Geek show

Geek shows were an act in traveling carnivals and circuses of early America and were often part of a larger sideshow.
The billed performer's act consisted of a single geek, who stood in center ring to chase live chickens. It ended with the performer biting the chickens' heads off and swallowing them. The geek shows were often used as openers for what are commonly known as freak shows. It was a matter of pride among circus and carnival professionals not to have traveled with a troupe that included geeks. Geeks were often alcoholics or drug addicts, and paid with liquor – especially during Prohibition – or with narcotics. In modern usage, the term "geek show" is often applied to situations where an audience is drawn to a performance or show where the performance consists of a horrific act that is found distasteful but ultimately entertaining by masses. It may also be used by a single person in reference to an experience which he or she found humiliating but others found entertaining. It is used in derision.
References in pop culture.
"Freaks" (1932) is a horror film with a long history of controversy because it used real carnival performers. In its original release, it became the only M-G-M film ever to be pulled from cinemas before completing its domestic engagements. 
In the film noir classic "Nightmare Alley" (1947), based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham, Tyrone Power plays a sideshow barker in a seedy carnival which includes a geek biting the heads off live chickens. Power's character later succeeds as a charlatan mentalist, but then descends into alcoholism and is reduced to falsely portraying a geek as a means of survival in another sideshow. In one of Gresham's non-fiction books, Monster Midway, he details the process of making an alcoholic or a drug addict perform a geek act in exchange for a fix.
In the television show "Starsky and Hutch" (1976), Huggy tells Starsky and Hutch that the guy they are looking for, Monty Voorhees, used to be a geek. Starsky explains geeks to Hutch. He also claims that the geeks formed a union in 1932, which he then admits he made up. "Well, suppose all they paid you in was chicken heads." (“Bounty Hunter”, Season 1, Episode 22) 
The artist Joe Coleman bit the heads off white rats as part of his stage act as Doctor Momboozo in the 1980s. He primarily did a 'Human Bomb' show, self-detonating at the end, but also performed with the rodents for his turn as a geek.
The 1990 Troma film "Luther the Geek" revolves around a geek named Luther, who eventually becomes a murderer who bites the heads off his victims.
A geek show figures in the Katherine Dunn novel "Geek Love" (1989). Crystal Lil, the debutante mother of the freaks, met their father while performing as a geek during her summer break from university. Aloysius, the proprietor of the traveling circus, comments that college boys often toured as geeks during their summer breaks, but at the sight of the lovely Crystal Lil and her eagerness they made an exception. During a recounting of her time as a geek, Crystal remarks on how damaged her teeth were from biting the heads off chickens.
In the 1998 "Simpsons" episode "Bart Carny", Homer and Bart are asked to perform in a geek show to pay off a debt: "You just bite the heads off the chickens and take a bow".
Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man", from the 1965 album "Highway 61 Revisited", makes a reference to the geek. It is directed at the 'straight' Mr Jones, who is unable to come to terms with the counter culture youth revolution around him:
In the 1995 "X-Files" episode "Humbug", real-life sideshow performer The Enigma portrays a mostly-mute geek named "The Conundrum." True to geek form, his willingness to eat anything plays a crucial role in resolving the episode's plot.
In "Marvel Noir", Norman Osborn has his henchmen all employed from various sideshow attractions. Adrian Toomes was a former Geek, and seems to have lost all conscience, as he devoured Ben Parker.
In the film "The Wizard of Gore" there is a show that opens with "The Geek" (played by Jeffrey Combs) eating maggots and then biting the head off a rat.
In the first two episodes of "", there is a geek named Meep (played by Ben Woolf) who performs in the Freak Show biting heads off of baby chickens. He is eventually wrongfully arrested and murdered by the other inmates in prison.
In HBO's "Carnivàle", Ben Hawkins' father, Henry Scudder, deserted the French Foreign Legion and fled to America where he eventually succumbed to alcoholism and worked as a sideshow geek at Hyde and Teller's carnival.