Melvin Burkhart

Was a legendary sideshow performer who billed himself as the Human Blockhead and proved it by hammering nails and spikes up his nose in front of millions of Americans in thousands of places — from the 1939 World’s Fair to countless dusty midways to the Coney Island boardwalk to an off-Broadway theater just last month — died on Nov. 8 in a hospice in Sun City, Fla. He was 94, and always swore that it didn’t hurt.

Mr. Burkhart, who lived in Riverview, Fla., was one of the last of the old-time sideshow performers clustered around the Tampa area. Percilla the Monkey Girl died in February, and Jeanie Tomaini, the Half Girl, died in 1999. James Taylor, publisher of the journal Shocked and Amazed, which chronicles sideshow history, also listed the Lobster Boy, the Ossified Lady and a man famed for boxing gorillas, all of whom have died in the last decade.

In a business in which some performers were born with abnormalities and others, like the fat ladies, created them, Mr. Burkhart was what was called a working act. He showed off talents that he taught himself or, more likely, stole from others.

He swallowed swords, breathed with one lung at a time, exhibited different expressions on each side of his face, ate fire, rotated his stomach muscles in an act called ”the cement mixer,” survived an electric chair, wrestled snakes and performed excellent magic. Working for a one-ring circus during the Depression, he was 9 of its 14 acts.

But it was as the Human Blockhead that Mr. Burkhart achieved carnival glory. Others had driven nails into their noses as part of larger exhibitions of withstanding pain. But he made a five-minute act out of it and added a droll presentation. Robert Ripley of ”Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” a sometime employer, came up with the blockhead name.

”Anybody can insert objects up their nasal passage,” said Dick Zigun, the impresario of the sideshow tribute Coney Island U.S.A., where Mr. Burkhart performed, ”but Melvin’s patter and comedy made it an act.”

Todd Robbins, a New York magician who sometimes does his own blockhead act, said, ”Anyone who has ever hammered a nail into his nose owes a large debt to Melvin Burkhart.”

Clarence Melvin Burkhart was born in Atlanta on Feb. 16, 1907. He grew up in the South, mainly in New Orleans, and left school in the sixth grade. He broke into show business in Louisville, Ky., at 15 or 16, while working as a Western Union boy. His uniform enabled him to get into theaters free, and one day he jumped at the chance when audience volunteers were solicited. He tripped on the stage, everyone laughed, and he was asked back for the next show.

This moved him to sign up for an amateur show. When he arrived, the stage manager immediately shoved him out on stage. ”What am I supposed to do?” the boy shouted.

”Do anything!”

He stood on his head, sucked in his bare stomach until the audience believed they saw his backbone and breathed with one lung, among other stunts. On the spur of the moment, he had conceived the elements of his first act, the Anatomical Man.

Then came a string of circuses, culminating at Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, where he performed five acts. Then Mr. Ripley intervened. He asked Mr. Burkhart to perform at his ”Odditorium” in Manhattan after hearing that John Hix, whose syndicated cartoon, ”Strange as It Seems,” rivaled ”Believe It or Not,” had asked him to perform in his sideshow.

The name ”Human Blockhead” first showed up in a cartoon drawn by Mr. Ripley that was never published. He was peeved because Mr. Hix had drawn Mr. Burkhart first.

Mr. Burkhart always said the reason he made such a fine blockhead was that he had often broken his nose as a boxer, and more than a dozen bone fragments were removed. ”I found out they had cleared a small passage,” he said.

He bounced back to Ringling Brothers and spent his winters at Hubert’s Museum on 42nd Street, famed for its flea circus. Show led to show, until he joined the James E. Straits Show, a major traveling carnival, staying for 30 years, performing in up to 15 shows a day, seven days a week.

He also acted as announcer and narrator — ”talker” in the jargon — bringing something of the sensibility of a Borscht Belt comic to the enterprise. Mr. Taylor said he provided the story line for Bill Durkes, known as ”the man with three eyes.” Mr. Durkes, whose abnormality resulted from a cleft palate and a painted eye, in fact had just one working eye.

Mr. Burkhart, his best friend, urged him to overcome his shyness and become his own talker so that Mr. Durkes could personally sell picture cards of himself. He told Mr. Durkes he would make a fortune, and he did.

Mr. Burkhart urged good taste in a tasteless business. ”We would never get up there and just say, ‘Come in here and see a horrible person,’ ” he said on National Public Radio. ”You wouldn’t say, ‘You’re going to see a girl with no arms.’ ”

The proper approach, he said, was to proclaim, ”You’re going to see the armless wonder who does fantastic things right before your eyes using nothing but the tootsies on her feet.”

His daughter, Bonnie Burkhart Lang of Port Charlotte, Fla., said that during all his travels he sent most of his earnings home to his family, who lived in a trailer in Florida. ”So many others didn’t,” she noted.

He is also survived by his wife of 51 years, Joyce; his sons, Murl of Webster, Fla., and Tony B. Asadian of Glendale, Calif.; a sister, Juanita Sanders of Lebanon Junction, Ky.; a brother, Murl of Louisville; and eight grandchildren.

Mr. Burkhart loved performing so much that he appeared yearly for each of his children’s classes, and then did the same for his grandchildren. He routinely did magic for whoever was in front of him in bank lines. ”I’m not here to make a fool out of you,” he would say. ”I just want to amuse you.”

He last performed on Oct. 8 at Mr. Robbins’s wedding at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Manhattan. He did some magic, hammered a five-inch spike into his nose for the last time and joked that that was how he got his iron.

”He was here to make people smile,” his daughter said.