Linor Horalik. Quasimodushki

Quasimodushki
The seventh sign: People's program "Sign of Quality"

Linor Goralik

Publication date: August 22, 2000

The display of grimaces began. The first face that appeared in the hole, with everted eyelids, a gaping mouth like an animal’s mouth and a folded forehead that resembled the top of a hussar’s boot from the times of the Empire, caused such uncontrollable laughter among those present that Homer would have mistaken all these hillbillies for gods. Meanwhile, the large hall least of all resembled Olympus. <...> The first grimace was replaced by a second, a third, then another and another; The approving laughter and stomping intensified. There was something dizzying in this spectacle, some kind of intoxicating witchcraft power, the effect of which is difficult to describe to the reader of our days.

Victor Hugo, "Notre Dame Cathedral"

Who doesn’t remember numerous childhood situations when you are dragged by your sweaty paw in a colored mitten through the first snowball, and something like this walks by !!!! Such an idea!!! His legs are like wheels, his arms are also like wheels, his head is shaking, one eye seems to be missing at all, drool is dripping, there is a hump on his back - oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh... What kind of marvelous wonder is this?! Freeze and stare with all your eyes and remember everything, so that later in an ominous whisper you can tell your neighbor, wheezing in horror, in a quiet hour, in order to come up with a terrible tale about how he did n’t listen to his mother, or ate porridge poorly, or entered into an open battle with Black- The Black Door... And he walks funny, hobbling like a wind-up monkey - you'll laugh, you'll cringe... But they drag, drag, drag away, they don't let you look properly, but to "what?" and why?" They answer irritably: “Don’t stare, the man is sick. It’s not good to stare. Do you think he’s pleased? It’s not his fault. Would you be pleased if they stared at you? Straighten your hat and stop dragging your feet, we’ll be late.”

It was then that we learned two postulates: “They don’t take offense at the sick” and “It’s not good to laugh at someone else’s misfortune.” True, at first we used them mainly in an abusive and contemptuous context, but with age, having been in a couple of teenage altercations, we somehow understood their meaning in our own skin. And we learned to feel sorry for freaks - not because it was necessary, but truly, from the ability to put ourselves in their place, and even later - from the understanding that the line is thin and fate is unpredictable...

While preparing this text, I tried to find something on the history of freak exhibitions - I wanted to know when they ceased to exist as a mass phenomenon. I was not able to find out anything concrete - but at the end of the last century they were still at every fair, and even at the beginning of this there were enough traveling circuses, booths, panopticons, where there were bearded women, and hunchbacked dwarves, and “a man with crocodile skin,” and hydrocephalus, and microcephalus, and everything else that nature has created in its eternal haste with its characteristic cruel negligence. Almost always, the nightmare life in the booth was easier for these people than the nightmare life in everyday life: here they at least had bread, shelter and a sense of their place in the world.

The owners of panopticons (contrary to literary classics, they were often compassionate and honest people who gathered the unfortunate under their wing, protected them to the best of their ability and tried to feed themselves and the troupe by traveling to fairs and bazaars) knew for sure that a person will always be ready to pay for two opportunities : the opportunity to satisfy your curiosity and the opportunity to feel your own superiority. These two products sold well even in the leanest times - especially in lean times! When there are few positive things in life, nothing is valued as highly as the opportunity to escape from your own troubles and feel that you are better than others in some ways.

Humanism, socialism, the series "ER" and the benefits of charity during the election campaign - in recent decades, showing freaks for money has become bad. Or rather, staring at freaks for money has become bad, and experiencing positive emotions at the same time has become even worse. Nowadays, when you see a person with dropsy, you should turn away sympathetically and look at the clouds with all your might. I do not know. Maybe he would have been happier in a booth than in the midst of this emphasis on his “normality.” But that's not what this is about.

The point is that demand has not gone away, but supply has disappeared. The love for healthy laughter at a geek, the love for a sense of one’s own normality, the love for carefree mockery of one’s neighbor’s shortcomings remained - there were no legitimate objects for satisfying this love. As you know, demand creates supply.

We were forbidden to mock the sick, but no one forbade us to mock the healthy. True, we were suggested many times not to do this - but somehow they suggested it very quietly, we didn’t hear, we were busy. Therefore, when a person in a passage shakes his stumps in front of us, we don’t look at him, and when a person on TV shakes his nose in front of us with twenty-one earrings in each nostril, we look, having specifically freed ourselves from other matters at the appropriate hour, sitting in a special comfortable chair , with a specially stored can of our favorite beer, with a specially cultivated sweet, joyful, reliable feeling that it is not us who are struggling there, and not our acquaintances, and not even our children (unless, of course, we are mistaken). We are good.

It seems to me that if a dude came to the management of a reputable TV channel today and said: “Let’s organize a program where all sorts of geeks will come and where they will demonstrate their humps, birthmarks, deformed gums and cleft lips,” they will send him (again - so to me it seems ). And if he came and said: “Let’s organize a program where all sorts of moral monsters will come and dance a striptease weighing 120 kilograms, fight on stage, tell that they are the reincarnation of Hitler, that they slept with their own mother and that they have eight husbands of both sexes.” ", - they will say to him: “Wow, dude. You’re thinking right, dude. Bring the estimate.”

...Do you know this feeling - shame for being a fool? For a stranger, unknown to you, but exposing himself to everyone's ridicule as a fool? No? Well, thank God. Talk Shows Forever.