- It's not the month of the national circus holiday but anytime is a good time for fun facts like these.
It’s not April anymore, the month that has a national circus holiday, but there’s no bad time for circus fun facts.
- “Circus” comes from the Latin word circle or ring.
- Rome’s Circus Maximus could fit an audience of over 150,000 Romans.
- A typical circus is a traveling company of acrobats, performers, trained animals and clowns.
- Art forms like juggling, trapeze, acting and music without a ringleader, animals or a “big top” tent are known as a Nouveau Cirque.
- A Flyer is a performer who performs skills mid-air.
- A second performer acts as the base to lift or catch the flyer.
- A third performer is a spotter who’s there to assist and safeguard the flyer. Did you know about the differences between the performers for these circus fun facts?
- Performers signal the act is done with a signature style of their own, like a wink, a hand gesture, or a “Ta-dah!”
- Commedia dell’Arte is the art of clowning and is highly physical theater, usually without words, also like pantomime.
- The Flying Fruit Fly Circus! Is the only one that’s a full-time circus school. For people though, not for bugs. Is this one of the circus fun facts you knew?
- Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest and came in third, ha! (You know, the influential clown and comedian?)
- Cigar boxes continue to be a popular juggling prop. It’s used for high-speed mid-air box exchanges, balances and other tricks.
- Cary Grant, the legendary acrobat and juggler, started his performance career working as an acrobat and juggler.
- A circus genre known as contortionism is when a performer displays unusually flexible muscles and mobile joints.
- The art of walking on a loose and flexible wire that’s connected between two point and often at a great height is called slackwire.
- Both whistling backstage and entering the ring with you left foot are both considered bad luck and considered a circus superstition.
- The simplest form of juggling is using three objects called a three ball cascade. Is this one of the circus fun facts you already knew before reading this article?
- The Stars and Stripes Forever is Sousa’s famous march which was traditionally played to signal an emergency quickly to all the circus personnel.
- Bringing a peacock feather into the circus tent is another circus superstition and can be bad luck.
- Some circus performers keep a hair from an elephant’s tail in their pockets under the superstition that it’s good luck.
- When a performers wardrobe trunk is set down backstage, it’s thought of as bad luck to move it prior to the circus relocating.
- A strolling vendor at a circus that sells concessions like popcorn and toys to the audience is known as a butcher.
- The Greatest Show on Earth is a 1952 Oscar-winning circus epic and the first film that Steven Spielberg ever saw in the theater. How interesting is this as one of the circus fun facts?
- A free ticket is also known as an Annie Oakley. (The small hole punched into the ticker resembles sharpshooter Oakley’s bullet holes and she’s rumored to have given bullet-perforated playing cards to kids that they could use as free passes.)
Did you know these fun facts about the circus? Let me know what you think in the comments!