The nature of these shows has itself mutated, keeping pace with society's own changing attitudes to physical deformities. It's no longer acceptable to ridicule or demonize the physically or mentally handicapped, to either shut them away in institutions or exhibit them to a leering public. Indeed, medical science strives to eradicate physiological deviance through pre-natal scans, and to treat other conditions with surgery or drugs. But despite this modern urge to standardize the world, a primitive awe lurks beneath the surface. Open any woman's weekly magazine and you're guaranteed at least one tear-jerker about a child born without limbs, suffering from a rare skin disorder or otherwise graphically deformed.
Rubbernecked fascination is dressed up as sympathy.
The morbid appeal that turned the Elephant Man into a Victorian celebrity still lingers. In the modern freak show, congenitally normal people snack on bugs and broken glass, set fire to their tattooed bodies, hang impossibly heavy weights off their most tender extremities, and generally warp our perceptions of pain and pleasure, animal and human, male and female. In the context of our modern obsession with perfect body image and genetic engineering, the deviance of this self-mutilation has a potent attraction. At Coney Island they see themselves firmly in the tradition of PT Barnum, vaudeville and the Island itself. In the mid 1980s it became a haven for many older sideshow veterans finishing up their careers in an increasingly censorious climate.