Except for one day a year, when Coney Island becomes its old self, for better and for worse. Every July 4, tens of thousands of people flood the streets to witness a spectacular exercise in metaphorical resonance known as the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. It says so much about contemporary American life that our Independence Day celebrations include 1. fireworks displays, which are essentially imitation battles complete with rockets and bombs, and 2. a contest in which people from around the world attempt to discover how many hot dogs and buns can be ingested by a human within ten minutes. To quote the legendary comedian Yakov Smirnoff: What a country.

Like the nation it aims to celebrate, the hot dog eating contest has always been a strange amalgamation of history and imagination. The contest’s originator was probably a guy named Mortimer Matz, whom the journalist Tom Robbins described as “part P. T. Barnum, part political scalawag.” Matz made much of his money as a public relations rep for politicians in crisis—a resource never in short supply in New York—but he also did PR for Nathan’s Famous along with his colleague Max Rosey. Matz claimed that the hot dog eating contest could trace its history back to July 4, 1916, when four immigrants staged a hot dog eating contest to determine which of them loved America the most. But he would later acknowledge, “In Coney Island pitchman style, we made it up.”

The contest actually started in the summer of 1967, when several people were given an hour to eat as many hot dogs and buns as they could. A thirty-two-year-old truck driver named Walter Paul won the initial contest with a purported 127 hot dogs and buns in a single hour, although bear in mind that number was fed to the press by Rosey and Matz.

The event didn’t become annual until the late 1970s. Most years, the winner would eat ten or eleven hot dogs in ten minutes. The hot dog eating contest was a fairly quiet affair until 1991, when a young man named George Shea became competitive eating’s professional hype man.

Shea was an English major who loved Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner and wanted to become a novelist, but instead he is the last great American carnival barker. He wears a straw hat and is known for his phenomenally grandiloquent annual introductions of the contest’s competitors. In fact, Shea’s annual preshow performance, which is broadcast live on America’s top sports network, often lasts longer than the hot dog eating contest itself.

He always starts out with reasonably normal introductions. “In his rookie year, he is already ranked number twenty-four in the world,” Shea began one year. “From Nigeria, now residing in Morrow, Georgia, he’s eaten thirty-four ears of sweet corn. Six feet nine inches tall, let’s hear it for Gideon Oji.” But as we meet eater after eater, the introductions become progressively more surreal. Introducing seventy-two-year-old Rich LeFevre, Shea said, “When we are young, we drink our coffee with milk and sugar. And as we age, we drink it with milk only, then we drink it black, then we drink it decaf, then we die. Our next eater is at decaf.”

Of another eater we are told, “He stands before us like Hercules himself, albeit a large bald Hercules at an eating contest.” Introducing longtime competitive eater Crazy Legs Conti, who is a professional window washer and the French-cut green bean eating champion of the world, Shea says, “He was first seen standing at the edge of the shore between the ancient marks of the high and low tide, a place that is neither land nor sea. But as the blue light of morning filtered through the darkness it revealed the man who has been to the beyond and witnessed the secrets of life and death. He was buried alive under sixty cubic feet of popcorn and he ate his way out to survival.”

If you don’t regularly watch ESPN, it may be difficult to understand just how odd this is compared to its daily fare, which is comprised almost entirely of athletic events and analyses of athletic events. ESPN is not in the business of visiting the place that is neither land nor sea.

But ESPN is a sports network, and I’ll concede that competitive eating is a sport. Like any sport, this one is about seeing what a human body can accomplish, and like any sport it has a variety of rules. You have to eat the hot dog and the bun for it to count, and you’re immediately disqualified if during the competition you experience a so-called “Reversal of Fortune,” the sport’s euphemism for vomiting. The competition itself is, of course, gruesome. These days, the winner usually consumes over seventy hot dogs and buns in ten minutes.

One can feel something akin to joyful wonder at the magnificence of a perfectly weighted Megan Rapinoe cross, or the elegance of a LeBron James fadeaway. But it’s hard to construct the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest as beautiful. When a soccer ball is at Lionel Messi’s feet, you don’t want to look away. When watching competitive hot dog eating, you can’t bring yourself to look away.

The hot dog eating contest is a monument to overindulgence, to the human urge to seek not just more than you need but also more than you actually want. But I think it’s also about something else. The world’s best competitive eater, the American Joey Chestnut, has said of Shea’s introductions, “He convinces the audience these guys are athletes. He does such a good job, he convinces me I’m an athlete.”

The carnival barker is an obvious flimflam artist—we know that Shea is kidding when he refers to Chestnut as “America itself” and claims that the first words Chestnut’s mother ever told him were, “You are of my flesh but you are not mine own. Fate is your father and you belong to the people, for you shall lead the army of the free.” We know that’s a joke. And yet people scream along. They chant, “Jo-ey, Jo-ey, Jo-ey.” As the announcer continues to rile the crowd, they began to chant: “U-S-A, U-S-A!” The energy on the street changes. We know that Shea isn’t speaking in earnest. And yet . . . his words have power.

Beginning in 2001, a Japanese man named Takeru Kobayashi won the hot dog eating contest for six consecutive years. Kobayashi totally revolutionized the approach to the competition—before him, no one had ever eaten more than twenty-five hot dogs. Kobayashi ate fifty in 2001, more than double what the third-place eater that year managed. His strategies—including breaking each dog in half and dipping the bun in warm water—are now ubiquitous at the contest.

Kobayashi was long beloved as the greatest eater of all time, although he now no longer participates in the contest because he refuses to sign an exclusive contract with Shea’s company. But he competed in the 2007 event, and when the Japanese Kobayashi was beaten by the American Chestnut, Shea shouted into the microphone, “We have our confidence back! The dark days of the past six years are behind us!” And that seemed to give the crowd permission to fall into bigotry. You can hear people shout at Kobayashi as he walks over to congratulate Chestnut. They tell him to go home. They call him Kamikaze and Shanghai Boy. Recalling this in a documentary more than a decade later, Kobayashi wept as he said, “They used to cheer for me.”

When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you’re just kidding. It’s so easy to take refuge in the “just” of just kidding. It’s just a joke. We’re just doing it for the memes. But the preposterous and absurd can still shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And ridiculous cruelty is still cruel.

I love humans. We really would eat our way out of sixty cubic feet of popcorn to survive. And I’m grateful to anyone who helps us to see the grotesque absurdity of our situation. But the carnival barkers of the world must be careful which preposterous stories they tell us, because we will believe them.

I give the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest two stars.

CNN

AMERICA’S FIRST twenty-four-hour, nonstop news network was launched by cable magnate Ted Turner on June 1, 1980. The inaugural broadcast began with Turner standing behind a podium speaking to a large crowd outside CNN’s new headquarters in Atlanta.

Turner said, “You’ll notice out in front of me that we’ve raised three flags—one, the state of Georgia; second, the United States flag of course, which represents our country and the way we intend to serve it with the Cable News Network; and over on the other side we have the flag of the United Nations, because we hope that the Cable News Network with its international coverage and greater depth coverage will bring a better understanding of how people from different nations live and work together, so that we can perhaps hopefully bring together in brotherhood and kindness and friendship and peace the people of this nation and this world.”