Cocaine, Coca-Cola, and Clickbait: The Eternal Hustle of the Carney Barker

Marks, Rubes, and Memes: A Brief History of Getting Played

Carnival Barker at a sideshow in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, 1938

In the old days… Dupes. Rubes. Patsies. Jays. Marks. Suckers. Mugs. Pigeons. Gudgeons. Greenhorns. Soft touches. Dewdrops. And Chumps…

Bought the farm and the fertilizer – Believed the whole outrageous pitch.

Swallowed it hook, line, and sinker – Fully taken in.

Got taken to the cleaners – Financially fleeced, often through trickery.

Fell for the old razzle-dazzle – Swayed by charm or showmanship.

Rode the gravy train to the edge of the cliff – Believed in easy gain until it all collapsed.

Got sold a bill of goods – Classic American idiom for being misled.

Does it seem like there are a lot of old expressions to describe people who fell for advertising hucksters, grifters, and pitchmen?

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In the first age of advertising, people didn’t just believe it—they took it as gospel. Scientific fact, moral advice, and brand loyalty all came in the same bottle. And if the tonic didn’t work, well, that was on you. You took too little. Too late. You didn’t believe hard enough.

That era—equal parts carnival, con, and commandment—birthed more than just business empires. It birthed a language. A whole vocabulary to describe the ones who fell for it.

They were called Dupes. Rubes. Patsies. Jays. Marks. Suckers. Mugs. Pigeons. Gudgeons. Greenhorns. Soft touches. Dewdrops. And Chumps.

Hetty, a Victorian Lady ghost from the TV series Ghosts talking about her relationship with cocaine.

One hundred and fifty years later, so many words and expressions linger in our vocabulary to describe folks totally unprepared to handle the dope of advertising. We still have so many ways to say: this poor soul bought the pitch. He bought the farm and the fertilizer. Swallowed it whole.

We’re still doing it. Most of us today have a good grip on advertising. Even in law ‘puffery’ in advertising is allowed and the onus is on the customer to sensibly discern the truth from the well-known words of advertising... maybe the most notable of which, NEW!, has really not been improved on in over 100 years of slogans and pitches.

Nathan, a reader with a sharp eye and a clearer mind, said it plainly in The Bee’s comments this week:

“To be fair, elections have brought out mudslingers, of various types, on all sides, both for and against for centuries now, if you think of elections generally worldwide. I guess it's just a feature of the process. The main difference today is not to let social media curtail or suspend rational thought. In at least a few ways social media makes the decision that much more personal than it used to be, voting for a more distant and more dignified individual.”

Exactly. We gotta get off that dope. Or more accurately, I suppose, we gotta build up some tolerance to that dope. People once needed to learn how to hold their digital liquor. We need to learn how to hold our memes and Reditt threads.

In the golden age of quackery, cocaine was less a drug and more a miracle. It was the secret sauce in everything from toothache drops to “female vitality elixirs” to the original recipe of Coca-Cola (yes, that Coca-Cola). Sigmund Freud praised it. Surgeons used it. Hucksters swore by it. It numbed pain, lifted moods, and made you feel like maybe the depression didn’t apply to you. Never mind the addiction, the hallucinations, or coming down. In the parlance of the time, those were just side effects of living your best life. For a brief, glittering moment, cocaine wasn’t a problem—it was the future.

In our real-life future, we’ve traded the everyday cocaine concoctions for a screen in our pocket. The platform has changed, but the hustle hasn’t. Every meme, every hot take, every bite-sized outrage is just a new bottle of snake oil, shrink-wrapped for dopamine delivery. We don’t elect leaders so much as subscribe to them. Their job isn’t to lead, it’s to perform trustworthiness.

And like always, we want to believe. That’s the real trick. No one ever cons the truly skeptical. The best cons are mutual agreements between the pitchman and the part of you that needs what he’s selling.

And so it goes. As old as persuasion itself.

A generation from now, they’ll laugh at us the way we laugh at radium toothpaste, asbestos insulation, phrenology, or — still lingering when I was a kid — Mercurochrome… cause what kid’s cut or scrape isn’t made better by dabbing on some glowing mercury-based product — it even has the word cure right in the brand title.

They’ll say: Can you believe people used to get radicalized by JPEGs?

Yes we can.

Because that’s what we do. We fall for it, we wise up, we laugh, and then we fall for the next shiny thing with a slightly different label and slightly better font. Snake oil with a sleeker UX. The new dope isn’t just out there—it’s in here. In our scrolls, in our shares, in that tiny hit of righteousness we get when we click “like” on something we didn’t stop to question.

But maybe the lesson isn’t to stop falling. Maybe it’s to fall better.

To be the kind of people who get taken once, then build up a cultural memory. An immunity. We learn to hold our intellectual liquor. To know that just because it’s viral doesn’t mean it’s true. Just because it’s trending doesn’t mean it matters. And just because it feels good to believe it doesn’t mean it isn’t a trap.

The good news is: we’ve been here before. And we made it through. We survived the tonics, the pamphlets, the golden elixirs, the miracle cures, the propaganda wars, the bad ideas with great copywriting. We can survive this, too.

But first we’ve gotta recognize the barker’s voice—no matter what platform it’s shouting from—and remember that the greatest defense against the new dope is the oldest tool in the kit:

A little doubt.
A little delay.
A little laugh.

And the courage to say, “Hang on. That’s just the snake talking.”

Because even in a world of mirror screens, memes, and Mercury cures, the truth still matters. It just doesn’t always shout as laughably loud as the pitchmen, hucksters, and hard sellers.