Tarring and Feathering - Pop Culture

Pop Culture

• In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Dauphin and the Duke are tarred, feathered, and ridden on a rail in Pikesville after performing the Royal Nonesuch to a crowd that Jim had previously forewarned about the rapscallions.
• Edgar Allan Poe's humorous short story, "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," features the staff of an insane asylum being tarred and feathered.
• It is mentioned in the chorus of the song "To Kingdom Come", from The Band's album Music from Big Pink.
• The 2002 PBS animated series Liberty's Kids showed characters James and Sarah witnessing a British sailor being tarred and feathered by a Philadelphia mob. Sarah is shocked, but James finds the sight of it funny, thinking the sailor is only being humiliated. Later James's mentor Moses takes James to interview the sailor, only to find him in an 18th-Century doctor's care. There he finds out the mob used boiling hot tar and the sailor suffered severe skin burns, made even worse by a looming infection. Seeing the victim moaning in bed and bandaged all over, James is horrified.
• Jimmy Carter's 2003 novel Hornet's Nest describes the tarring and feathering of a Tory by members of the Sons of Liberty.
• Tarring and feathering is a common punishment for low-lifes and unfortunate citizens (and often the Dalton brothers as well) in the Franco-Belgian comic Lucky Luke, mostly for comedy purposes.
• The avant-garde electronic music artist Fad Gadget often performed on stage while tarred and feathered. He was photographed in tar and feathers for the cover of his album Gag.
• In the TV show Deadwood, season 2, episode 5 ("Complications"), Samuel Fields, the "Nigger General", is tarred at scalding temperature on the shoulder by a lynch mob leader, before the procedure is interrupted by sheriff Seth Bullock. The tar is then painstakingly but painfully stripped off his shoulder by Calamity Jane.
• The AMC TV series Hell on Wheels (TV series) depicts a character, The Swede, getting tarred and feathered before getting run out of town.
• In the film Little Big Man, Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) and his con-artist employer, Merriweather (Martin Balsam), were tarred and feathered for having sold "miracle elixirs" that made several townsfolk seriously ill.
• In the events depicted in the motion picture Revenge of the Nerds, nerds Lewis Skolnick and Gilbert Lowe are tarred and feathered by the Alpha Betas in response to their attempt to seek admittance to the fraternity.
• In 2012 film Lawless a bootlegger is shown being tarred and feathered and left as a warning to others.