Woodrow “Woody” Barnum is the kind of person you wouldn’t invite to a family reunion but absolutely would want at your “going away” party — mostly because he can bring a stuffed lion and a live goat, and somehow still make it weirdly educational. A direct descendant of Phineas Taylor Barnum, the man behind the phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute” (which Woody has tattooed on his bicep in comic sans), Woody is basically the heir to a circus empire, or as he likes to call it, “the family business of deception, illusions, and questionable animal talent shows.”
Woody’s formative years were spent in the gritty underbelly of Tarpits, Uzbekistan, a city that definitely exists (or so he claims). There, his father, a goat recruiter for the Barnum & Bailey Circus, taught him the ropes of how to convince livestock they had more potential than just “being goats.” According to Woody, “I learned two things in Tarpits: goats are surprisingly stubborn, and people will pay good money to watch them do almost anything.” In fact, his first job was convincing a particularly ornery goat to play poker — an endeavor that ended with the goat winning the pot, and Woody developing a deep mistrust of farm animals.
Woody Barnum
At age 9, Woody’s family moved to the thriving metropolis of Pineville, Kentucky, a town known for having approximately two things: moonshine and a population that thinks “Fractured Fablers” is a legitimate sport. Woody became the captain of the Fractured Fablers team at Pineville Preparatory School, a highly competitive sport that requires both dramatic storytelling and a lack of concern for personal safety. “Fractured Fablers is a lot like Shakespeare, except we break things… and sometimes each other,” Woody explained in an exclusive interview where he was both sober and holding a plastic sword.
From there, Woody attended Kentucky State College, where he majored in lion taming and minored in writing — a combination that has yet to make any sense to anyone, including Woody himself. “The lion taming was a requirement for the family business,” Woody said, “but the writing degree? That was my way of sneaking in a back-up plan. Turns out, writing is a lot like taming lions. You just have to do it with more coffee and fewer maulings.”
Graduating with honors (in what he calls “the unspoken art of not dying in a lion cage”), Woody joined The Daily Circus. Here, we pay him exclusively in peanuts (mostly for his extensive knowledge of animal-related drama). His writing is regularly described as “brilliantly absurd,” “suspiciously well-researched,” and “the reason our office pet goat has a constant look of existential dread.”
Fun fact: Woody once tried to write a serious news article, but his laptop was devoured by a circus lion. He now prefers writing with a pencil, in case it ends up in an animal’s mouth. “Writing’s just safer that way,” he claims.