Ask Bizarre - Water Spouters
Lynn Weinberger: I recently saw a television show pertaining to the art of the circus sideshow. It featured a performer who drank numerous glasses of liquid (at least 25) and then proceded to spit all of the water back up in a graceful arc across the stage. How was this feat accomplished?
DR MIKE: It sounds as though you may have been privileged to see a rare clip of the remarkable Hadji-Ali, a circus and vaudeville star billed as ‘The Amazing Regurgitator’ who lived 1892-1937. He was the most famous – indeed almost the only – water spouter of his day, and performed numerous feats involving the regurgitation of coins, buttons, stones, nuts and the occasional live goldfish. The enigmatic Egyptian was particularly noted for his ability to down a miscellany of small items and bring them back up in any order, as dictated by members of the audience.
The climax of Hadji-Ali’s act came when he knocked back a gallon of water, followed immediately by a one-pint jug of kerosene. Standing to one side of the stage, Ali would spout the kerosene onto a model castle placed on the stage, causing an instant conflagration. Waiting for the audience (who were, most likely – as was common at the time – tightly packed into a highly flammable wooden theatre with no safety exits) to experience a genuine thrill of terror, the ‘human fountain’ would then bring up the water, spouting it in a graceful six-foot arc onto the flames and extinguishing them to general applause.
Ali’s act was filmed in the early 30s and clips appeared in a contemporary documentary, Gizmo (not to be confused with Howard Smith’s 1977 docu-feature of the same name), which still crops up occasionally on obscure cable TV channels. It was made possible by the fact that kerosene floats on water rather than mixing with it, allowing the performer to bring the two liquids up one after the other after careful practice.
Another possibility is that you saw some footage of Harry Morton, the famous ‘human hydrant’. Morton’s act consisted of downing anything up to 300 small mugs of beer on stage and regurgitating them before he could become intoxicated. He was at his peak in the 1920s.
Harry Morton and Hadji-Ali were pretty much the last in a long line of water spouters. Modern-day regurgitators such as Stevie Starr prefer to work ‘dry’ with objects such as coins, rings and Rubik’s cubes. Even when swallowing goldfish, Starr brings the fish back up without the water they were swimming in only moments before, and we’ve not heard tell of an actual water spouter in years.
The great Harry Houdini put his finger on the reason for the spouter’s demise in his book Miracle Mongers and Their Methods, a highly-instructive work which can be found online, in its entirety, at The Learned Pig Project site ( http://thelearnedpig.freeservers.com/index.html ). The act, Houdini observed, is simply too disgusting for today’s lily-livered theatre-goers to stomach. Even the most practised water spouters find it tricky not to regurgitate the stinking, yellow-tinged digestive fluids and comestible detritus floating about in the pit of their digestive systems – ‘a performance,’ the escapologist observed, ‘that could not fail to disgust a modern audience’.
Joe Laurie Junior makes much this point in Vaudeville: from the Honky Tonks to the Palace, his history of the variety show. Hadji-Ali, he writes, ‘lasted four weeks in one theater before they got wise that he was killing their supper shows’.
Old-time theatre-goers were not so squeamish, and the art of the water spouter can be traced back at least as far as the mid 17th century, when the most famous regurgitator of them all – Blaise Manfre of Malta – wowed the courts of Europe with an act so bizarre it once had him arrested on suspicion of witchcraft. Manfre was famous for the duration rather than the sheer quantity of his spouts (though a French rival, Jean Royer of Lyon, was billed as being able to outspout the Maltese, maintaining a flow for ‘as long as it would take to recite the fifty-first psalm, or the time required to walk 200 paces’. The highlight of Manfre’s performance came when he appeared to drink water and regurgitate wine.
Many water spouters (Norton, a Frenchman whose career peaked around 1949, is a typical example) have accounted for their feats by claiming to be freaks, born with two or more stomachs and thus the ability to keep the things they swallow apart. There is no evidence these claims are anything other than simple showman’s bravado. Houdini explains Manfre’s water-into-wine act by suggesting the Maltese swallowed Brazil wood extract, a natural red dye, before coming on stage. The extract would stain the regurgitated water a rich red wine colour. (As a refinement, some water spouters are reported to have regurgitated successive draughts of claret, beer and Burgundy. This effect was produced by successive dilutions of Brazil wood extract, the ‘beer’ being regurgitated into glasses washed with white wine vinegar to produce a pale red-gold colour.)
As for the ‘trick’ of the water-spouter’s art, it is simply a matter of controlled vomiting – learning to expand and contract the muscles of the stomach and throat at will. Some performers are know to have swalled gall before going on stage to ensure they could vomit easily, but most seem to have acquired precise sphincter control through regular practice. Long-distance spouting of the sort made famous by the German ‘Living Hydrant’ Hans Rohrl (fl. 1920s) – who could produce an arc of spray 15 foot long and seven wide – is made possible by inducing violent stomach spasms while retaining lip control. And, in case you were wondering, modern-day ‘dry’ regurgitators obtain their results through diligent training by swallowing and bringing up successively larger objects. Cut-down potato pellets of varying sizes are apparently highly favoured for this work.