the Way of the Showman – Details, episodes & analysis

A chainsaw mounted to a sword. Seventeen pumpkins in a minute. And a philosophy that says a show only becomes real when the audience completes it. That’s the ride we take with Jelly Boy the Clown—writer, record-setter, and sideshow artist who turns chaos into craft.

We start with the surprise aftermath of America’s Got Talent: millions of viewers, zero promotion allowed, and a door opening from an unexpected direction—Guinness World Records. From there we go inside the workshop, where ideas live first in a sketchbook, then on a bench with bolts and cork, and finally on stage. Why pumpkins beat watermelons, how to create negative space with pitchforks, and what three points of contact do for stability when the saw is humming in your throat. It’s engineering, rehearsal, and risk management wrapped in clown logic.

The heart of the talk is presentation. Tools are level one; meaning lives in timing, character, and framing. Jelly Boy shares how he disarms fear—pairing eye hooks with Careless Whisper, mixing menace with sincerity—so the audience leans in. We dig into act architecture: the tennis racket routine evolving through constraints, failed slapstick reappearing later as the perfect chaos engine, and why variety beats repetition for laughs and suspense. Along the way, we trace his films—from a B-movie to a raw fire-recovery doc to Dark Imagination Party—capturing how the pandemic pushed the work from stages to cameras and back again.

Threaded through is our host’s upcoming book, Facing The Other Way, a philosophy of showmanship that frames performance as a three-part system: performer, audience, and attention. Without a witness, magic isn’t magic. That idea lands as we talk edits, cuts, and voice—how slicing fifty pages can reveal the core, why a unified tone matters, and how community and small presses help art find its people. If you care about live arts, circus, clowning, sword swallowing, or the creative process of turning rough sketches into resonant moments, this one’s for you.

If the conversation hits home, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review. Your attention is the spark—help us keep the fire bright.

Support the show

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After a long abscence our Merch Shop is back! Check out t-shirts, hoddies, and hats! Show yourself as a Follower of the Way of the Showman.

You can also "listen" to the Way of the Showman at youtube.

If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.

If you want to  contact me about anyhthing ou can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
You can find out more on the Way of the Showman website.

Follow the Way of the Showman on Instagram.

If you're compelled to suport the showes and have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

What makes an audience lean forward before the first trick lands? We dive into stage presence as a lived practice, not a buzzword. From Jay’s house in Stockholm, Frodo and Jay unpack how real attention, honest emotion, and contextual awareness turn raw technique into connection you can feel in the room. No acting notes, no hollow smiles—just the hard, generous work of being here with people, right now.

We share the messy path many artists take from hobbyist to performer and why conviction matters before the material is perfect. You’ll hear how a modular show architecture lets you answer a crowd in real time, when quieting down tames a rowdy room, and how three loops—your inner state, the audience’s state, and the social relationship—guide moment-to-moment choices. We talk about reading the room beyond clichés: the corporate ballroom with chairs turned away, the school assembly building to a roar, and the town theater reopening after a flood. Context isn’t decoration; it is the content your presence must meet.

Words versus abstraction, authenticity versus mimicry, and the test that cuts through everything: would you want to watch this? We dig into teachable charisma, why about half of presence can be trained, and how to find an archetype that fits your truth instead of chasing someone else’s shine. Craft supports presence—framing, tempo, applause points—but love powers it. Love of practice gives you something worth showing. Love of the audience gives you a reason to share it well. That’s how feeling transmits, Tolstoy-style, from your center to theirs.

Support the show

...

After a long abscence our Merch Shop is back! Check out t-shirts, hoddies, and hats! Show yourself as a Follower of the Way of the Showman.

You can also "listen" to the Way of the Showman at youtube.

If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.

If you want to  contact me about anyhthing ou can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
You can find out more on the Way of the Showman website.

Follow the Way of the Showman on Instagram.

If you're compelled to suport the showes and have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

What happens when we lose touch with play, friendship, and authentic human connection? This episode dives into the surprising links between playfulness, friendliness, and showmanship – revealing how these seemingly "purposeless" activities might be the very foundation of what makes us human.

I explore Belyaev's groundbreaking fox experiment, which demonstrated something remarkable: when researchers bred foxes solely for friendliness, playfulness emerged spontaneously without being selected for. This suggests these traits may be facets of the same evolutionary adaptation – our innate drive to connect meaningfully with others.

The conversation takes a sobering turn as we examine the concept of "play deficit" – the documented decline in children's free play since the 1960s that correlates disturbingly with skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, and even suicide among young people. Could our efficiency-obsessed culture be robbing children of something essential to their development?

This leads us to consider a parallel concept: "show deficiency." Using the COVID pandemic as a natural experiment, we look at what happened when humans couldn't gather for performances, cultural events, and community celebrations. The resulting 25% increase in mental health struggles suggests these seemingly frivolous activities might be as necessary as food and shelter.

Throughout the episode, I challenge the capitalist notion that values only productivity and efficiency. What if Hobbes was wrong about human nature? What if we're not naturally selfish and cruel, but instead born to learn, bond, and play? Our cultural expressions – from singing around campfires to magic shows – might not be diversions from "real life" but expressions of our deepest nature.

Join me as we reimagine what truly matters and discover how embracing the apparently purposeless might be the key to living fully human lives.

Support the show

...

After a long abscence our Merch Shop is back! Check out t-shirts, hoddies, and hats! Show yourself as a Follower of the Way of the Showman.

You can also "listen" to the Way of the Showman at youtube.

If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.

If you want to  contact me about anyhthing ou can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
You can find out more on the Way of the Showman website.

Follow the Way of the Showman on Instagram.

If you're compelled to suport the showes and have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

In this episode I talk to Morgan James about our collaborative process in creating his, now, multi-award winning show A One Man Circus. I have had the pleasure of hanging virtually with this driven and entrepeneurial showman for the last year and I had a lot of fun exploring and revisiting some of the insights and the ways we arrived at the decisions taken in creating a one hour family show. It's a solo performance as the title points out, yet there is more than one character appearing in the show. If that is surprising to the audinence, they're not nearly as surprised as I, or we, were when another character emerged in the process.

The regular episodes of season 2 are about the philosophy behind a way of looking at performance. In episode 41 where I talked to Jay Gilligan and episode 23 where I talked to myself and now this episode with Morgan I find there are patterns and techniques emerging and becoming visible on how the philosophical ideas and the Way manifests itself in the world.

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If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.
If you want to  contact me about anything, including wanting me to collaborate on one of your projects you can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
or find out more on the Way of the Showman website.
If you find it in you and you have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at:
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

Support the show

Support the show

...

After a long abscence our Merch Shop is back! Check out t-shirts, hoddies, and hats! Show yourself as a Follower of the Way of the Showman.

You can also "listen" to the Way of the Showman at youtube.

If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.

If you want to  contact me about anyhthing ou can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
You can find out more on the Way of the Showman website.

Follow the Way of the Showman on Instagram.

If you're compelled to suport the showes and have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

This episode explores the moral implications of Attention on us showfolk, it also delves into how Showmanship is present in monkeys and the great apes, it explains how Attention allows oddballs and how individuals that might appear to be evolutionary dead ends can climb the ladder of social hierarchies.

Most importantly this episode expands the concept of Attention to give a better understanding of how important it is in Showmanship. To the attentive performer Attention is really the cash value of what performance is about. I try to show that by pointing out that it is Attention which infact determines you entire reality and how it is what makes your life and your relationships meaningful.

Support the show

...

After a long abscence our Merch Shop is back! Check out t-shirts, hoddies, and hats! Show yourself as a Follower of the Way of the Showman.

You can also "listen" to the Way of the Showman at youtube.

If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.

If you want to  contact me about anyhthing ou can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
You can find out more on the Way of the Showman website.

Follow the Way of the Showman on Instagram.

If you're compelled to suport the showes and have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

This episode explores the supremely important phenomena of Attention. This faculty lies at the core of what a performer does. For at its most fundamental what a performer does is to manipulate time and Attention. We are given some Attention by an Audience and what we do with their attention through the time that it is given to us is all we can do.
First I try to paint a picture of what Attention is then we expand our understanding by looking at Attention like three different kinds of light.

This is all very important for us showfolk, and for those that still remembers, or have taken into their daily work on the Craft of performing, from episode 35 on the Anatomy of Showmanship Attention is one of the four foundational elements that makes up Showmanship.

Links:

James William - expert on attention
not to be confused with William James - which was an american philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first exucator to offer a psychology course in the United States. A supremely interesting thinker, but not immidieately relevant to this episode.

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If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.
If you want to  contact me about anything, including wanting me to collaborate on one of your projects you can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
or find out more on the Way of the Showman website.
If you find it in you and you have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at:
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

Support the show

...

After a long abscence our Merch Shop is back! Check out t-shirts, hoddies, and hats! Show yourself as a Follower of the Way of the Showman.

You can also "listen" to the Way of the Showman at youtube.

If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.

If you want to  contact me about anyhthing ou can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
You can find out more on the Way of the Showman website.

Follow the Way of the Showman on Instagram.

If you're compelled to suport the showes and have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

Today we use a section of Goethe's faust as a lens through which to view our noble craft. I believe there is a suprisingly deep mataphorical connection between this monumental book from literature and what we do as performers. Although we start in the highbrow world of literature we end with one of the most practical application of esoteric exploration we have had along the way.

...

 If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.
If you want to  contact me about anything, including wanting me to collaborate on one of your projects you can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
or find out more on the Way of the Showman website.
If you find it in you and you have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at:
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

Support the show

...

After a long abscence our Merch Shop is back! Check out t-shirts, hoddies, and hats! Show yourself as a Follower of the Way of the Showman.

You can also "listen" to the Way of the Showman at youtube.

If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.

If you want to  contact me about anyhthing ou can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
You can find out more on the Way of the Showman website.

Follow the Way of the Showman on Instagram.

If you're compelled to suport the showes and have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

I work my way to an expanded idea of what Entertainment is. By further examinations on the idea that entertainment has "enjoyment for the Audience" as a necesity in its definition.  I find this to be a valuable concept to understand what I do personally but also as a fundamental  aspect of what we as artists delivering art on varying parts of the entertainment spectrum.

"Entertainment is anything which allows the audience to effortlessly pay attention.
This all means that whether something can be defined as entertainment is dependent on the Audience’s experience of it. This places no restrictions on what you do, only how it is perceived and experienced by those watching the show. In this sense entertainment is a kind of limitation placed not on the material or content of the performance but on the on the nature of the Audience response. Art on the other hand is not affected by the response it gets from an Audience."

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 If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.
If you want to  contact me about anything, including wanting me to collaborate on one of your projects you can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
or find out more on the Way of the Showman website.
If you find it in you and you have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at:
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

Support the show

...

After a long abscence our Merch Shop is back! Check out t-shirts, hoddies, and hats! Show yourself as a Follower of the Way of the Showman.

You can also "listen" to the Way of the Showman at youtube.

If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.

If you want to  contact me about anyhthing ou can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
You can find out more on the Way of the Showman website.

Follow the Way of the Showman on Instagram.

If you're compelled to suport the showes and have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

There is a hidden move made in the popular imagination in regards to the relationship between work and what we do in our leisure time. This links up to the value judgment which lies implicit in how the world sees Art and Entertainment.
From there I sketch out a key difference between art and entertainment. To properly understand this helps the Way we look at what we circus performers, sideshow freaks, and performance artists do.

...

 If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.
If you want to  contact me about anything, including wanting me to collaborate on one of your projects you can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
or find out more on the Way of the Showman website.
If you find it in you and you have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at:
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

Support the show

...

After a long abscence our Merch Shop is back! Check out t-shirts, hoddies, and hats! Show yourself as a Follower of the Way of the Showman.

You can also "listen" to the Way of the Showman at youtube.

If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.

If you want to  contact me about anyhthing ou can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
You can find out more on the Way of the Showman website.

Follow the Way of the Showman on Instagram.

If you're compelled to suport the showes and have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

What kind of emotions and attitudes do you nurture for your Audience? How powerful would you say your feelings are? How does this affect your performance?

In this episodee I share some stories of how I arrived at my own personal attitudes. And explore in some detail how and why the personal feelings we have can benefit directly on the decisions we take in creation and the style we have as performers as well as in the way our Audience experience us.

...

 If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.
If you want to  contact me about anything, including wanting me to collaborate on one of your projects you can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
or find out more on the Way of the Showman website.
If you find it in you and you have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at:
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo

Support the show

...

After a long abscence our Merch Shop is back! Check out t-shirts, hoddies, and hats! Show yourself as a Follower of the Way of the Showman.

You can also "listen" to the Way of the Showman at youtube.

If you want to help support this podcast it would be tremendous if you wrote a glowing review on iTunes or Spotify.

If you want to  contact me about anyhthing ou can reach me on thewayoftheshowman@gmail.com
You can find out more on the Way of the Showman website.

Follow the Way of the Showman on Instagram.

If you're compelled to suport the showes and have the means to do so, you can suport the podcast financially at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/captainfrodo