World Wide Words: Dog-and-pony show

DOG-AND-PONY SHOW

[Q] From Christopher Greaves: I’m doing a series of dog-and-pony shows (come and check out our new training courses in a FREE 3-hour demo ...) and was wondering about the origins of this expression. I’ve heard it only in the context of software demos, but there again, that’s the world in which I am immersed.

[A] These days, your meaning of the phrase is the usual one: an elaborate briefing or visual presentation, usually for promotional purposes. Writers in recent decades have applied dog and pony show pejoratively to military briefings, photo opportunities and political speeches as well as to sales pitches.

To find the origin, we have to go back to the small towns of the middle west of the USA at the end of the nineteenth century. Around 1890, reports start to appear in local newspapers of the arrival by rail of small travelling troupes of performers billed without any hint of sarcasm as “dog and pony shows”. The earliest example I can find is from the Decatur Daily Republican, Illinois, dated March 1889: “A small audience saw the last of the Johnson & Lovett dog and pony shows last Saturday night”.

The most famous was that run by “Professor” Gentry (actually four brothers), but many others existed, including those of Sipe & Dolman, the Harper Brothers, Stull & Miller, and the Norris Brothers. They were in truth small circuses, many of them running on a shoestring, with no more than a band and a ringmaster in addition to the animal acts, which did consist only of dogs and ponies. The Gentry operation was bigger than its rivals and around 1894 it had some 40 ponies and 80 dogs in each of two troupes (later it would grow into a full-scale circus).

A further indication that the term was used literally in the early days comes from Booth Tarkington’s book Penrod, published in 1914, which also gives a feel for the circus atmosphere: “Arrived upon the populous and festive scene of the Dog and Pony Show, he first turned his attention to the brightly decorated booths which surrounded the tent. The cries of the peanut vendors, of the popcorn men, of the toy-balloon sellers, the stirring music of the band, playing before the performance to attract a crowd, the shouting of excited children and the barking of the dogs within the tent, all sounded exhilaratingly in Penrod’s ears and set his blood a-tingle.”

My reference books suggest that, at least by the 1920s, the term dog-and-pony show had begun to be used dismissively of any small-scale or mom-and-pop operation, in the same way that dog and pony shows were considered to be cut-down versions of “proper” circuses. However, the literal term continued in use in parallel with it right through into the 1950s; it was sometimes the name for one part of a larger circus, perhaps designed as a sideshow for the children, who were allowed to ride the ponies and pet the dogs.

It was in the 1950s that the term began to appear in print as a metaphor for some event that was more pizzazz than substance, like the tinsel and glitter of a circus ring. An early example of this figurative sense appeared in the Great Bend Daily Tribune in April 1953: “I imagine there is an awful lot of quiet glee these days in the ranks of the Democrats, who are watching a dog-and-pony show that threatens to rival the hassle that rid the land of Democratic influence for four years.”

I suspect the pejorative sense was helped along by the suggestion that the participants were like the performing animals at a circus; it’s likely that the expression putting on dog also had some influence on its popularity.