Do your jobbers ever have to work the dunk tank when the carnival comes to town?
The answer is that some poor fools must have this task, and of course it’s best when they are professionally trained slapstick performers who are able to cope with the physical rigours – and the mental challenges, too. It’s a tough life, getting messed-up repeatedly, day in, day out.
As you know, the dunk tank is a time-honoured means of attracting the crowds, whether it’s on a fairground, or as a side-show to the circus. Surprisingly, recruiting those who are prepared to be on the receiving end is never a problem: there’s an inexhaustible supply of applicants - men with an urge to be seen getting messed-up, men who actively seek out public humiliation.
(Let’s be clear - jobbers aren’t involved. You can’t combine the role of a professional wrestler with that of a dunk tank stooge. For a start, the hours conflict, and secondly pro-wrestling jobbers already have enough indignity to contend with: imagine what it’s like to walk out into the ring knowing you’re going to finish with being powerbombed to the canvas three times in succession and lose to a folding press with your backside up in the air, your packet on display from behind, and your trunks riding up to expose the briefs you have on underneath.)
Returning to dunk tanks, as you’ll also be aware, there are two main types.
There’s the style that is basically a see-through rectangular box. It is divided in half by a shelf that has a trap door. The gunk fills the top chamber; the stooge sits in the chamber beneath. Once the trigger has released the trap door, the gloop pours through over the poor stooge below. The box is set at its rear into a revolving clasp so that the entire contraption can be turned upside down, enabling the procedure to begin again.
And then there’s the style where there’s an actual tank or large inflatable pool filled to the brim with gloop. Above this, the stooge sits on some kind of suspended platform that collapses once a target is struck, thereby dropping him - or sending him down a slide - into the muck.
What’s common to both these ways of operating is that there’s a usually a portable shower out of the punters’ sight, where the stooge attempts to clean himself in between his numerous messings as quickly as possible. And to prevent too much of the gunk material from being abstracted by the stooges’ bodies and sluiced away in the shower and wasted, the stooges must scrape off what they can of it before they wash themselves. The gunk that has been retrieved in this fashion is recycled to the tank.
There are frequently two stooges on duty sharing the work - they appear one after the other - but there are rarely any more than this. (When there’s only one stooge, punters may not bother waiting at the empty booth while the stooge is showering. If they see there’s no chance of any action they’ll wander off instead.)
The life of a dunk tank stooge is brutal in numerous ways.
Firstly, it’s relentless. Step into the box and have around 2,000 litres of gunge dropped over your head till it covers your body and reaches up to your mouth, shower, return to the box, repeat. And repeat ad infinitum.
(It’s a similar procedure if you’re on a booby-trapped platform, except that you can expect to fall up to one-and-a-half metres into a tank that holds perhaps six times that quantity of gloop.)
What has to be emphasised is that you as a stooge must do this again and again. And again and again and again. There are no limits to the number of times you might get messed up during the course of a working day, and these can be gruellingly long, while a six-day week is the norm. The dunk tank needs to operate all the while that punters are around. If you’re a stooge, don’t expect any sort of a break.
You’re under enormous pressure to shower yourself clean (or clean-ish) and get back to the booth super-fast. The management will expect there to be a stooge ready and waiting for another messing at all times.
Secondly, everything about the job is nasty. For a start, you have to share costumes. You come out of the shower and grab whatever’s on top of the communal pile – the next pair of shorts, tank-top, or Speedos. Your colleague wore them last, but you’ll be thankful if they’ve dried out since their last rinsing.
You’re probably going to be using a primitive portable shower. Its’ reservoir ought to be refilled frequently with fresh water, but this may be impractical, in which case you’re merely sluicing yourself down with a diluted solution of the gunge you’ve had dumped over you, and which you and your colleague have already shared countless times earlier in the day.
Next, the gunk is cold. It’s not going to be heated for you. If you’re lucky, the water in the shower may be warm, which will be your only chance to restore your body temperature.
The gunk isn’t clean. At least, it won’t be for most of your contract. When the booth first operates, the gunk will still be fresh. Then, it’s a neutral, inert mixture that’s had colour added (the basis is usually some form of methyl cellulose which is the chief ingredient of wallpaper paste as well as certain food thickeners).
However, it doesn’t take long for this concoction to become adulterated. Airborne viruses are sufficient to set it deteriorating. And because the gunk is partly recycled off your own and your colleague’s bodies, you need to be inured to the reality that the mixture with which you’re making repeated full bodily contact increasingly incorporates dead skin, spit, sweat, and snot. Plus (and I’m sorry to mention this, but it’s a fact, given you’re unlikely to be allowed any kind of rest-break) piss as well. After a few weeks, the mixture will be rank. Though this is what you’ll have dumped over you - or be falling into – repeatedly.
Unless you’re extremely tough and resilient, you’ll most likely suffer various forms of minor ailments as a result of your daily treatment. But unless you turn up for work you won’t get paid. (And overwhelmingly probably, the pay will be miserable anyway.) You’ve developed a skin infection, an eye infection, an ear infection? Too bad. Change into these trunks and get back to the booth. You’ll be told there’s a list six pages long of men who’d like to take your job.
These are the physical hardships you’ll face as a dunk tank stooge: are there also mental ones?
‘Definitely,’ says Wesley Gittings who gave up a good job in IT to tour with a carnival for three years. ‘It can get to you. I used to wake up in the mornings in a basic trailer and all I’d have as the prospect for my day ahead was that I’d have gunge poured over me time and time and time again. And I’d think why the hell am I putting myself through this? What I’m doing is degrading. Absolutely no-one respects you for it.’
‘I’ll admit I don’t have the greatest body in the world, so I’d be out there each time before I got messed in just a pair of swim-briefs, and I’d have kids of no more than eight or ten in front of the booth laughing at me. And then when a punter managed to throw the quoit onto the stick and the muck went all over me the kids would all go, “Eugh! He’s crazy!” And do you know what? Maybe I was.’
‘Eventually I had to come to terms with the fact that wanting to get messed-up in public was a compulsion. I realised I needed to be seen being humiliated, and although the work as a gunk tank stooge harmed me in all kinds of ways and exhausted me totally, my hunger for having it done to me over and over and over again just kept growing. I knew I was being exploited, but I wanted to be exploited. Sometimes I hated myself for doing what I was doing, but I couldn’t have borne it if somebody else was the full-time dunk tank stooge and not me. I just had to do it.’