He was slandered and laughed at throughout the British Isles and often threatened with lynching, but he persisted in his efforts to act. During one dramatic performance, several members of the audience were so violently convulsed with laughter that they had to be treated by a physician. Coates was struck and killed by a carriage – but not until 1848, when he was 74.
4. SADAKICHI HARTMANN
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Billing himself as a Japanese–German inventor, Hartmann was, briefly, a fixture in the New York theatre in the early 1900s as he offered soon-to-bejaded audiences what he called ‘perfume concerts’. Using a battery of electric fans, Hartmann blew great billowing clouds of scented smoke towards his audience, meanwhile explaining in thickly-accented English that each aroma represented a different nation. Hartmann, who frequently had trouble with hecklers, rarely made it beyond England (roses) or Germany (violets) before being hooted from the stage.
5. FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS
A taxi collision in 1943 left would-be diva Florence Foster Jenkins capable of warbling a higher F than she’d ever managed before. So delighted was she that she waived legal action against the taxi company, presenting the driver with a box of imported cigars instead – an appropriately grand gesture for the woman universally hailed as the world’s worst opera singer. The remarkable career of this Pennsylvania heiress was for many years an in-joke among cognoscenti and music critics – the latter writing intentionally ambiguous reviews of the performances she gave regularly in salons from Philadelphia to Newport. ‘Her singing at its finest suggests the untrammelled swoop of some great bird’, Robert Lawrence wrote in the Saturday Review. Edward Tatnall Canby spoke of a ‘subtle ghastliness that defies description’. But Newsweek was the most graphic, noting: ‘In high notes, Mrs Jenkins sounds as if she was afflicted with low, nagging backache.’ On October 25, 1944, Mrs Jenkins engineered the most daring coup of her career – a recital before a packed Carnegie Hall. That concert, like her others, saw the well-padded matron, then in her 70s, change costume numerous times. She appeared variously as the tinsel-winged ‘Angel of Inspiration’; the Queen of the Night from Mozart’s Magic Flute, and a Spanish coquette, draped in a colourful shawl, with a jewelled comb and a red rose in her hair. Inevitably she seasoned her ‘coquette’ rendition by tossing rose petals plucked from a wicker basket to the audience. On at least one occasion she inadvertently tossed the basket as well. But she always made certain to retrieve the petals for the next performance.
6. MRS ELVA MILLER
While growing up in Kansas, Elva figured that with practice and training she might have a shot at a career in singing. Her friends and family thought otherwise. However, she made the high school glee club and the church choir and even studied voice at Pomona College in Claremont, California. But with it all, her voice was reminiscent of cockroaches rustling at dawn in a rubbish bin. In the 1960s, still convinced she could sing, Mrs Miller – by now a 50-ish California housewife – recorded on her own a few favourite melodies ‘just for the ducks of it’. She persuaded a local disc jockey to give her an airing and finally cut a nightmarish 45” single of the hit song ‘Downtown’. It sold 250,000 copies in barely three weeks and made ‘The Kansas Rocking Bird’, as she was dubbed, the darling of TV variety shows. ‘Her tempos, to put it charitably, are freeform’, said Time magazine. ‘She has an uncanny knack for landing squarely between the beat, producing a new ricochet effect that, if nothing else, defies imitation … [She] also tosses in a few choruses of whistling for a change of pace.’
7. WILLIAM HUNG
Hung, a 21-year-old engineering student from the University of California at Berkeley, auditioned for the 2004 season of the American Idol television show. After Hung sang a tuneless, but enthusiastic, rendition of Ricky Martin’s song ‘She Bangs’, judge Simon Cowell observed, ‘You can’t sing, you can’t dance, so what do you want me to say?’ Despite the rejection, repeated showings of the Idol clip turned Hung into a cult star. Soon, ‘The Real American Idol’ was giving off-key performances on talk shows ranging from the Today Show to the Tonight Show, singing at a nationally televised NBA game, and sharing the stage with the likes of Janet Jackson, Outkast, and Lenny Kravitz at the Wango Tango Music Festival at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. He signed a contract with Koch Entertainment and recorded an album, Inspiration, that sold more than 200,000 copies – outselling the debut album by Idol’s season one runner-up, Justin Guarini.
– B.F.
10 Most Unusual Variety Acts of All Time, by Ricky Jay
Ricky Jay is an author, actor, sleight-of-hand artist and scholar of the unusual. Most of the performers listed here are included in his histories of remarkable entertainers, Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women and Jay’s Journal of Anomalies.
(In no particular order)
1 TOMMY MINNOCK Shortly before the end of the nineteenth century, this ‘human horse’, a subject able to withstand excruciating pain, was literally nailed to a cross in a Trenton, New Jersey, music hall. While he was crucified he regaled the audience with his rendition of the popular tune ‘After the Ball Is Over’.
2 THEA ALBA This German schoolgirl wrote with both hands, both feet and her mouth, simultaneously; for a finale she wrote 10 different numerals at the same time with pieces of chalk extending from pointers on each of her fingers.
3 DANIEL WILDMAN This eighteenth-century equestrian beekeeper rode around the circus ring on the back of a horse while swarms of bees surrounded his face then moved away to specific locations at his command.
4 MATTHEW BUCHINGER Born in Germany in 1674, this remarkable man was one of the most well-known performers of his day. He played a dozen musical instruments, danced the hornpipe, and was an expert pistol shot, bowler, calligrapher and magician. His accomplishments seem even more remarkable when one realises he stood only 28 in. high and had no arms or legs.
5 ORVILLE STAMM Billed as the ‘Strongest Boy in the World’, he played the violin with an enormous bulldog suspended from the crook of his bowing arm. As an encore he lay on the ground and a piano was placed on his chest; a keyboardist stood on his thighs and pounded out the accompaniment as Orville sang ‘Ireland Must Be Heaven ’cause Mother Comes from There’.
6 SIGNORA GIRARDELLI Entertained audiences in the early nineteenth century by cooking eggs in boiling oil held in her palm, running a red-hot poker over her limbs, and attending to baked goods while inside a blazing oven.
7 ARTHUR LLOYD Astounded vaudeville fans by producing from his capacious pockets any item printed on paper. Admission tickets to the White House, membership cards to the Communist Party, and ringside tickets to the Dempsey-Carpentier championship fight were among the 15,000 items he could instantly retrieve from his clothing.
8 JEAN ROYER A seventeenth-century native of Lyons, he swallowed an enormous quantity of water and then spewed it out in continuous graceful arcs for as long as it took to walk 200 paces or recite the 51st Psalm.
9 CLARENCE WILLARD As ‘Willard, the Man Who Grows’, he had an act that consisted of his growing six inches in height while standing next to a volunteer from the audience. A master of manipulating his body, Willard used no trick apparatus of any kind.
10 JOSEPH PUJOL ‘Le Petomane’, as he was called, was the legendary French musical farter who issued sonorous but odourless notes from his body’s most secret orifice.
Jeremy Beadle’s 20 Barmy Quiz Questions
Writer and TV presenter Jeremy Beadle first came to major public attention in 1981 when he co-hosted Game for a Laugh. Among the other series he has presented are Beadle’s About, You’ve Been Framed and Win Beadle’s Money. But before all that, Beadle was the European editor of The Book of Lists. He has a personal library of 25,000 volumes. Here Beadle displays his passion for quizzes in typical style.
1 What colour are the breasts of blue tits?
2 To which planet do Abbott