Dead Man's Carnival: Something wicked this way comes

Unbeknownst to most Milwaukeeans, the city harbors a small band of street performers passionately dedicated to the traditions of vaudevillian comedy, lying on broken glass, and stripping off clothes slowly to music. Dead Man’s Carnival has been playing for the bar crowd since 2007, preaching the gospel of the underground circus as part of a growing grassroots movement that stands squarely against canned corporate entertainment. The A.V. Club met some of the core members at Stonefly Brewery, where they will be performing their latest two-stage, four-hour extravaganza of burlesque, cringe-inducing sideshow stunts, “fire-manipulation,” and live music on Saturday. The performers go by their nommes de cirque: Gypsy Geoff, Sir Pinkerton Xyloma, Zero The Clown, Lady Ambrosia, and Erik Bang!!!.

The A.V. Club: Dead Man’s Carnival is an underground circus act, but haven’t circuses always been somewhat disreputable? Clowns, for one, are creepy.

Gypsy Geoff: I’m afraid of Shriner clowns, old clowns who don’t have any talent hanging around with kids. It’s totally weird. If you say you’re scared of clowns, I’m going to find a way to make you not scared of clowns.

AVC: But you’ve embraced a seedy aesthetic, haven’t you?

Lady Ambrosia: Only the men.

Sir Pinkerton Xyloma: Geoff is the most innocent of us all. We pride ourselves on taking people through the full spectrum that an audience can go through. They will laugh, they will get nervous or upset, they’ll be allured by burlesque. Sanjoola—the guy with sharpened bicycle spokes through his jaw, he’ll be at the August 1st show—or Eric are absolute masters at framing it as a test of human endurance: You want them to succeed, so it’s not like a freak show. You get a lot of groups that all they want to do is make people vomit.

AVC: So you don’t go for the Jackass-style gross-out stuff?

SPX: We do it in a way, like, you’re suddenly a religious shaman going through this experience, and you’re letting everyone else go through it with you

AVC: What’s your audience like?

SPX: We have a lot of dropout, punk-rock, all these different bohemian types, art-theater types, but we have a lot of really strait-laced folks who are some of our most dedicated fans. It’s the cliché that the people who go to dominatrixes are always these corporate executives that have no outlet in their lives.

AVC: What is the most unexpected thing an audience did at your show?

Erik Bang!!!: Oh God! I don’t know which one to start with! I was with Brewzirkus and—we don’t know how this happened—somehow our sideshow got booked to play Summerfest.

GG: [Laughs.] The kid’s stage?

EB: Yeah [Laughs.] We had a woman who did this act called “The Insectable.” And after she ate some insects, a bunch of them were getting away, and, um, the children ran up and started eating… [Laughs.]

AVC: What kind of insects?

EB: Crickets. The children were eating crickets. And the parents didn’t move.

AVC: Who are the characters you play?

GG: Gypsy Geoff has a bit of me, and also some of my most influential performers: Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Marx Brothers, Stooges, vaudeville.

SPX: I’m Satan. Not like from the Bible, but like Satan from Sandman, with a little bit of, never-know-you-can-trust-him-around-your-girlfriend-type guy. We do a routine together where she [Lady Ambrosia] does a burlesque shower scene and I’m a peeping tom. I seduce her, and then as soon as she gets turned on, she tears off her robe, she’s got full S&M gear on and I’m kind of looking at my watch like, “I’ve got to go.” [Laughs.] And she throws me down and has her way with me.

LA: I like to call it "old-school, vaudevillian-style striptease." It’s an exchange with the audience where I am in control and giving as much as I want, keeping as much as I want. I’m doing it for me.

EB: You’re watching for nuances.

GG: Not just taking off your clothes.

AVC: Is it hard to get women to do burlesque?

EB: It’s sweeping the country. It’s like Hula-Hoops. It’s coming back!