The Carnie and the Mark

With their loud and gaudy midways, their sad freak shows and crooked games, America's traveling carnivals have spawned a rich catalogue of literature. Now, following a familiar chronology, behavioral scientists have moved in to analyze what journalists and other lay observers have long sensed. Carnivals, say the sociologists and psychologists, offer a valid test for theories about the organization of subcultures. Nightmare Alley has an orderly social system, with its own lingo, hierarchy and behavior patterns.

That system is described in the current Journal of Popular Culture, an issue devoted chiefly to U.S. circuses, carnivals and fairs, and intended "to introduce the carnival to the social scientist." Three of the contributors have ties to the carnival or circus worlds: Sociologist Marcello Truzzi of New College in Sarasota, Fla., whose father was the juggler Massimiliano Truzzi; Sociologist Patrick Easto of Eastern Michigan University, whose mother was a carnival stripper; and Social Psychologist Theodore Dembroski of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, who was born into a carnival family and takes a job as a carnival worker, or "carnie," every summer.

They contend that the carnival is an ideal place to study what Sociologist Erving Goffman (TIME, Jan. 10, 1969) calls the total institution--a self-contained organization or society that raises barriers against the outside world.

There are many such barriers be tween the 85 million Americans who visit carnivals every year and the thousands of men and women who work in them. One is the carnie's feeling that society looks down upon him; even circus workers feel superior, Truzzi says, because the circus is really an extension of the theater, while carnivals spring from street fairs and gambling.

A second barrier is language. Carnies use hundreds of special terms (see box) that help give them a feeling of group solidarity. Frequently they mix these with a special language called Carnie, or ZLatin, which follows--and sometimes ignores--a complex set of rules for disguising the meaning of ordinary English. The word sucker, for instance, may be translated "see-a-zuk kee-a-zer," or simply "see-a-zuker," while carnival becomes "kee-a-zar nee-a-zuh vee-a-zul."

At the top of the carnival caste system are the owner and such administrators as the lot man (who arrives first in each town to lay out the midway); the patch, who handles complaints from outsiders; and the ride superintendent, whom Truzzi and Easto describe as "a kind of grand mechanic." All of these aristocrats outrank the owners of rides, shows and concessions--second-string entrepreneurs who either sign up with the carnival owner for a season or "hopscotch" from one carnival to another.

Third in prestige are strippers, freaks and other performers, with the ride operators, hawkers and laborers in fourth place at the bottom of the heap.

Whatever their rank, all carnies stick to certain norms of behavior. The prime rule, Truzzi says, is that "you don't talk to the marks." Townspeople are chased away if they try to penetrate the off-midway areas where the carnies live in trailers and socialize in a tent usually called the G-top (because it is often used for gambling). Carnie youngsters are told to play with each other rather than with outsiders, and while unmarried carnie women are no longer forbidden to go into town without a male carnie escort, they are discouraged from getting to know anyone in the towns they visit. Carnie protectiveness toward women can take some odd forms: Although male carnies permit their wives to perform as strippers, they are unwilling to let other carnie men ogle them; thus girlie shows are off limits to carnival men.

The Stick. Truzzi and his colleagues have also studied the relationship between customers and concessionaires, including dishonest ones. With the public's growing sophistication, carnivals have had to cut down on cheating. But Truzzi identifies two shady specialists who still inhabit the carnival world. One is the carnie who "works the gaff," a hidden device to keep customers from winning games touted as tests of skill. The other is the "stick," a carnie who passes himself off as a customer to lure marks into playing gaffed games.

Dembroski describes a still more colorful character, the "alibi agent," a concessionaire who specializes in usually rigged games called alibis. That name comes from the agent's ready explanation for the mark's inevitable failures. "You threw that one too high," he may say, thus persuading the mark that he can easily do better if he keeps playing. (One example of an alibi is the six-cat, in which a mark tries to knock a row of canvas cats off a shelf with a baseball--but fails because a mechanical device keeps the cats in place.) According to Dembroski, "Show owners almost always set a limit on the amount out of which any one mark can be beat." Once that limit (perhaps $10 or $15) has been reached, the agent rewards the mark with a shoddy prize.

That generally mollifies the mark --which confirms what was said many years ago by another behavioral expert, P.T. Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute."

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