[Phineas Taylor] Barnum turned profits detecting humbug, staging humbugs, and in authoring books that present him as a humbug. In each case he operated by aestheticizing humbug: in writing tongue-in-cheek reform literature about avoiding humbug, in creating narratives or mythologies to advertise his own humbugs, and in celebrating in prose his own ability to balance contradictory roles.

Did you know he’s a bottle brunette? His natural hair color is strawberry blonde.

Someone's turned the chest out alow and aloft.

Of all mad creatures, if the learned are right, / It is the slaver kills, and not the bite.