Everyone has encountered persons who know a trick or two that they may spontaneously demonstrate for friends at home, in a café, or the like. These amusements may be stunts of various sorts that draw on ordinary household objects such as playing cards, string, a drinking straw, or a piece of aluminum foil; elementary magic and mentalist tricks; puzzles; and other entertainments. Most of them are doubtless traditional and might be regarded as expressions of one or another minor genre of folklore, but, so far as I know, they lack a collective name among folklorists. Sam Bartlett calls them stunts.
Bartlett (www.sambartlett.com) is a professional contra-dance musician and member of an old-time band in Bloomington, Indiana, who for the past twenty years has traveled around the United States and abroad in his work. He also goes to schools and libraries across the country showing children and adults how to do interesting and amusing stunts. Bartlett was raised by parents who enjoyed stunt-like amusements, and he never outgrew his early interest in them. As he went to different places in the course of his work, he learned more stunts and added them to his repertory. He began making a record of them for himself in the form of cartoons, eventually collecting them in zines, which he labeled issues of the Journal of Stuntology. Some he gave away, and others he sold at his performances. His zines helped to spread the word about stuntology (www.stuntology.com), and presently he was getting letters from fans in the USA and elsewhere in which people described to him stunts that they knew. In time Bartlett’s repertory of stunts and pranks grew so large that it was rare for him to encounter one he did not already know.
The zines evolved into a modest series of mostly self-published books, of which the little work under review, 51 Impossible Stunts Anyone Can Do, is the latest. Like earlier works of his that I have seen, it has the format of a graphic comic. The author is a self-taught artist, whose whimsical pen-and-ink drawings might be described as naïve in a sophisticated way. To some persons Bartlett’s style may call to mind the informal ink drawings that occasionally enliven medieval manuscripts.
The present book offers the reader fifty-one stunts that are grouped into eleven categories: String & Rope, Heads, Coordination, Watch Closely, Paper, Fruit & Nuts, Balls, Mouths, Cups, Kitchen Stunts, and Brainy Stupidity. The author explains one stunt per page, often adding performance tips (“Start by saying something like this to somebody”), guidance (“Remember not to move your fingers. This will take some practice”), and silly humor (“To start, get a small elastic hair tie. These are quite easy to find on any sidewalk”). The drawings are very helpful in conveying the idea of the different stunts.
Examples of individual stunts are The String Breaking Stunt (how to break a piece of string with your right hand by wrapping the string around your left hand in a certain way), the Eye Cracking Stunt (how to make someone think you can crack your eyes the way some people can crack their knuckles), The Floating Card Stunt (how to perform this illusion), Three Sided Flat Object (how to construct and manipulate a flexagon), Screaming Acorn Cap (how to make an extremely loud noise with your mouth and an acorn), Ping-Pong Ball Flotation Stunt (how to use your breath to keep a ping-pong ball floating in the air), That That That That That (how to make a grammatical sentence that uses the word “that” five times in a row), and the Demonically Cackling Cup (how to construct a loud noise-maker from a paper cup, string, a toothpick, and pine pitch). The cackling cup proves to be a homemade version of the Brazilian musical instrument known as a cuica.
Sam Bartlett’s 51 Impossible Stunts is not of course a scholarly work and does not aspire to be one. What it offers folklorists is a sampling of mostly traditional stunts, pranks, and puzzles, clearly and amusingly presented, as well as a glimpse into the repertory and whimsical mind of an amateur and professional stuntologist.
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[Review length: 690 words • Review posted on November 8, 2016]