Johnny Fox, sword swallower, 1953-2017

December 18, 2017 7:44 AM

Johnny Fox, adept sword swallower and slight of hand expert, had his final "dance" with cancer and Hep C Sunday morning at the age of 64. After being diagnosed, he began treatment and was unsure if he could return to performing. This fall, he was able to do a limited number of performances with no sword swallowing at the Maryland Renaissance Festival: but did include balloon swallowing. The stage he performed there had been named in his honor before the 2017 season. (Squeamish warning: almost all the videos/stories show sword swallowing and other similar acts.)

Performing around the country (perhaps most well-known at the Maryland Renaissance Festival) through the 1980s, 90s, 00s, and most of the 10s as a sword swallower, slight of hand magician, and other side-show style acts. In a public Facebook group Friends of Johnny Fox (may still require a FB account, sorry), fans, friends, and colleagues have been sharing photos, videos, and stories of growing up with Johnny Fox and all the joy he inspired.

He ate a lightbulb for Maalox in the 1980s, performed some or all of his act on varous TV shows in the 80s and 90s: The Paul Daniels Magic Show - Johnny Fox, Keep On Cruisin' (with Sinbad!), and swallowing a tube fluorescent light bulb and 16 swords.

In New York City, he ran a now-closed museum called the Freakatorium (video segment).

Back to Renaissance Festivals, he often performed for the repeat visitors but always bringing smiles, laughs, and gasps: Johnny Fox 1988 at Atlanta, Georgia Renaissance Festival, cups and balls, arm twisting and swallowing a screw driver, hammering a nail into the center of his skull, a criss blade, a nearly full performance from 2011, and water from India.

posted by skynxnex (15 comments total)

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Wiggling my adam's apple in the parking lot in memory.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:51 AM on December 18, 2017 [3 favorites]

Ahh, thank you so much for posting such a great obit post for Johnny. I've worked at the Maryland Renaissance Festival since '99 and was a patron for 10 years before that, so of course I knew him, and I felt it was too self-linky to post anything myself.
posted by desuetude at 7:57 AM on December 18, 2017 [5 favorites]

Johnny was more than a fixture at MDRF; he was an institution. I only knew him in passing, but I have friends who work Faire and knew him well. (desuetude, I guarantee our friend circles overlap, assuming we don't actually know each other IRL.) It warms my heart to see him earn an obit on MeFi.

Mañana.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:04 AM on December 18, 2017 [4 favorites]

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Oh, man. This brings back memories. He was a regular at the Colorado Renaissance Festival. I remember the Adam's apple thing, but the one memory that sticks out for me is his throwing one of the swords (a kris, maybe?) into the wood of the stage to prove that it was sharp--or at least the point was. Even if I was on my way to see something else at the festival, I'd always stop and watch him for a few minutes.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 8:12 AM on December 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

RIP Johnny. I think I have a recording of one of his MDRF performances from so long ago it is on VHS-C (no idea how to play that now).
posted by 445supermag at 8:16 AM on December 18, 2017

Oh no. I grew up going to the Maryland Ren Faire every year, and Johnny Fox was the highlight.

I remember going one year as a teenager, and being surprised (but enjoying) how many really raunchy jokes he was telling that year. After one of them he gave a wink to the audience, and said something like, "Don't worry parents, either they don't understand, or they get it and it's too late for them anyway." That was when I realized it probably wasn't his act that had changed, but me.

One of his regular jokes I remember was about a fellow sword swallower he supposedly knew, who once attempted to swallow a sword that was too long. He went on to have a second career picking up trash in the Ren Faire parking lot, patrolling and spearing anything he found with the tip of his sword by doing little half-squats. (This one probably works better as a visual gag, hopefully it's in one of the videos linked above.)

I still reference the "water from India" gag occasionally with my family.

If a life well-lived is one of spreading joy and helping shape people through formative shared experiences, Johnny Fox found the good life. He died too young, and I regret I'll never get to see him perform again.
posted by biogeo at 8:52 AM on December 18, 2017 [3 favorites]

Revel Grove will not ever be the same.

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posted by CheeseLouise at 9:41 AM on December 18, 2017 [4 favorites]

Wow! He must have been the sword-swallower I saw at the MD RenFest when I went a few times in the 90s.

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posted by tavella at 11:28 AM on December 18, 2017

I saw Johnny Fox a few times at the Sterling Renaissance Festival. Somewhere at home, I have a picture of him posing with my kids.
posted by maurice at 11:42 AM on December 18, 2017

I remember going one year as a teenager, and being surprised (but enjoying) how many really raunchy jokes he was telling that year. After one of them he gave a wink to the audience, and said something like, "Don't worry parents, either they don't understand, or they get it and it's too late for them anyway." That was when I realized it probably wasn't his act that had changed, but me.

Also often expressed as "Parents, if your kids understood that joke, it's nothing that *I* taught them."
posted by desuetude at 12:52 PM on December 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

I've never heard of this guy before but I've watched the videos now and his hands don't look that small.
posted by unliteral at 3:29 PM on December 18, 2017

Man, it's weird to see someone you know show up on the blue. Worse when it's an obit. Here's my Johnny Fox story. I took a gap year and traveled the ren circuit. We ended up at Maryland because Johnny recommended it, I think at the Colorado show. While at the Maryland show, a hurricane hit. Or I remember it as a hurricane, trying to shelter in a bunch of booths that stoners built, tripping balls, wading thigh deep in mud at some points. We all ended up mostly naked, covered in mud, having the best hurricane party of all time, when I realized my cat was missing. Johnny organized a search party, and it was he who found my beast, hiding in the lion's area, because he thought he was a lion. And the next weekend, after we got the show ready for customers, we did a playlet that weekend where he and I had to go before the court and argue for the custody of kitty who thought he was a lion, whereupon Johnny tried to put his head in my cat's mouth, and my cat let him. It was one of the funniest things, although perhaps you had to be there. It was also Johnny who drove my van to the hospital to retrieve me after I'd been stung by a dozen bees and had been ambulanced out.

There was, in the 80s, a big crossover of rainbow family and ren faire people, and Johnny, like me, had a foot in each camp, and was pretty beloved in both of them.

I lost track of that whole community after I was raped at a show, and people chose to believe my attacker, or suggested that I had it coming for being a kissing wench, but Johnny was someone remember fondly, and I'm sorry to hear of his passing. I hope his friends and loved ones find peace in the knowledge that he brought so much joy to so many people that he was no doubt a force for light and good in a dark and scary world.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 7:14 PM on December 18, 2017 [5 favorites]

I'll share another memory of going to see Johnny Fox as a kid. After shows at the Ren Faire, he used to stand by the exit aisle and hold out his hat for tips. One year, when I was probably about 8 or 10 years old, my mom gave me a bill to put in his hat. A little hyper and keyed up after the show, I bounced up to him and, for reasons that are not clear to me today, tried to dunk the bill into his hat. Though he was himself a great practitioner of sleight-of-hand, Johnny Fox didn't see that one coming, and his hat, along with dozens of bills of various denominations, was whipped to the ground.

Instantly I was mortified, and overwhelmed with shame. This man had just spent an hour entertaining me, and this was my repayment? I tried to make up for it by helping gather the money back up, but Johnny Fox waved me off, clearly annoyed and probably suspicious that I was trying to run some kind of hustle, but still composed and polite. The incident haunted me for months, and for years afterwards, I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I remembered it. To this day the experience is essentially my emotional template for "mortified."

It's funny, I probably saw his show a total of 15 or 20 times over the years, only for a short hour once or twice a year. But because they were my formative years, his show looms large in my memory. In a lot of ways, Johnny Fox was the Maryland Ren Faire to me, and at a gut level, that one could go any summer to the ren faire and catch his sword swallowing show felt like an immutable fact of the world. Hearing of his death hits me in a way no big celebrity death ever has.
posted by biogeo at 7:54 PM on December 18, 2017 [3 favorites]

I've been attending the Maryland Renn Faire almost-annually since my father took me my first time as a child. I'd always stop and watch Johnny's performance. My father and Johnny Fox were the same age. Johnny shared his cancer diagnosis publicly just a week after my father received his own. My father passed away in May of this year, and for some reason getting to see Johnny come back and to watch him perform one more time this Summer really felt like a triumph in what has been a pretty terrible year. I didn't know him personally, but I'll absolutely miss seeing him at the Faire.
posted by word_virus at 11:49 AM on December 19, 2017 [3 favorites]

<======|=D

He was an ornament to the Grove. Farewell.
posted by Pallas Athena at 10:14 PM on December 19, 2017