Old Carnie Tricks

[KAMALARAMBO: BOOMSHAKALAKA!!!]

Amusement parks and wrestling have a bunch of them, but at this point carnie culture is mainstream culture. Carnie tricks permeate society. What are some in other industries you’ve heard of.

One I’ve heard David F. Friedman talk about is when exploitation movies were popular. Friedman distributed low budget movies to theaters.

Unlike today where thousands of prints are made of a movie to give to different movie theaters back in the 1970s and earlier it was very different. Especially for low budget exploitation. Some movies would have 6 prints or less made of them to give to different movie theaters. So what would Friedman do if he had a surprise hit and some movie theaters didn’t even have a copy to play?

Well Friedman had many different movies playing at the same time. Sometimes rather than pay to have more prints made he would just change the title card to the more popular movie and the the theater would advertise it accordingly.

So say She Freak only has 6 prints in circulation and is selling out theaters. Meanwhile the Brick Dollhouse has 20 prints in circulation but it’s shitting bricks as a box office draw. He’d just put the She Freak title card in front of the Brick Dollhouse and that was it. Now there were suddenly 26 prints of She Freak in circulation. Well actually there were still only 6 prints of She Freak and 20 slightly edited prints of the Brick Dollhouse. But the audience didn’t need to know that

[Pooh Carlson]

As a literal carny trick, when I worked at an amusement park we had the mallet game where you hit the base and ring the bell. It was all electronic, and there were two settings, an easier and a harder. When it was slow, we would set it on the easier setting and take turns bashing it so it looked super easy to win, then when somebody came up to play, switch it to the harder setting.

[Limity (BLM)]

At actual carnivals, a lot of the games aren't nearly as rigged as people think. Sure, some like the classic knock down the milk bottles are, where the top bottle is weighted to always land instead of being knocked over. But a lot of others are just deceptively difficult, like throwing a baseball to break a beer bottle, and/or the prizes are so incredibly cheap that you're almost always making a profit even if a person wins.

The game where you throw the ball into the angled tub isn't actually rigged, the carney running the booth will catch the ball sometimes if he knows it's going to land and stay inside, and make up some story about how the person is throwing it wrong. The carney will keep doing this, appearing to be helping the person, letting the ball land in the tub when he knows it'll probably bounce out.

Carneys running games will intentionally target kids, giving them free tries at games because it will keep the parents there until they break down and pay for a round.

The term "mark" originated when someone at rhe carnival was identified as having a lot of money, so a worker would come up to that person and pat them on the back with chalk on their hand, and the carneys working the booths would know to call to that person.

[DSR]

Telekinesis.




Oh sorry, I read that as "Old Carrie Tricks".

[Pooh Carlson]

The game with the angled board and tub underneath, the difficulty depended on how far over the angled board the tub was. The further underneath it is, the harder it is. There's also a specific place on the board to hit to make it angle into the tub correctly. The basketball hoops we had were regulation size, but super far and the rims were super tight so they were very bouncy.

The local fair does have non-regulation rims and they have signs saying as such.

[Cranjis McBasketball]

This guy eventually was on Tosh.O and still didn’t know how he got screwed.

[Push R Truth]

During my wife's election I worked a desk at a county fair for the entire 12 hours the fair was open every day. Every day and every 10 minutes the same two kids would walk by: each with a milkshake in a lidded cup (so you couldn't tell what was in it, likely empty). They would say things like "WoW I can't believe they had double chocolate malts, these are great!" At off hours they would say shit like "Two for one milkshakes, now we can go back for more without asking Mom for money!" They weren't flat out barking like a salesman, but they were obviously talking loud to make sure they were heard.


It was so painfully obvious they were carny stunt-granny-kids. They were like 10 years old and probably were working 12 hours days in the sweltering heat of summer for a week straight before they moved on to the next shitty county fair.

[Vice honcho room temperature]

Alot of carny tricks involve stabbings