CHAPTER XVIII
BUNKUM ENTERTAINMENTS
The Cuckoo of Society
It has been asserted that the noun “bunkum” is first cousin to the verb “to bunk.” If so, the dealer in bunkumisms disdains the connection until matters grow too hot for him at the end of a performance, when, as a last resource, he hugs his relative gladly. Cupboard affection this, and in order to shelter himself from the righteous wrath of the audience, achieves a flying bunk from the platform.
The word “bunkum” is interesting. It is defined in the dictionary as “speech spoken merely to please one’s supporters or constituents and secure their votes—mere talk.” It originates from “Buncombe, a district in North Carolina, with a constituency, to please whom a member of theirs once boasted he made a speech in Congress.”
Bunkum covers a wider field than science, woman’s suffrage, or politics. It is an autocrat that stands aloof, and demands the gentle hearts of greenhorn and sage alike for its sacrificial fires. It endeavors to prove that the age of miracles has not been choked out of existence beneath the widespread fingers of civilization, or how could an orange be transformed before our eyes into a cauliflower, an egg into a peeled potato ?
The bunkum entertainer molds the brains of the most iron-headed cynic into putty, and transforms the scoffing jeers of the know-all schoolboy into humble admiration. He is a quack sorcerer, and, even while we designate him as such, we are obliged to own that his art is steeped in deepest mystery.
The bunkum entertainer is a parasite, a cartoonist, and mimic, a smooth-tongued, unscrupulous rascal, who deserves—the conscientious entertainer (who never tries bunkum because he is too stupid and wool-headed) so has it—to be banished to a desert island and served to cannibals as minced donkey flesh “à la bunkum.” He is the sort of man who borrows five pound notes, gold watches, and diamond rings from his audience, and forgets to return them. He cheats, deludes, patters, lies by the yard, swallows enough solid materials to furnish a warehouse, and give an ostrich indigestion.
He is tough and brazen, and cheaply cynical at the expense of the authentic conjurer, juggler, phrenologist, ventriloquist, seer, and spiritualist. He is the cuckoo of society. He concocts a potpourri of brains and wit, and offers it as his own; and yet, in spite of it all, how fascinating and overwhelming is his personality. He is the fool of the world—the jester who prances about in cap and bells, who causes our sides to ache in our futile effort to keep our risibilities decorously pitched. Never did a folly play pitch and toss with the pedantic phrases of solemn courtiers, kings and prelates, as ably and irreverently as this monster incarnate with the five senses of mankind.
He is wrapped in mystery. We regard him with awe and wonder: the curtains, the table, the walls, the footlights are his faithful agents. We gaze at the rabbit popping up from his hat, the watch flicked through a pistol barrel to the wall, the inane jack of diamonds darting from his mouth to the back of his coat, in trembling amazement of his cunning. We whisper to our beating hearts, “Can such things be?” At that instant he throws aside the cloak of secrecy, and shows us his glaring infidelity. He has not, as we supposed, ruptured and mastered every law of gravitation and nature. He has simply been dealing in the art of “bunkum,” and, when he reveals his methods to us, as he never fails to do in a continuous prattle of artless confidence, we see—or we think we see—that it is all child’s play and foolish absurdity.