Sideshow exhibits that featured human oddities once amused millions.

Freak shows’ appeal faded, but popular attractions still spark morbid curiosity.

The fixed gaze objectifies, blurring lines between curiosity and cruelty.

Early memories encoded visually prove remarkably sticky. A recollection that is hardest for me to forget is a childhood trip to a carnival freak show.

Our small family had traveled to a fair for the tame thrill rides. If I rode a carousel, the experience is now lost or overshadowed.

The attraction there that persists tenaciously in memory, the one that I must have insisted on seeing, was advertised as the two-headed baby. We’d been ballyhooed into a striped tent. I must have tugged my father in. The come-on pushed the buttons for exoticism—the promise of physical oddity and foreignness. (This was the first time I heard the word “Siamese,” for example, a vivid instance of the way visual and auditory recall conspires.)

But once the drapery parted, the infant conjoined twins proved a great anticlimax, consisting of only an Asian-stylized concrete sculpture sunk into an aquarium. Because the exhibit was placed at the exit with no re-entry possible, this joke was on the visitor. An old-fashioned “humbug,” it moved the crowd along, profitably. This way to the egress.

Two other human exhibits pushed the buttons of otherness (“othering” in modern psychological parlance) more bluntly. The first was a purported Hawaiian princess, dressed in a flowered muumuu, who towered over her diminutive dashiki-clad consort. A comic narrator on stage provided a spiel that my 6-year-old brain couldn’t process. On the next stage, a geek invited the audience to poke hatpins through his biceps, and then more strangely, patiently guided more piercing through his cheek, the needle passing through his tongue, and then out the other cheek.

When my mother caught up with us outside and discovered where we’d been, my father was in for it.

Titillation vs. Uplift

Freak shows, an invention in Europe of some antiquity, became popular in........

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