Horsemanning
When comedy gets beheaded
Well, it’s Halloween in the Hollow, which you can more efficiently call Holloween. Not a day, not a week, but a season spanning September to November, when the tourists tick up 1,000 notches, parking spots are precious, my site specific version of the Legend has its annual moment at the local shops, and I litter every lamppost with flyers for my third Sleepy Hollow Show & Tell. If you’re nearby, search your curio cabinet for an odd object with a sentimental/spooky/strange story attached and come share—or listen. The first two events have each been so uniquely excellent, full of the spectacular and everyday weirdness of humanity revealed through five minute accounts rich with pathos, awe, and, most importantly, humor.
In an age when you can laugh or cry, humor has risen to one of the biggest things I seek through connections with people. One of the topmost items on my wishlist in a partner. Humor, that to me, is a sign of the highest form of intelligence. You have to be more than just silly to evoke laughter, you have to be smart. Comedians, I believe, should rank among our most esteemed intelligentsia.
Instead, first we lost Colbert and now Kimmel to Presidential pressure. In the prophetic words of Jon Stewart when receiving the Mark Twain Prize in 2022 (in a section that starts around minute 11 of his speech):
This threat to comedy… Comedy doesn’t change the world but it’s a bellwether. We’re the banana peel in the coal mine. When a society is under threat, comedians are the ones who get sent away first. It’s just a reminder to people that democracy is under threat. Authoritarians are the threat to comedy, to art, to music, to thought, to poetry, to progress, to all those things. … All that shit is a red herring. It ain’t the pronoun police. It’s the secret police. It always has been, and it always will be. And this man’s decapitated visage is a reminder to all of us that what we have is fragile and precious. And the way to guard against it isn’t to change how audiences think, it’s to change how leaders lead.
Wait, says this listener from the land haunted by the Headless Horseman. Did he just say decapitated? Oh, he just means the bust of Mark Twain alongside him on stage, of course, phew. From the audio, I pictured something much more gruesome—some newly beheaded stand-up guillotined for effect in the audience—but here’s a helpful visual:
Which brings us to Horsemanning and today’s amusing show & tell item:
This photo from the 1920s, which makes its way regularly ‘round the internet—the most original kind of meme, two people playing the part of one tragically severed child.
Of course there’s a Reddit forum to help define this—“To appear headless while taking a photo, known as ‘horsemanning,’ was a popular way to pose in the 1920” with a whole surrounding conversation. A compilation of various commenters:
It’s like “Planking” and “Faith Hilling”
…“Tebowing”
…and “Taylor Swifting”
Flagpole sitting, phone booth stuffing, and goldfish swallowing were all fads at one point.
They Horseman’d so we could one day Plank
…and dump ice water on ourselves
The original deepfakes
Imagine going viral in the 20s
TikTok trends have always been a thing. What’s wild is how they did it without the internet
Head doesn’t look dead enough. rating: 5/7
The 1920s were a rush. Real cocaine in Coca Cola…
It was also pretty popular among the French aristocracy in the mid 1790s...
A deeper dive into the photo phenomenon from Wikipedia:
Horsemanning is the act of posing for a photograph in such a way that the subject appears to have been beheaded, their head resting on the ground or on a surface. Such photography was a fad in the 1920s. The practice derives its name from the Headless Horseman, an evil character from Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
Horsemanning saw a revival in 2011, along with other photo fads such as planking and owling. All three were considered among the top 10 Facebook sensations of 2011 and a series of horsemanning photos began trending on sites like BuzzFeed as people were inspired to recreate the original fad. It has also become popular with beachgoers, one person is buried in the sand with her body covered and another person lies next to her with her head buried in the sand.
The objective of horsemanning is to make it appear that the photo’s subject has been beheaded. Horsemanning requires two individuals, one situated with one’s head hidden (e.g. tilted backwards) with the other hiding his or her body and exposing only his or her head. The resulting photo appears to show a headless body with a disembodied head lying beside it; in fact, it consists of one person’s body and a different person’s head.
If you need more of this nonsense, there’s a Facebook group with a few Horsemanning poses, a dedicated website with some pages of the “best” horsemanning pictures submitted from all over the world, and, not for the Swifties, a song!
Ok, understood, but there’s plenty of terms rolling around with the heads above that I had to further research since I don’t live full-time in cyberspace.
In case you too missed that dumb moment of 2011, planking is lying face down and rigid (i.e. like a wooden plank) in an incongruous or odd location. It was a thing before memes apparently (as it also has a Wiki claiming its first instances around 1983-84 in the state of Washington) but later had a revival on Facebook.
Owling is the act of squatting like an owl in a “in a populated but unusual area. Participants commonly make noises similar to an owl, to make the owl impression more realistic.” Also attributed to Facebook circa 2011. What was up with 2011? How did we live before this?
Along with many more dumb postures for pictures, gathered from various Wikis and other odd crevices of the interwebs:
Faith Hilling, a derivative of planking, which involves having a picture of oneself taken while pulling the front of one’s shirt forward in mock resemblance of women’s breasts.
Tebowing, which has it’s very own website, and the answer to “What is Tebowing? to get down on a knee and start praying, even if everyone else around you is doing something completely different” (after the same move done by the pro football player).
Taylor Swifting, the art of laying on the floor in your room wallowing for a boy while listening to Taylor Swift songs.
Teapotting consists of bending the arms into the shape of a teapot, in reference to the children’s song “I’m a Little Teapot.” This variation was created by teachers in Mortlake College in an attempt to create a new ‘craze’ after noticing the amount of attention given to planking.
Playing Dead (known as 시체놀이 in Korean) originated in South Korea in 2003. It involves a large number of participants pretending to be dead. It was inspired by the manga character Crayon Shin-chan and is thought to have arisen independently of planking.
Batmanning involves hanging upside down by the feet.
Dufnering is a variation of planking that involves a person lying with the bottom half of their body on the floor, the top half leaning up, their arms close to the side of their body, and their hands ending towards the bottom of their thighs. The person would also be looking straightforward. The fad began when Rory McIlroy tweeted a photo of himself imitating 2013 PGA Championship winner Jason Dufner. (Isn’t this like a cobra pose in yoga? Why give this Dufner credit?)
In any case, the possibilities are endless. When a true sign of being famous is getting yourself mimicked in scripted poses, we can look to a more innocent time pre-www to those creepy grainy pics of the 1920s, or better yet, to an even creepier time for early photography, the Victorian Era.
Before there was Horsemanning, there were the headless portraits that weren’t a dramatic act between two people, but a morbid technical hack.
Victorian headless portraits were a fad in Britain in the late 19th century. In the photographs, the model’s head appears separated from the body; often the sitter holds it in their own hands. Although this genre is called headless portraiture, it is the head that is always present in the photograph, and the body may be absent.
An early example of the genre is photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s Head of St. John the Baptist in a Charger, a print made by combining two different negatives. The photograph dates from somewhen between 1855 and 1860. Photographer Henry Peach Robinson described Reilander’s insistence on finding a model for John the Baptist saying that ‘Rejlander saw his head on the shoulders of a gentleman in the town. …The curious thing is, that he did not so much see the modern gentleman as always the picture which the head suggested. It was some months before the artist ventured to ask the model to lend his head … and years before he obtained his consent.”
Many later photographers created similar images of men and women with severed heads, depicted held in their hands, laid on a platter or held aloft by the hair. Often in the other hand, the sitter carries the weapon of their own murder. The demand for such photographs was so high that many Victorian photographers openly advertised this particular type of photography.
The most prolific photographer in this genre was British photographer Samuel Kay Balbirnie, who ran advertisements in the Brighton Daily News offering “HEADLESS PHOTOGRAPHS - Ladies and Gentlemen taken showing their heads floating in the air or in their laps.”
Yup, I kid you not. Those hilarious Victorians.
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We are such an interesting species, though I like us better when we're funny.