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Jack the Whipper: From Renaissance Festival to Viral Fame | Meet Jack Lepiarz | PROFOUDNLY Pointless

For more than a decade Jack Lepiarz - better known as Jack the Whipper or Jacques Ze Whipper (@JacquesZeWhipper ) performed at Renaissance Faires and Festivals across the country, then a series of viral videos skyrocketed him to fame. We talk growing up in the circus, the growing popularity of Renaissance Festivals and musical whipping 00:00: Growing Up in the Circus 01:59: How Much I Make 04:28: Starting with the Whip 06:22: How to Crack a Whip 07:14: Finding Viral Fame 11:46: Singing while Whipping 15:57: The Rising Popularity of Renaissance Festivals 18:05: Hardest/Easiest Whips to Crack 19:13: Worst Whip Injuries 20:11: Favorite Song to Perform 21:13: Trying Indiana Jones Tricks 24:09: Knife Throwing 25:47: Bullwhip World Record #profoundlypointless #exploresomethingnew #renaissancefestival #circusperformer #whipping #podcast Profoundly Pointless is a podcast created by Nick VinZant. Each episode explores something new with a unique guest from a different side of life. Particle Physicists, Porn Stars, Deep Sea Explorers, Olympic Athletes, Money Launders, Furries, Cannabis Photographers, Sex Toy Designers and more all share their stories. Then, in the Pointless part of the show, Nick is joined by lifelong friend and 2nd Grade Wrestling Champion John Shull to debate life’s biggest questions. Questions like, “Who are the Top 5 Steve’s of All Time”, "What's the Worst Line to Be Stuck In”, and "Which Actor is the Best Onscreen Runner.” Together Profoundly Pointless explores the world through profound guests and pointless examinations of life’s little mysteries. Join us, Explore Something New and find out why Proundless Pointless was nominated from Best Interview Podcast in both 2021 and 2022. Subscribe to Profoundly Pointless on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3OJYyjJ Get More of Profoundly Pointless Official Site: https://profoundlypointless.com/ Podcast: http://playpodca.st/profoundly-pointless Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/profoundlypointless/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profoundlypointless Twitter: https://twitter.com/profoundlypp Jack the Whipper: From Renaissance Festival to Viral Fame | Meet Jack Lepiarz | PROFOUDNLY Pointless

Profoundly Pointless

5 days ago

It's a place where you can go and be yourself, no matter how weird yourself is. So how did you get into this? I grew up in a circus I so my dad, when I was a kid was working with Big Apple Circus. And we left the circus when I was six, and started doing renaissance fairs around the country. My dad eventually started his own show did school assembly programs, theater programs, so I had that taste of the life all through my childhood. And at the same time, my mother was a college professor, she's
now retired in Florida. And so I still got a normal education on top of it. Looking back was that kind of an interesting life is definitely an interesting life. Being the circus kid is really cool when you're six, and it stops being cool around 12. Up until I would say, like college. So like that whole stretch of like middle school, high school. Not a fun time. We all have those teenage experiences, like I don't want to be my parents, but then how do you how did you find yourself back in it? So
that's, that's a really easy question. I was actually I was working for an ice cream shop, and I was making 625 an hour. My dad called me he was like, I need you to I need some help with this show. I will pay you I think it was the equivalent of $50 an hour. And I was like, oh, oh, okay. All right. You can you can make a living with this. And much better than, you know, the minimum wage at the time. And so I was I think it was 16 then, and I hadn't done anything with him for about five, six year
s. And suddenly, I was like, oh, okay, well, let's let's start relearning some of these skills, learning skills that I never had in the first place. And then when I went off to college, it was like, Alright, I can go back to scooping ice cream, or I can just, you know, go out on the streets of Boston and just street perform and see if I can make some money that way. And it turned out that just by street performing in like September, October, and then again, in April, May when it was warm enough,
I could make enough to kind of like have spending money throughout the year. I wouldn't say necessarily lucrative, but that's the first word that jumps into my mind. Like you can do this full time and be good. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So my dad has been a full time circus performer his entire, essentially his entire adult life, he worked when he was very, very young, kind of worked in the factory, drove cab just to kind of like pay the bills. But since I would say about 30 years old, he has been a f
ull time circus or Renaissance, fair performer, no side, hustle, nothing, nothing like that. And he, he let's put it this way. He's put multiple children through college. With that. It is I think there's this image of circus people and Ren Faire people have, you know, they're there because they don't have anywhere else to go. But if you have the right skills, it can be a very good career. There are a lot of people that have those right skills. So like you can do this, but you got to be really go
od. I think where you get it the most is sort of in my line of work where you're the variety act, you're not, let's say a member of the cast at the renaissance fair. You're not working at a booth or something like that. So when you have a variety act, whether it's myself, someone like Paulo garbanzo, the juggler, you're an Arizona so like Adam, when rich at the Arizona renaissance fair, those are people who can make a solid living in and support themselves off of that. Now, when you do like kind
of the variety show for people who aren't familiar, I know that you're known mainly for the whipping. But what all kind of what's the show? What do you do all that kind of stuff? Well, so just a comeback track of variety show is sort of anything that's not let's say doing Shakespeare, so just variety circus tricks. So my big thing that I do that you see on tick tock Instagram, all that is the musical whipping. So I'll take two whips, use them to make a beat. And then I will improvise lyrics as
best I can on the fly with what the audience gives me and that's what gets posted to social media because that's all improv I kind of related to it's like a stand up comedians crowd work, it's because it's different every show. I'm fine putting that up there. But then after that, I have, I would say about 45 minutes of completely, you know, scripted material, that is a mix of stand up and circus tricks. So whether it's target cutting with the whip, lighting, a whip on fire, fancy whip cracking,
there's there's a whole other set of the show that does not get posted because that's scripted material, and you have to come see the show in person to see that. But why did you gravitate towards the whip? So when I was a kid, my dad did whip cracking and Indiana Jones so I think those two things I basically when I was a kid, it seemed cool. And I had easy access to it. So you know the whip that I first learned on was one of my dad's old Whips that was made by the guy who made the whips for the
original Raiders of the Lost Ark Indiana Jones. So that was the whip that thing is worth like $2,000 today, and that was the whip he handed to a seven year old To learn how to use, which is not a good idea, I do not advise teaching seven year olds to crack whips. Yeah, that's kind of a more dangerous thing, right? Like, I don't know if you can do that today, like here three years ago, not as dangerous as people think it's, it's dangerous, but it's if you're taking the right precautions, which is
wear long, long pants, sleeves, wear eye protection, that's the big thing. It's not too bad. I also say if you got someone young, give them your protection too, just because those things are loud. And I do have mild to moderate hearing loss. And, you know, you can avoid that. If you just give your child some some earplugs while they're cracking, cracking their first whip babies first whip, you can they're that loud, or you just done it so much that like it's a combination of it. So most of the
time, I actually try to not be too loud with the whips because it's, it's louder for someone on the on the other end who's watching me because the whip it when it cracks is, you know, 678 feet away from me. And if I'm on a small stage, that means it's like two feet away from the audience. So it's right in their face when it cracks. But there are a few cracks a few Whips that I have, where it's just right next to my right ear, and it is loud. So it's if I've taken hearing tests, the hearing in my
right ear is so much worse than my left ear because I'm right handed, most of the cracking is on my right side. How do you crack it? I've never been like I had a whip when I was a little kid. But I couldn't do anything with it. Like how do you do it. So the first thing you do is don't try to do what everyone tries to do, which is they take the whip at like on the ground, they just kind of flick it up and down real quick. That's a really good way to hit yourself in the eye hit yourself on the ar
m. The trick is usually it's kind of like and I've never fly fished. But I've been told that it's the exact same motion, it is the way that you would fly fish, which is you bring it back behind you let it get fully extended, and then bring it forward. It's kind of like kind of like casting a fishing line. Not perfectly the same. But it's it's it's a process. And then over time, you just kind of develop the muscle memory I learned so long ago. I have actually I have trouble teaching people now be
cause I'm like, just just do this. It's that simple. Just do this. And they're like, I don't know what I do. I have two children like explain to them how to run. I don't know, you just you just just do it, do it. And as a person who fly fishers like that's exactly how you fly fish, right? You let it go all the way back. And then you just kind of snap your wrist a little bit do exactly. Um, what do you think makes you good at it? I think so what what I had the fortunate, I had the good fortune of
a couple of things. One, I grew up in the world, so of circus. So I've, I've kind of learned a lot just through osmosis. When I first started really, really practicing whips. I found that I knew how to do a lot of the tricks just by watching having watched my dad do it so many times. But then the other thing was, I've been doing this show 15 1617 years now. So I'm in my mid 30s. I started performing solo when I was 18 in college. And so I had essentially 1314 years where no one knew who I was,
I was I was getting work, but not a ton of work. And so I had all that time to polish my show, figure out how to do this figure out okay, what makes people laugh, what doesn't make people laugh, and go from there. So I had a lot of time to fail off camera. And then you know, this social media blow up didn't happen for me until October of 2021. By then, I think I was in my 13th 14th season. So I had a lot of time to kind of figure it out. What was that like doing something for so long? And then a
ll of a sudden, boom. It was it was weird. I mean, so the the initial videos that went viral actually, were not my videos, they were videos of me that a fan took and put on tick tock, and suddenly these videos are gone. My wife texted me while I was at work. At my real job. I was working at a radio station. And she goes, my friend just sent me this asking if this is you. And so I was like alright, well, I guess there's a demand for this after I think the second video went viral. So I was like, w
ell, let's let's make a tic tock account. We've got some old show footage. Let's just put it on the internet and see what happens. And it was very quick within 10 days. I was like okay, all right, there's there's a demand for this. And then as it continued to roll, it was sort of like okay, well, let's see if we can make this a career. And it's i i think in a lot of ways going back to being able to fail off camera, you know, the having the time that I did, working both, you know, at renaissance
fairs, and then also my work at working in radio I got a chance like sort of a taste of what it's like to be in the public eye without Being a celebrity. And that kind of, I feel like I came into it. Not surprised. Not not surprised, but I sort of knew is like, Okay, this is what we do. This is how we manage expectations. This is how we manage, you know, making sure that I take time for myself make sure I have things that are outside the public eye. Doing that was was huge. And having that oppor
tunity before this all happened was huge. knew how to handle it. Like there was the groundwork was laid essential. Yeah, yeah. And I've said, you know, had this happen when I was 22, I would not have been able to deal with I would not have been ready to deal with it, I would have turned insufferable. Yeah, I think you see that happen to a lot of people on social media, too. What was that like kind of being in the public eye doing the radio stuff? And then like, hey, what do you do on the side li
ke, Well, I do I. So I tried to not always publicly say it, and be super forthcoming about it. It was not information that I would regularly volunteer. But certainly plenty of people that I interacted with knew I remember, it was very funny. I was doing a show one time I saw Boston City Councilor who I had covered in my crowd one day, he was a terrible audience member, he was talking to his wife or his girlfriend the whole time. But no, I think I think early on, there was this sense of, I think,
people were kind of confused, they would give you this quizzical look, they're like, wait, what? What do you do on the side? But I think after a few years, everyone kind of knew, and if they didn't know, they were just kind of like, alright, it's, it's always I, you either get this reaction of people are just shocked. Or more more frequently, it's kind of just that people are like, Oh, okay, that's cool. That's interesting. And then they move on, when did you start kind of in including the sing
ing in it like that spot thing. So let's get to though we have things again. That came out of out of just an improvised bit, I was working with another whip cracker, and I was just standing there, we both had one whip. And so I'm standing there and I was going. And then he happened to crack just in time that we made the beat for We Will Rock huge boom. And I'm like, Well, wait, keep that going. Keep that going. And suddenly, we started saying, we will rock you. And I was like, wait a minute, you
can probably do this with a bunch of stuff. So I tried to start trying out different beats. And I had taken a ton of improv classes when I was younger, when I thought, you know, maybe I want to be an actor or something like that. And making up lyrics to songs had always been something I was, I don't know about good at, but at least you know, that age proficient at and I had done high school musicals, high school theater. So my singing voice is not, you know, no one's gonna confuse me for a prof
essional singer. But I can carry a tune decently. And so from there, it sort of became this idea of like, okay, well, let's, let's try putting this in the show as what we call the pre show, which is the pre show is not your good material, the pre show is something that's good enough, that's loud to get people to come to the show, because renaissance fairs, you know, you have show times, but you don't have a set crowd. So you the first five minutes, you're essentially trying to get more people to
come and see your show. And so what I realized is musical whipping, being loud singing songs, this is a great way to get people to stop by and watch the show. And so I made that kind of the permanent fixture of the first five minutes of my show, and that was probably starting around 2012, I would say was when that happened. Are you surprised that it was like, Wait, this, this is the thing? No, because I mean, I mean, you look at the popularity of people like weird L. And you know, there's a dem
and for it. It's not everyone's thing, like, I see my comments every now and then where people are like, really people find this entertaining. And I'm like, Listen, I don't know, I don't get it. Yeah, right. Like, what are you? What are you mad at me for? Whatever works, man? How does that work? Then you get paid by the Renaissance Fair, or people have to pay to come into the show or is it? It's a combination. So the most fairs are a combination of they will pay you. And then you also get tips f
rom the audience. And the tips are where you make most of your money. Usually, now what are you always you can pronounce it better than I am zipper. Jaaxy whip, right? Yeah. So early on was my father and I essentially helped create, create this this act when I first moved to renaissance fairs when I was 20, I think. And they're kind of three pillars of what makes a good, Renaissance Fair show. And you ideally should have a mix of all three. But you can get by with two of the three if those two a
re really high and that's comedy, skill and character. And when I started my skills were Yeah, so we had to lean more on the comedy, and especially on the character and renaissance fairs. Most people are English, Irish, Scottish, you get the straight German, every now and then very few French people. And so I was like, alright, well, let's let's be French. I took I took five years, six years of French classes I can, I can kind of fake it a little bit. And it kind of worked. And then I remember t
he last day of my first weekend doing the character, I drew on the mustache, and that seemed to make it click for everyone, which is that, oh, this is dumb. This is this is a skill show. This is dangerous show. But this is still dumb. This is comedy, and we're here to have have a good laugh. And nowadays, I'm so glad I made that decision, because it allows people to understand that they should not be intimidated by by a man holding a whip. And that this is this for laughs This is to have a good
time. What is it about renaissance fairs because it's something that I haven't personally been to, but it's in my experience that people who are into it, they are into it. I think Renaissance Fair is it's a place where you can go and be yourself, no matter how weird yourself is. So for a long time, it was a safe space for to put it bluntly, the freaks and geeks of our world and I, you know, I put myself in that category. But I think over the last, I would say 10 years between Game of Thrones, wh
ich are the Lord of the Rings, being a nerd has become more acceptable, and of course, Marvel as well. And so we've had this influx, I think of young professionals, you know, people in their mid to late 20s, they're finally making good money, they don't yet have kids, they have a lot of disposable income. And they have been coming to the Renaissance Fair in droves. I noticed it around 2014 2015, where I was like hanging on. Everyone who's here at this show. Looks like me, it looks like they're a
t the exact same stage of life, as I know, except for like that family there and that old guy there. So I think there's been a big jump in that clientele so that renaissance fairs have grown. And then on top of that, in the years after COVID, it was an outdoor safe space, it was an outdoor space, you could go and have fun, and not necessarily need to worry about being indoors with 500 other people to go see some kind of entertainment. So maybe I'm missing out. Do you think that continues though?
Is it a flash in the pan? Or like No, no, I think we've set a benchmark. They've been around for 50 years. Going back to the early one. I think it started in the 60s, in California. And you know, a lot of the festivals I work are in there. You know, they're 30 plus years old. They're 40 plus years old. So I don't know that they're going anywhere in the immediate future. I don't think you're going to see yours like you did in 2021 was just an extraordinary year, all around. But I think yeah, I t
hink I think they're here for I think they're here for a good long while. Are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions, go for it. Hardest type of whip to crack stock whips. So there are essentially three kinds of whips. You have a leather bullwhip, which is like an Indiana Jones whip. You have performance hybrid whips, which are a combination of a bullwhip and a stock whip. And those are what you see me cracking and most of my videos I use, I call them my musical whips. And
then stock whips. They come from Australia, used for driving stock driving cattle, and they had this weird hinge on them where you go from the stiff handle into the braid of the whip. It's got this hinge on it, and I cannot figure out how to work those and it's probably just because I didn't grow up, cracking those I grew up cracking my dad's bull whips. So I actually have a pair on their way to me now that I'm gonna try and figure out and see if I can get better with them. But that's that's eas
ily it. And that and the chain whip just because the chain whip is you know you're cracking a chain, it's heavy, it's floppy is a really good chance you hit yourself and hurt yourself. But that's that's I put that in a whole separate category. That leads us into this question, right? Like, what's the worst injury that you've had? Like? How often do you get hurt? Not very often. I think people think whips are a lot more dangerous than they are. Whips will leave a welt at the most they'll leave yo
u know kind of a shallow cut. And that's if you really really mess up. The worst I ever did was in college when I was 20 or that was 20 or 2221. And I went to go do a side crack and as the whip came forward, it caught the back of my neck and I thought it was just a welt and then I learned that the next day in class that I had not left a welt I had left a long cut across the back of my neck. Someone in class leans over to like, Jack, what did you do to your neck? And I just look at them I gave th
e whip crack motion. They're like, Oh, okay, all right, we're not interested anymore. Crack myself with a whip I go, yeah. Okay, you know, we've all been there. All right, um, what's your favorite song to perform? So I would I always like or songs that are a little bit slower or that have different rhyming schemes. So if it's just, you know, rhyme A, B, B, that's harder, because your, your brain has to move faster. What I really like are songs that are slower, and it's an A B, a type of rhymes.
So you have two lines before you have to come back and do the rhyme. So a good example of this is sound of silence. Sound of Silence is nice and slow. Everyone knows it, and you have tons of time to think up what the rhyme is going to be. So I had done some sound of silence a bajillion times. It is never the same rhymes because every single time I'm adapting it to the situation because I have enough time to do it. Something like Eminem is Rap God where he's making a rhyme every half second, not
my favorite to do. Those are a lot of those are a lot harder to do. How do you feel about Indiana Jones? I'm a fan of Indiana Jones. I was not a fan of Indiana Jones for I thought Indiana Jones five was fine. I am very much very much looking forward to the video game that's coming out at some point this year. Who is your favorite fictional character with a whip? Besides if it's if it is Indiana Jones? I think right now it's Richter Belmont. Trevor from the Castlevania series, the Netflix series.
I so I watched both both Castlevania series they have I really liked Trevor Belmont. And the original of just being just a dumb himbo who's really good at fighting vampires, which I enjoyed a lot. I thought they gave Richter a little bit more depth. And I like his costume a lot more. So I think right now it's, I'm leaning towards Richter at the moment, can you really swing from a tree or from anything on a whip, you can swing from a tree on a whip, it is not advisable. And it is not something t
hat you should rely on. So it's easy to tie the whip around the tree, it is much harder to get the whip untied around the tree. You know, I don't know that my whip would actually survive doing that more than two or three times. Is there an aspect of kind of like circus performance necessarily that do whip seem to do better than not something else say that if you're juggling or throwing knives or anything like that? Is there kind of a hierarchy like you want to make it you get the whip? Well, so
I think my dad actually told me about this and talked to me about this when I was very, very young. When I was sick, I was like, oh, I should learn how to juggle. And my dad said here's the thing. Everyone can juggle everyone in the circus can juggle everyone who goes to the circus has seen a person juggle before. And so if you want to be a standout juggler, you really need to be extraordinary at it or you need to be so funny that you essentially don't need the juggling anyway. And even then, ev
en if you do all of that, there, you know there are 10 Other jugglers who are almost as good or just as good as you who could also do that, that act whereas, you know, I look at the Renaissance Fair circuit, there are three people who do a primarily whip based show myself Adam when rich Aaron bonk. So starting just from there, the level of competition is much lower. And that was you know, when he'd mentioned that to me, I was like, oh, okay, you're, you're telling me that I can get more work for
less, less amount of practice? Yes, this sounds like a great idea. So I gravitated towards whip cracking. For that reason. I also tried dice throwing, I have a knife throwing show that I don't do very often. I have some other kind of miscellaneous circus skills, plate spinning, balancing, both, you know whether it's on a tight surface or something, let's say on my chin. Lots of other skills that I can kind of pull out but they're not really you know, the reaction that you get from spinning a pl
ate is much less than what you get from cracking the whip. I have never understood the knife throwing aspect. Is it the knife? Is it the technique? Do you have to get the distance down? Like how do you get it all of the above. So what you want is you want knives that are weighted in such a way that they'll fly truer, heavier knives are better because there's less variation on how much they rotate. You want to spin the knife as little as possible. And then for me so I know that 10 nine and three
quarters steps away from the knife board is where I want to be. When I'm when I'm throwing knives. The way that I throw them the knife will rotate and it'll stick the same way every single time as long as I can find that distance. But if somebody gave you like a random distance, okay, I want you to do 13 and a half steps. Could you hit it or like No, it has to be this distance. I couldn't consistently do it. I was amazed. So I'm sharing a stage with a guy named sai the sword swallower in Colorad
o, and he doesn't like throwing show and I was watching him and I was like, sigh I'm looking at the stage because normally you tape where your mark is where you need to stand your tape where the board needs to be and where you need to be. And I'm looking at like, sigh where, where are your marks? How are you? How are you figuring this out? And he goes, Oh, and he walks up to the board, starts throwing knives and stepping back, you know, about a foot each time and every single one of those knives
stuck. And I was like, what? How do you how do you do that? It goes, I don't know, I practice a lot. Jesus man, that doesn't seem to really go along with like the laws of physics. I don't know if it's physics, but I would think like no, you it's not going to rotate again that fast. He just he's he's that good where he can he can just eyeball the distance and change how much the knife is rotating. Okay, so we're looking at a video. Most bullwhip, let me make sure the audio is off. Yeah, this was
when I think I did 287 cracks. So this is actually not the current record, because I broke this record in 2020. But this is me swinging the whip back and forth. 287 tight, well, 290 times, but I missed a few cracks in it. And this was this was a record that I spent most recently, I spent about two years training six hours a day working our six days a week working out three days on one day off three days on one day off, spent two years doing that put on 15 pounds of muscle to do this record, and
then promptly had shoulder surgery for unrelated reasons and lost all that muscle. I went from looking like Captain America to looking like my normal self, which was sad. You need that much muscle to do that. At the point that we had put it, you did, because I had been going back and forth with Adam when rich for a few few years. And I wanted to just finally put it way out of reach. So I in COVID, I decided you know what? Screw it. I don't have anything else going on. I'm just going to work out
as much as I can put on as much muscle as I can. And see, you know how high I can put this mark? I think that's the thing with like whips, though. It's one of those things where like, you look at it like I could do that. It's Is it a lot harder than people think that it is? I mean, cracking a whip in an in and of itself is not difficult. The record is difficult because I was one of those guys where I looked at the record. I'm like, I can do that. And then I tried it. I was like, oh, oh, that's
a lot harder than I realized. And so, you know, I think I think getting to where I am as a whip cracker. Someone could probably do in six months to a year if they were dedicated. And I've been cracking whips for like I said, you know, 20, almost 30 years. But then getting the record, it has to be basically your sole focus at this point for for a year plus, at where Adam and I have said it. Here's knife throwing. It's not actual knife throwing this is this I just posted this morning. Oh, okay, me
showing off all those other tricks that I that I learned and that I don't actually do in the show anymore, because no one cares about them. Is that there is magic play that there's a little bit of magic. It's not good magic. Why is plates spinning in the Renaissance? Fair? Is that an old timey thing? No, it's just a circus thing. So my dad's show was called the super scientific circus still is called the super scientific circus where you teach science through circus tricks. And so one of those
was plate spinning because it teaches about centripetal and centrifugal force. And I had a lot of days backstage where just just sat there spinning plates because it was the only thing to do. Oh, there you go. Indiana Jones in with my dad. Hey, go. So this is where we tried all the things that Indiana Jones does in the movies with one of my dad's old whips made by the guy who made the whips for Indiana Jones who's dead now. And so you know that whip is worth more than I am all of those whips are
worth more than I am. But he had these whips and and the new Indiana Jones movie was coming out this past summer last summer. And I was like well let's let's try and do some Indiana Jones tricks with with the whips like there's a flash that he does in the Raiders movie. That's actually harder than that it looks disarming an armed attacker. So I had them hold out a bat pulled the bat out. It worked far better than I expected it to. And then trying to swing from a tree branch. So for this, we did
not use one of those whips because I didn't want to break it but we use an eight foot whip caught around it perfectly and I don't I don't have it here. But it took me about three minutes to untie it from the tree. I haven't I have it in the bloopers reel that i think i i posted later. Because it's really hard to actually untie a whip. Once you've taught you know you spent so much of your life trying to not get your whips tangled or like tie them into knots because they they will do that sometim
es. And then trying to do it intentionally is really hard. That's cool. So there's different ways to crack it. Yeah. So front crack back crack over the head crack side crack, these are not the official terms. And then I say we will not be demonstrating the butt crack. Obviously not that kind of show. You can see that show somewhere else, but not with me. But there are all sorts of different techniques that you can use for whip cracking. I think the the one that's most common, you know, that fron
t crack is called either the circus crack or the Kettlemans crack because it was how cattlemen would would crack whips. There's another one called the coachman's crack, where you don't want it to crack out front, because then you're going to be whipping, you know, the oxen or the horses that are pulling your carriage. And so what you do is you kind of put out this stutter into your hand, so that it cracks right next to your right ear and makes you lose hearing for a few seconds. I don't like tha
t crack. This is what I always wonder about people who do circus performance in any kind of thing where they have to like, how many copies of that outfit do you have? Are you just wearing the same one time? I have three different set. I have three vests? I have four shirts. I have three of those sashes. The pants right now I have four but I'm having four brand new pair or No, I have three because I sent one of them off to a woman who's making me four more pair of pants and then the socks. I have
probably like seven or eight pair of socks, and then the shoes I have five or six pair of those. He and now Wait. Does anybody just wear the same one every day? Like, Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it gets gross. So for a while I only had two, which was usually fine, because I'm performing, you know, on weekends. But then you would have that stray that rogue three day weekend, let's say around like Memorial Day weekend or Labor Day weekend. And that Labor Day Monday. Oh, boy, what I smell bad. B
ecause it's also you know, it's late August, early September. It's still warm. It's you know, even if you're in the Northeast in Boston, which is where I usually was it's still it's hot and it's humid, and it's muggy. I mean, like not like what you get in Arizona, but humid humidity helps or doesn't help, I should say. So how hard was this to do? So these whips are so freakin heavy. And I have I have my shoulders are Swiss cheese, as I always like to say they've got lots of lots of damage with t
hem. So I start with a five pound chain whip, which is heavy, but it's crackable. I can do most of what I want. But this this other one is a 10 pound chain whip. And the whole time I'm swinging this being like, Oh God, just don't dislocate your shoulder trying to crack this thing because you can feel it pulling on you the weight is there. I mean, you say it's only 10 pounds, but it's also eight feet long. And just you know the central riff. The goal for us I always have to remember is that centr
ipetal or centrifugal? The centrifugal force is just pulling on your arm so much that I have to just like tuck everything in there to make sure nothing comes out. That's pretty much all the questions that I got. Is there anything that you think that we missed? And what's kind of coming up next for you? Where can people find you? The best way to find me is so I'm going on tour in just just a few days. Busy 2024 ahead. The full schedule. The easiest way to find it is Jack the ripper.com or Shaka Z
i wipro.com or Jack lip ers.com. No one knows how to spell any of my names. So I got all three domain names, and they will all take you to my website which has my full schedule. Otherwise, give me a follow Tiktok Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, I'm on all the platforms and just about all the platforms get all the same content. I think Renaissance Fair is it's a place where you can go and be yourself no matter how weird yourself is.

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@Jadden_Rogers_comedy

Was he on kill tony?