The hat wearers who found their headgear deemed “shocking bad,” MacKay wrote, did well to take the teasing good-humoredly, or at least quietly:“What a shocking bad hat!” was the phrase that was next in vogue. No sooner had it become universal, than thousands of idle but sharp eyes were on the watch for the passenger whose hat showed any signs, however slight, of ancient service. Immediately the cry arose, and, like the war-whoop of the Indians, was repeated by a hundred discordant throats.
He who showed symptoms of ill-feeling at the imputations cast upon his hat, only brought upon himself redoubled notice. The mob soon perceive whether a man is irritable, and, if of their own class, they love to make sport of him. When such a man, and with such a hat, passed in those days through a crowded neighbourhood, he might think himself fortunate if his annoyances were confined to the shouts and cries of the populace. The obnoxious hat was often snatched from his head, and thrown into the gutter by some practical joker, and then raised, covered with mud, upon the end of a stick, for the admiration of the spectators, who held their sides with laughter, and exclaimed in the pauses of their mirth, “Oh! what a shocking bad hat! …. What a shocking bad hat!” Many a nervous, poor man, whose purse could but ill spare the outlay, doubtless purchased a new hat before the time, in order to avoid exposure in this manner.
Again, the joy of declaring, as a body, that something sucked was the strongest social glue of all. Sante pointed out that the same phenomenon played out to its logical endpoint in the beloved 70s and 80s game show The Gong Show: People began to try deliberately to look stupid. “People would show up and do the dumbest things and present themselves in the stupidest ways,” he said. “Ridicule would get you a prize. Human nature rose to the occasion.”“Give ’im the hook” took barely twenty-four hours to establish itself as the crowd’s favorite line. Soon it was a cliché and stage managers were kept busy hatching entertaining alternatives: dousing performers with seltzer from spray bottles, carrying them out on stretchers manned by burly stagehands. The hook and its variations became a reliable source of audience jollification at theaters everywhere, so that managers began to engage in something like inverse talent hunts, as truly disastrous acts achieved perverse renown.