References in Pop Culture
The film noir classic Nightmare Alley (1947) features a sideshow performer (Tyrone Power) who winds up as an alcoholic geek, biting the heads off chickens.
A geek show figures in the Katherine Dunn novel Geek Love (1989). Crystal Lil, the debutante mother of the freaks, met their father while performing as a geek during her summer break from university. Aloysius, the proprietor of the traveling circus, comments that college boys often toured as geeks during their summer breaks, but at the sight of the lovely Crystal Lil and her eagerness they made an exception. During a recounting of her time as a geek, Crystal remarks on how damaged her teeth were from biting the heads off chickens.
In the 1998 Simpsons episode "Bart Carny", Homer and Bart are asked to perform in a geek show to pay off a debt: "You just bite the heads off the chickens and take a bow".
Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man", from the 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, makes a reference to the geek. It is directed at the 'straight' Mr Jones, who is unable to come to terms with the counter culture youth revolution around him:
- You hand in your ticket
- And you go watch the geek
- Who immediately walks up to you
- When he hears you speak
- And says, "How does it feel
- To be such a freak?"
- And you say, "Impossible"
- As he hands you a bone.
In the 1995 X-Files episode "Humbug", real-life sideshow performer The Enigma portrays a mostly-mute geek named "The Conundrum." True to geek form, his willingness to eat anything plays a crucial role in resolving the episode's plot.
In Marvel Noir, Norman Osborn has his henchmen all employed from various sideshow attractions. Adrian Toomes was a former Geek, and seems to have lost all conscience, as he devoured Ben Parker.
In the film The Wizard of Gore there is a show that opens with "The Geek" (played by Jeffrey Combs) eating maggots and then bite the head off a rat.
In the AMC TV series The Walking Dead, the zombies are often referred to as "Geeks".
Read more about this topic: Geek Show
Famous quotes containing the words pop culture, pop and/or culture:
“There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today’s pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.”
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