Target acquired: the vaudeville tradition of being shot with a cannon
When you see old footage of people being shot out of a cannon, it’s easy to think that we really did use to be entertained by any old thing, didn’t we?
Long before the internet age, where we can now take out the telephone in our pockets and immediately immerse ourselves in the greatest work of art, music, fiction, you name it, in the very same moment we thought of it, we had to settle for things. You want to watch a Prince concert from 1984? Tough shit, there’s no YouTube, Spotify or even CDs. Prince himself hasn’t been born yet. Instead, here’s a hula hoop and a stick. Make the best of it.
It’s the reason why a lot of vaudeville looks so quaint these days. Quaint at its best, I suppose. When you look at all the child exploitation, animal abuse, ablism and bigotry that were used to make a quick buck on the stage circuit of the late 1800s and early 1900s, quaint becomes too small a word for it. For the most part, though, it was pretty knockabout entertainment.
Singers, dancers and comedians were the most common, to the point that lessons learned from Vaudeville still permeate the modern versions of those art forms. Look at most drag performers for proof of that. Yet not everyone is cut out to be Gene Kelly, or even Velma Kelly. Some people just had a weird thing they could do and decided to make a name for themselves with that one weird trick.
A lot of the time, that weird trick was being able to take a hell of a lot of pain. So much so that one of the most famous Vaudeville veterans of the day could get shot with a cannon and walk it off.
Why was Frank Richards shot with a cannon?
Born in Minneapolis, Kansas, on February 20th, 1887, not a whole lot is known about the life of Frank Richards other than the fact that he served in World War One and, presumably, during that period of conflict, discovered that he had a hidden talent. While most people would like their hidden talent to be something like boxing or doing a sick-ass Charleston, especially at that time. However, Richards’ was something a little simpler than that.
Put simply, the man’s gut could take an absolute pounding. Get your mind out of the gutter, not like that (well, maybe like that), in a much more literal sense where his fellow squaddies could punch, kick and even swing baseball bats at his stomach and he’d barely feel a thing. After the war finished, not a lot of work was going around for squaddies coming home, but Frank knew he had this one thing setting him out from the rest of the pack, so he decided to take it on the road.
He joined a local vaudeville troupe, and at first, his act was pretty similar to the way he passed time in the War, getting audience members and, in some cases, local boxing champions, to punch him in the stomach as hard as they could. However, all acts get stale and soon enough, Richards had to heighten the stakes, and he did so by finding someone willing to fire a cannon directly into his gut. This made him a national celebrity, and at the peak of his popularity, he was getting shot with a cannon twice a day and shaking it off like it was absolutely nothing.
Sure, we can binge Breaking Bad in its entirety precisely when we feel like it these days, but admit it, you’d watch Big Tom go to work if you could, wouldn’t you?