A humbug, according to Webster's Dictionary, is "an attitude or spirit of pretense." Barnum's humbugs were practical jokes for the sake of entertainment. While his jokes seemed to be over exaggerated and perhaps outright deception, the intent was always to provide amusement for the general public in a family friendly way. His most famous humbug was the Fejee Mermaid.
In 1842, P.T. Barnum advertised a mermaid captured off the Fiji Islands on exhibit at his American Museum in New York City. He rented the attraction from Moses Kimball, who operated a museum in Boston, and hired his friend Levi Lyman to pose as the professor who captured the mermaid. Barnum released posters and stories to the press that presented the mermaid as a beautiful woman. He created such curiosity among the public that attendance to the American Museum tripled. The attraction Barnum rented from Kimball was in fact the head and torso of a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish. Upon seeing the "mermaid" visitors realized that they had been tricked. They were so enthralled and unwilling to be seen as gullible that they encouraged friends to attend the exhibit and share in the wonder. The Fejee Mermaid is an excellent example of Barnum's ability to turn an obvious hoax, or humbug, into a believable curiosity.
Visit our Humbugs & Curiosities Exhibit.
Curiosities are objects that created interest for uncommon or exotic characteristics. In Barnum's American Museum, part of the draw was to see things that were out of the ordinary that were otherwise unavailable to the public. He had whole exhibition halls dedicated to ethnographic curiosities like a family of Albinos and costumes from the Far East. Curiosities could also be naturally occuring oddities and in its early years, The Barnum Museum gathered scientific oddities for research purposes. In the Museum's collection there are a number of items remaining including a two-headed calf.
"The American Museum was the ladder by which I rose to fortune [and] curiosities began pouring into the Museum halls", states Barnum in his autobiography. Curiosities simply had to draw in the public appeal and James C. Adams was such a man. "Grizzly Adams" brought in a large collection of California animals including twenty or thirty grizzly bears to the Museum to perform. Though the bears were said to be as docile as kittens, Adams bore the many scares of working with the animals. An attack from one of his bears had "laid open his brain so its workings were plainly visible" according to Barnum. Dressed in buckskin cloths, decorated with the hides of small furry animals, Adams would walk with his bears to the American Museum to the sound of a rowdy band in the morning and spend all evening having his wounds dressed by a doctor. This type of show drew in large crowds and entertained mainy in New York City.
Visit our Humbugs & Curiosities Exhibit.
