impress you, especially if you're a five year old um chimney sweet who's owned by the guy who bought you from your parents. Yeah. Or I actually looked up some flea circuses on YouTube. Uh, there were those little kids. There was one and I think Denmark in the nineteen fifties that I looked at, I saw that, and like in Telfair, people were just delighted. Oh yeah, I mean I watched some of the videos too, and I noticed that, like my hands were classed together beneath my chin. I think it might have been the perfect post election uh youtubing that I could have done. Actually, yeah, it worked pretty well. Uh so Bert, sorry Bert? 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. I don't know. I mean they likened him to Elvis Presley. I don't know if he was that big. I think the point the authors making is like that this guy wasn't some some like, he wasn't Internet famous, he was like famous famous, Like he traveled the world doing this. It's good for him, right, yeah, And he didn't. As he traveled the world, people were like, I can do that too. I'm tired of working. I want to do this. But it turns out that from what I can tell, as far as show biz goes, running your own flea 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 ten fleas can even make the cut, right. Uh, once you find your your champion team of they're they're gonna die and there need to be cared for 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 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? But apparently it happened a lot. There was a guy I read and I'm not quite sure who it was, but they he had a 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 Majorca to get um fresh shipments of fleas like every two weeks because hers just kept she couldn't keep them alive any longer than 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 Majorca in Spain to get fleas fortnite 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. Apparently, if you had a flee circuses from from like the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, you the flea master, build yourself as professor whatever. So weird, there's just all these really weird trends. But the in the history of flee 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 account Oh man, you know that would have broken a new ground. But they would have to pay money, and that says in the nineteen fifties 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, at which I did, I couldn't find anywhere to buy fleas. You have to send off from overseas um. But I've thought, well, surely there's some weirdo somewhere who's selling fleas to flee circuses and there are none, none whatsoever. Well there is a flee circus in Germany still, yeah, at the Munich October Fest. Where else would you have one? Alright, 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. Then maybe we can train them to finish this episode for us. So chuck, we we kind of made it as far as Berto Lotto, And there's actually a lot of mystery surrounding that guy. Here's the weird thing. Okay, I'm gonna confess something to you. When I first read this article, I was like, well, here's a stinker. Then I dug in a little further and I was like, oh, I'm being tortured with research to do a stinker. And then the more I did, the more I did, the more I again, I'd find these weird little things that kept popping up that combined create the the the history or the culture of flee circuses. And and the more I came upon these little things and put them together more the more I was just totally delighted. But then I think, like you when I when I finally hit YouTube, it was like, okay, I need to see some of these. Then I was like, I love flee circuses. I could sit here and talk about them all day. Well, we'll try and keep this minutes all day. So I just realized I didn't finish my thought. The um, the weird little thing that I found out about Professor Barlo Dolore you thanks man Um. He just vanished, he disappeared. He was like as famous as as an astronaut, and then all of a sudden he's gone. And there's a guy um who is uh. I think his name is Andy Rich he's like basically the foremost flee circus researcher working today. Hey, and he found Professor Barte Lotto. Apparently he moved to Canada and lived out the rest of his life and anonymity. Wow. Yeah, I have a question. Okay, why do you always use astronaut as a fame indicator? It's uh think it says Simpson's reference. It's Homer was saying somebody was richer than an astronaut. I was going to challenge you and say, name an astronaut. Oh, dude, Jim Lovell No, no, no, name a current astronaut. Oh current astronaut. Well you got Mark Kelly and Scott Kelly. Okay, all right, the twins get back off. Then her their parents called them Project Jim and I. That's cute. But they did not just made that up? Oh really? Yeah? Oh man, that would have been surely somewhat thought of that. If not, I'm going to trade market. Uh yeah, And then you could blackmail them. I feel like you want this nickname. I know you're richer than an astro Alright, So early nineteen hundreds, 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 flea master. And uh, he did the usual things, made them box and race and juggle. And we're gonna tell you some of these secrets. By the way, if you're wondering how these things are accomplished, just hang in there. Uh. And he said at one point he was bringing in two hundred and fifty dollars uh day or performance in a in a day of performances a day. Yeah, so many many performances. And here's the thing I Philip, I kind of wondered I was 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 ten or fifteen people crowded around a little table for six to ten minutes. You would shuffle them out and bring in the next group. Yes, I saw somewhere that if you were really dedicated to it, I think Cecil Laden Road it on the on the straight dope, that if you were like a really dedicated performer, you could conceivably do fifty ten minute performances a day. So that's basically like ten hours with a ten 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 as when we talk about how to do this, it will become clear just how much work this must be. Yeah, alright, well let's talk a little bit about that. Um, every flee is different. And like I said, uh, if you believe the research, about ten percent of the fleezer fit for the job. And it's 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 fleas neck. And apparently that was really hard to do because when a fleet eats the blood of their master, yeah, which is true. We'll get to that again later, but their next well, so you can't tie it too tight or else they're gonna die and that your prize flee could die. Or if it's too loose, then the flea goes away and the chariot stays behind, and that's no good and you just hear a tiny bionic man sound. That's right. So um, 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 three or four months. It's an old flee. So you've got like a 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 us fleas all the time and and again before you even harness them, you have to sort them. So you have to study and observe the adult fleas see which one's like to jump. Um. There's an old legend, uh that apparently came from Professor Heckler's son, if not Professor Heckler himself, who said, Um, you 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 learned not to jump, then they've passed their first test. It's not clear whether that's actually hocum or not, but um, that's for for a very long time. That's been part of the lower 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, Heckler, 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. Uh, 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 spend 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. I don't know if I believe it. He well, yeah, I mean he was a showman, consummist. Showman like you didn't just basically point and be like, look at the fleas, came your money, please leave now, like you were like carrying the show on. Right, you had to tell this this this, You had to help the performance along, your 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. So I don't know, like a lot of it's lost too to time, what was true and what wasn't as far as these these old guys go. Yeah, but he Professor Heckler also said when he was picking them out, and he said, stodgy wins are broken to the merry go round harness. Flighty fleas make good dancers. Those with especially strong legs will become kickers, jugglers and chariot racers. Yes, so you've got you've got fleas harness. That's like the first initial thing. But there's other things you need to do to him to write. 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 or or a merry go round or something like that. And yet people will be like, that's pretty neat, that's cool. But before I could do that, you know, but you could do other stuff too, and a lot of it involves glue unfortunately. So say like you take a tiny piece of um of would or a tiny piece of metal and you glue it to the fleas arms, right, and we should say, once that happens, that's it. That's never that's never coming off for the rest of the fleas life. Yeah, I mean, do you think they even survive 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, okay, I think they live horrible lives. I mean, basically, we as a species should know more about this because if the fleas of a rise up and become intelligent, like our backs are against the wall for what the flea circus flea masters have done to them glued to the wall, they'll be like, oh, guess whose turn it is? Alright, so go ahead, Oh so you you, um, 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 flee 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 the sword fighting. So that's a really good example of a flee circus. Like you're you're having them do things, and then the flea masters like, well, look at this, this is a sword fight. Everybody see they're doing or fencing or something like that, right en, I've trained them to do so exactly exactly. So there's there's these things where really it's the interaction between a restrained flee, 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 and saying, oh, they're they're fencing, or they're walking the high wire something or there. 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. Uh. They would soak it in something that the fleet doesn't like, some odorous, malodorous thing. Yeah, I looked that up. Like lavender works really well, sit, tranella, cedar oil, those are all lovely. That's a shame. But come to think of it, when you see natural flee sprays, that's what's in natural flee spray exactly, so they would soak it in that stuff and then uh, just the fleet 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 were restrained and when they kick, instead of it propelling the flee away, it's repelling the ball away from them. So if you have them this kind of do that back and forth, then yeah, they're playing soccer. What about juggling, Josh, love it. What you do there is you would glue a flee to its 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 apparently would just kind of go up and down and spin around like it was juggling. Amazing. Yeah, and like this is this is uh thanks to Heckler in particular in the United States. Um, he really started hitting the county fairs and um, the the the carnivals. So it became basically part and parcel with the with sideshows the fleet circus. Like basically anytime 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 the high high Wire Act and the flea walls. When it would appear as if a fleet orchestra was playing and fleas were dancing. Yeah, because there's there's other things that fleas respond to. Two besides um citronella, they respond very well the heat. They can 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 uh just um, I don't know, a drumhead or something like that, they'll all start hopping around. But if they 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 their arms at a nice backbeat exactly, then you have fleas playing music and fleas dancing to it. A flea ball. Uh. So this all is delightful and well and good. Um, but what fun is a naked little flea doing these things? If you could have a flee dressed up as Napoleon, right, And that's what they did. They apparently historical figures were lampooned. Uh. 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 they're these they they're nimble fingers grew tired in their eyes deteriorated as we're making these things. Okay, I thought that was that was a good quality they look for an a Mexican nun seems dress right, How are your nimble fingers feeling? That's kind of tired? They're tired. That's sad. Actually. Then, so they would get apparently these Mexican nuns to make these tiny little costumes, and um, they are still on display today if you go to Uh, how do you pronounce that in England? I mispronounced everything in England. It's spelled Hertfordshire show Cambridge, all right, Cambridge, England. I think it's where that 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, 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. 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, how would you do that? Well, as we all know, fleas or parasitic blood suckers. Uh. And so they would just go down to the blood bank and get a bag of blood right right, and let the fleece swim around in it. Yeah, and they loved it. And know what they would do is and this is like it gives me chills thinking about it. They would roll up their sleeves and 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 fleet performers have done so great, I shall let them feast on my blood and the crowd would be like you gross, that makes sense. Yeah, it was part of stage pattern, but apparently at least Heckler, but I'm sure others actually did let the fleas feed on them. Uh yeah, I mean, what's a good flee 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 the episode has come out, but people are going to be really confused, yeah, 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 was a Heckler Sr. And Junior, and apparently Junior kept it going in Times Square until like the late fifties had a flee circus going, and Heckler's flee circus shows up in a scene an Easy Rider. No way. Yeah, I couldn't figure out what's scene. I didn't have time to go check. But there's a scene an Easy Rider where in the background there's Heckler's flee circus, and then they were pushed out of Times Square by peep shows. And then the peep shows were pushed out by Walt Disney and Julie Annie. Yeah, Heckler tried at first to do pants less flee circus. Well 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 flee circus right after this. So check. One thing that I found I'm pretty sure you found it too, was that when you start looking into flee circuses, some people think that there is never such a thing as flee circuses that used real fleas. Yeah. I thought you were going to say, when you start looking into flee circus is there's no going back and you'll never be the same again. That's definitely true too, Like I'm changed forever. Yeah. I always thought that flee 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 flee circuses that used real fleas. Following these traditions that we just mentioned. But if you believe that there are plenty of flee circuses out there that don't use any fleas whatsoever, you're right too, because there's both. Yes, there's the type of flee circus that doesn't use fleas is called a humbug flee circus, and it's all it's all stage magic, it's all illusion, and it's pretty pretty awesome. Actually, yeah, there was a man, a magician named George Tollerton in the nineteen thirties, and he wrote a booklet actually um outlining fake flee circuses and skits that you can do. We're in you're sort of the I mean, while the carnival barking was going on in the real flee circuses. Um, you you really want to take center stage if you have a fake flee circus, because then not only introducing the death defying feats, but then you are are following these fleas, jumping around with mimicking it with your eyes and following it around, you know, 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, that's the most like basic humbug flee circus there are, right, sure, but there's one in that that started like that. I guess the genuine stagecraft stage magic um humbug flee circus came about from Michael Benteen, who is a gooon actually right, remember, then explained that what it is the goons showed up in the Monty Python episode. They were the direct predecessor of Monty Python, Spike Milligan and his goons. Yes, he wasn't a hockey playing goon, that's a different thing, or a goon on Scooby Doo or a goony, right, just a regular old goon. Yeah, Michael Benty And he was a British performer and entertainer and he uh in nineteen fifty performed that the h called the Royal Variety Show. I guess I think so. And it was a little you know, fake flee circus apparently pretty elaborate one, yeah, because rather than just using like his power of suggestion, he was using things like magnets and remote control pumps and mechanical devices to really kind of do this exaggerated simulation of a flee doing stuff going through the circuit of his flea circus right, So he would say, have a magnet or a piece of string of something or something pushing a ball or rather pulling a ball up a hill an incline, and he would say that this is the uh, the flea sisyphus and he's pushing this ball up a hill right or um, this is this is my favorite. This gets me every time a flee going up on the high dive board. And then so as he's going up there, the wrongs of the ladder, each one gets depressed, right, so you can see the fleas progress up the ladder gets up to the end of the board, jumps a couple of times, so the springboard goes up and down, and then it makes a springing sound as he jumps off right exactly dives into the water, and there's like this huge splash, which a fleet could never make a splash to begin with, but a huge one. It's just hilarious. Or I like the one the sand table. They would have a little sandbox in the fleet with the fake fleet would invisibly jump around, but it would create a little splash of sand everywhere. He dropped all over the place and again all with magnets, all fakery, Yeah, but really really clever. I get the impression he was not um not terribly old at the time when he first debuted on tv UM and in the grand tradition of flee circuses, some other people saw it and said, I want to do that too, So the Humbug Flee circus took off and became pretty popular and like the second half of the twentieth century. Yeah, I should say popular as far as flee circuses go, which is to say, not very popular, right, popular among weirdos. Yeah. I'm really kind of wondering about this Burt to Loto and his fame, like he might not have been I don't know, I mean just because he traveled the world. I mean, he could have been traveling the world performing in front of you know, sixty people a day. That's not exactly Elvis. It's true. This whole thing is under a cloud of suspicion, is Yeah. Man, it's really tough to figure out the what's from the who's in the winds and the why and the fleas from the magnets. Yeah. Yeah, because once you introduced that humbug ury into it. Everything comes into question. There was, actually, though, there was a book that I want to get. It's a it's a pamphlet basically turned into a book from that a guy named Tom Palmer wrote. It's called the Famous Flee Act and it teaches you everything you need to know to do a humbug flee circus. I just want to read it just for frenzies. You know, Christmas is coming up. I bet you someone out there, I'll send that to you. I was talking to you. No, that just someone else out there. Well okay, uh 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. Um. Her name was what is it, chuck, Maria Fernanda Cardoso. Did you read about her? You should check out her act. You didn't see the video of it. There's like a seven eight minute video of her act and apparently it's just the highlights, so I guess her act was longer and she's a performance artist, so um it was she did it at like different places like she did at the New Museum in New York and um, San Francisco and just kind of some some pretty neat places places you wouldn't expect to see a flee circus, is what I'm saying. I guess. But she used live fleece in the grand tradition of flee circuses and uh made a very beautiful, neat almost circutus so laish flee circus in the nineties. Yeah, but there's a video of it, or there's plenty of videos, I'm sure of it out there. Um, just lock her up and look for the flice circus video with with our thumbs up on it. Yeah. And you know, we kind of joked about this being cruel it. Um, it's easy to to say this is a flee so who cares. But I'm sure there are people that get up in arms about using any sort of you know, mistreating and animal for any kind of or 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. Know, there's uh, there's apparently um, societies that are dedicated to preventing cruelty to insects in particular. There you haven't, and they have called specifically for flee 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, um, 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, um, and they die probably prematurely. Yeah, well as what went off on fleas in the fleet episode. So I can't really say anything about that. Sure, I've had bad infestations and I had no problem grabbing them between my hands and holding them underwater until they slowly drowned. Right, They're like, please just crush me, and you say, never drown. You can't crush them. You can crush a fleet if you get it's hard eat finger nails, that's your problem. You butt your finger nails too much. Yeah, But you try to smash a flee and he just goes dying. Do do do do do do Yeah, anything else? Um, you can buy flee circuses ready made flee circuses if you want. Well, that's fun. Yeah, um like an ant. Good luck finding fleas is the thing, right, And I think that's it. Man, that's a flee circuses. Just go watch some Flee circus videos on TV or on the computer TV. You're gonna love it. Yeah, it's a good way to just dumb it down and check out. Yeah, it's delightful though too. Uh. Since I said it's delightful if you want to know, that's right, I got all the order I was thinking about flee circuses. If you want to know more about Flee circus's do what I just said. And you can also type those words in the search part how stuff works. And since I said it's delightful. Before it's time for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this what the writer called it, which is pick me for listener mail. Thanks from a teacher. Okay, it's hard to resist, Josh, Chuck and Jerry. And finally writing to you all. I've been listening 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 ten minutes and Josh was still looking for his perfect pot casting partner, my sister introduced me to you. So if you picked this for listener mail, please do be extremely cool. If you give my sister Laura a shout, well, that is really nice. If 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 at high school english teacher in Illinois, but recently relocated Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I've been moved on where I moved on to become a community college professor. Uh, a professor. Maybe she could train please. 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. Views the episode on book banning several times while teaching to Kill a Mockingbird or informing students about Banned Book Week. I've also used the episode about police interrogation during a unit featuring Walter Dean Myer's novel Monster, about a boy who was on trial for a crime. He may not have committed that sounds good. It does, and more recently, I use a listener all about the benefits of hunting as an example of how to structure an argument. Let's hear that. I want to hear that argument. We'll shows are right back in. The students got to laugh out of Josh's comments about waiting for the deer to fall over and collecting the dead bodies instead of actually killing the animal. Anyway, Really enjoy 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 uh shout out to Laura yep, her sister, Laura Amato or whatever her name is. Shout out not presuming they have the same last name. A modern guy 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 word. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm a josh um Clark at Twitter and you can also follow the official s Y s K podcast on Twitter. Can hang out with Chuck at Charles W. 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