I’m writing this article on the plane home from the IJA festival in Bowling Green, Ohio. What a fantastic week! If you’ve never been to an IJA festival, I highly recommend it. So much better than those magic conventions where they don’t have hover-chairs or a gauntlet. For me it was a week of learning new tricks, seeing old friends, …
The Show Must Go On: Anecdotes of Mid-Show Mishaps – Part 2
As I stated at the onset of Part 1 of this article, “The show must go on” is an old show business adage that originated in the circus. It still applies today for most professionals. We prepare and train in order to present the very best performances we can, but things often don’t go according to plan. In my thirty …
Juggling Helps Kids Stay in School
Juggling has been part of the Fayetteville, Arkansas, ALLPS program (Agee-Lierly Life Preparations Services Center) for the past 20 years. ALLPS is an alternative learning high school program for kids who have not necessarily been successful in other high school settings, and it has been helping kids stay in school since 1972. Recently I enjoyed a conversation about juggling with …
The Show Must Go On: Anecdotes of Mid-Show Mishaps – Part 1
“The show must go on” is an old show business adage that originated in the circus. It still applies today for most professionals. We prepare and train in order to present the very best performances we can, but things often don’t go according to plan. In my thirty years as a professional juggler, I’ve encountered a wide array of unexpected …
Be Funnier With Scotty Meltzer: You Punch Like a Girl
For the past two months I’ve been writing about three methods to write lead away jokes: forward from the front, out from the middle, and backwards from the end. If you haven’t already read those introductory articles, Nice Structure and Structure? Genius!, now would be a good time. I’ll wait … Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from …
Giant Juggling Clubs
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 …