When many people juggle American clubs for the first time after having only juggled the much more common European clubs, they often comment on how large the Americans are. Modern American clubs are slightly smaller than their older predecessors, which are smaller than a category that can simply be called “giant clubs.” Most jugglers have never seen one of these …
10 Female Juggling Stars of the Past
Looking across the gym at the most recent IJA Festival, a sizable proportion of the jugglers are women. This hasn’t always been the case. In the first forty years of the IJA’s existence, female performers were a fairly rare sight. However, female jugglers have an incredible and very important history in our art form. The earliest depiction of juggling we …
A History of the Plastic Toy Bowling Pin Juggling Club
If you’re like most jugglers, you cringe every time you hear someone refer to juggling clubs as bowling pins. Even worse is when you hear another juggler call them pins, which, thankfully, happens only very rarely. As creator Casey Rentmeester so comically pointed out in the meme below, the two really don’t look that much alike. It is true that …
Be Funnier With Scotty Meltzer: Structure? Genius!
Whenever my old partner Rich Ross and I came up with a joke that was based solely on structure, usually a call back or a denial capper, we would throw our arms in the air and yell, “Structure? Genius!” We even did it when watching other people’s shows. This taught us a lot about the power of structure and it …
William Everhart – The Father of Hoop Rolling and Hoop Juggling
As the IJA prepares to bring its festival to the state of Ohio, we look back on an Ohio native who single handedly invented a form of juggling well over a hundred years ago that is still being performed today. William Everhart was born in 1868 in Columbus, Ohio (USA). At the height of his career, he performed all …
How Running is Like Juggling
I hate running but I love juggling. Ok, so maybe the two are very different, but I do see many parallels in the ways I approach both activities. First, a bit of background. I have never been a runner and I have been overweight and even obese for most of my life. Late last summer, my doctor diagnosed me with …
Be Funnier with Scotty Meltzer: Nice Structure!
When comedians watch other comedians perform, they rarely laugh. If they like a joke, they nod their heads and say: “Nice structure.” If they really like a joke they say: “I used to do a bit like that.” Structures are to comedy as brushstrokes are to painting: Often invisible, absolutely necessary, and if you want to be a pro, you …
“I Wanna Juggle, Too!” – Teaching Juggling to Little Kids
I’ve taught juggling for many years and have learned a lot about improvising when things don’t go according to plan. Problems have run the gambit from having twice as many kids as I planned for, to children showing me the “trick” of using diabolo string to strangle one another. The challenge that vexed me the most was that children typically …
Reasons You Should Fail
No one steps up to bat for the first time and hits a home run, and no one steps up to five clubs and starts doing backcrosses. I look at videos of my early performances and cringe. When starting out you need some ridiculous amounts of optimism to convince yourself that it was actually okay and the next time will …