What are the origins of American “geek culture?” That is the question that this project started off seeking to answer. In the process of doing so, however, a different sort of collective started to emerge, a freaky constellation of performers, performances, and personas that are connected through a concept much more interwoven with American identity-formation, and more politically charged: wildness. Indeed, a new flourishing of scholarship centers around the concept of wildness and the ways in which the wild has been fetishized, exploited, contained, and celebrated – often all at the same time – throughout the making of modern and post-modern American culture and identity. This project adds to that conversation by looking specifically at “acts of wildness;” moments in American popular culture in which the concept of the wild has been enacted either phenomenologically, in performance, or in visual culture.Through the case studies of William Henry Johnson, a.k.a. the “What Is It?;” Ota Benga; Peter Sewally, a.k.a. Mary Jones; Minnie Woolsey, a.k.a. “Koo-Koo the Bird Girl;” Eva Tanguay; and Florence Turner’s Daisy Doodad’s Dial; alongside broader considerations of the institution of the freak show and the hysteria “craze” of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, I use a cultural studies approach to weave a connection between the common threads of wildness in each of their examples. The wild man act and women’s “hysterical” performance collide in these readings to form new alliances across disability studies, postcolonial theory, race and gender studies, trans scholarship, and more. Ultimately, this project argues, these solo performances and personas do the work often associated with that of the clown: providing a space of meaningful excess, through which we might get a glimpse of potential, a spatial-temporal-social possibility not provided in modern and post-modern American formations: utopia.