Credit: Dangerous Minds / Video Still

Hey, so, you remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer becomes a sensation on the carnival circuit with an act consisting of getting shot in the gut with a cannon? Turns out this is one of the very few cases where The Simpsons didn’t actually do it first.

I joke because that episode is a 20-minute tribute to the life and career of Frank “Cannonball” Richards, a vaudeville performer from the 1920s and 1930s who made a career out of more or less exactly the same stunt…showing just how much force his abdomen could take. Except that Richards had a lot more than 20 minutes to demonstrate his talent and thus could get a lot more creative with it.

Born Frank Anson Richards in Minneapolis, Kansas, on February 20th, 1887. During his time serving in the First World War, Richards discovered that his pain threshold was much higher than his other sqaddies, especially when anything came into contact with his stomach. Anyone from his company could punch him as hard as they could in the stomach, and Richards would be able to shrug it off with ease, even from hardened soldiers.

It takes quite a miraculous amount of chutzpah to look at this weird quirk and think, “I’m going to build my career out of this”. However, after the end of the war, there weren’t a whole lot of other options open to Richards. Thus, he took his act to a local comedy club back home in Kansas, let a number of audience members punch him in the gut and was suddenly an in-demand Vaudeville performer by the mid-1920s.

Of course, for a vaudeville act to really sing, you’ve got to evolve it, and pretty soon after Richards set up the act, punches just wouldn’t cut it any more.

How did Frank Richards get to taking a Cannonball to the gut?

Richards’ act escalated and escalated fast. In the world of Vaudeville, you were only as good as your next booking. Anyone who got stale rarely revitalised their career, so Richards had to go from punch to more dangerous activities real quickly. This is exactly what he did, graduating from taking punches from audience members to taking blows from baseball bats from them. Then he got them to stamp on his gut from five feet in the air.

Dangerous, to be sure, but there were ways of preparing for them. It was everything that happened next that started messing with Richard’s health. He started handing audience members sledgehammers rather than baseball bats. Anyone who was punching him was the heavyweight boxing champions of the day, like Jess Willard and Joe Louis. Yet the act still had to go on, getting bigger and more dangerous until finally, he decided upon the act that made him an icon.

By the late 1920s, Frank Richards’ act consisted of, twice a day, getting shot in the stomach with a 100-pound cannonball. As far as we know, it was real. Of course, carny culture can be as loosey-goosey with the fact as your average professional wrestling promoter, but if there was any way of kayfabeing this, they wouldn’t have restricted it to two, then one show a day. He also probably wouldn’t have stopped doing the act so soon after it started.

After all, it made money, and if anything, the fact that it stopped because of its clear and present danger to its performers’ health is a rarity in the world of carnival freak shows. Yet, hopefully, Richards can rest easy knowing that the images of him taking a cannonball to the chest made him an icon, appearing on everything from Van Halen album covers to an episode of Futurama.

A lesson to us all, then. With enough heart, grit and disregard for our physical well-being, anyone can make something of themselves!