For the fate of humans and the fate of beasts is one and the same fate: as one dies, so dies the other; they all have one breath, and man has no advantage over the beast, for all is vanity.
— Ecclesiastes 3:19
When I was a child, a chimpanzee named Mr. Jigs came to my summer camp.
This was not a religious camp, or an arts camp, or anything particularly special - it was just an ordinary secular day camp on Long Island, popular with families along the South Shore of Nassau County. Each summer, once a year, Mr. Jigs arrived as reliably as color wars.
The children gathered in a wide circle on the large asphalt parking lot in front of the camp - forty or fifty feet of empty space in the middle. Mr. Jigs performed there. He wore children’s clothes. He danced. He juggled. He rode a bicycle or tricycle or unicycle – I don’t exactly recall. He bounced a basketball. He tossed objects back and forth with his handler. We clapped. We laughed. We were supposed to and it.
When I was six or seven, it was pure fun. By eight or nine, it was still amusing but less remarkable. By ten or eleven, something had shifted. The performance hadn’t changed, but my response to it had. The act began to feel strange, even though I couldn’t have said why.
It was around that time - whether I noticed it then, or only in retrospect is hard to say - that I became aware of a wire.
It ran from Mr. Jigs’ body to his handler who held something that looked like a small box. No one explained it. No adult ever mentioned it. A year or two later, my best friend and I acknowledged it to one another, almost as comedy yet with revulsion as well, the way children do when they realize something without wanting to say it aloud. We understood, without really understanding, that Mr. Jigs was not performing on his own.
I don’t know what the wire did. It may have delivered shocks. It may have simply vibrated. It may have produced some other unpleasant sensation. I only know that, within a short time, it became clear that compliance for him was not really optional.
I remember - or think I remember - Mr. Jigs hesitating. Just briefly. Perhaps a stall, followed by a sudden urgent lurch into whatever came next. That hesitation, more than anything, made the wire visible in memory. The show was still funny. But it had become unsettling.
Years later, while reading about nineteenth and early twentieth-century circuses, exhibitions, so-called freak shows, I came across another chimpanzee: Consul.
Consul was not a local curiosity. He was an international sensation. According to an account published in 1904, he rose at the sound of a gong at ten in the morning, discarded his light blue silk pajamas, took a morning bath, smoked cigars and cigarettes, rode a bicycle, drove an electric motor car, used a typewriter, and wrote his name boldly. He took a pint of hot chocolate before retiring at night. His intelligence, the article concluded, was “marvellously suggestive.”
He was insured for an extraordinary sum – million in today’s terms. He toured widely. When he died in Berlin, reportedly of pneumonia, he was very far from the climate to which a chimpanzee would ever naturally belong, at a time when veterinary medicine scarcely understood what it was treating.
I found the photographs initially amusing - Consul in a tuxedo holding his hat and walking stick with cultured elegance (which is the picture used as this substack’s avatar). However, the more I looked at the photo I found, with equal measure, a sense of revulsion. The humor and the horror were inseparable. The same was true of Mr. Jigs. It was funny and it was wrong - simultaneously.
Let me stop and explain that this feeling is not about animal rights (though that is a serious issue) but something far deeper and more visceral. There is something intrinsically wrong with the image of a chimpanzee being almost human. Something ancient.
What fascinated me most was how long it took to realize that nothing about my reaction was peculiar or even modern.
Long before anyone spoke of the uncanny valley, we were already standing in it. Chimpanzees dressed as people are close enough to invite identification but just far enough away to provoke discomfort. The laughter comes easily at first. It grows much thinner with time.
Later iterations made this easier to deal with.
Television gave us chimps with dubbed voices- Lancelot Link with chimp spies and hippies (and a stray orangutan always there to be looked at with revulsion by the other chimps). Then chimps as joke-delivery systems - The Chimp Chanel saw Television parody of 90’s icons by way of overdubbed monkeys chewing gum.
The wire of Mr. Jigs had disappeared and was replaced by ventriloquism. The animal vanished beneath the human voice but watch long enough and the unease is still there, but safely padded.
Not all cultures choose padding.
In their work on So’o masking among the Hemba of the DR Congo, the anthropologists Thomas and Pamela Blakely describe funerary masks whose chimpanzee qualities are neither disguised nor softened. These masks do not entertain, they terrify. They appear briefly, under strict ritual conditions, at moments when ordinary social order (such as death) has been suspended. They are not explanatory objects, but interventions.
There is no comedy in them. No reassurance. The discomfort they generate is not discharged but held. Where we dressed the almost-human in pajamas and taught it to ride a bicycle, the Hemba allowed it to remain unsettling - and precisely because of that, it retains its force.
Western literature found its own way to this realization, though less gracefully. One of the most disturbing examples is H.P. Lovecraft’s Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jeremyn and His Family, a story that works precisely because it strips away spectacle and leaves only proximity.
There are no trained tricks, no costumes, no padding. What horrifies is not in the ape’s behavior, but what it is, in relation to the human. The terror lies in lineage - in the suggestion that that boundary was never as firm as one might have hoped.
It remains one of Lovecraft’s most unpleasant, almost sickening stories because it offers no safe distance - only recognition.
I sometimes hear younger people speak about films made with AI as though the unease they feel at seeing what looks almost right but is just slightly “off” in a way they can’t explain, is unprecedented - as if we have crossed a new threshold of the almost-human.
But standing there as a child, watching a chimp in a suit wave at us while a wire ran discreetly away from his body, I remember already knowing this feeling.
The discomfort is not new. It was simply unnamed then and perhaps the worst part about it is that I still can’t really look away from a Mr. Jigs or Consul dressed as a person.
The masquerade is both compelling and disturbing, which of course is why it’s so potent - why anything that seems so like us but yet not like us, is unsettling, but impossible to disregard.
The costumes change. The wire disappears. The feeling does not.