Robert Halloway

Robert Halloway (December 13, 1912 - January 12, 1998) was a standup comedian from Cleveland, Ohio. He became famous for his half-hour stage act in which he balanced a spoon on his nose and discussed the act of balancing a spoon on his nose.

The son of a bicycle repairman, Halloway had a way with silverware from a young age. As an infant, he would spoon-feed himself baby food without the assistance of his parents. By age five, he could use a fork as a catapult to launch small bites of food into his mouth with an eighty-two percent success rate. By the age of seven, he could eat soup with a fork. By the age of twelve, he was morbidly obese due to the number of food stunts he insisted on performing. Finally, by the age of eighteen, he mastered the trick that would make him famous: balancing a spoon on his nose.

Halloway was the first to do this. Prior to Halloway's breakthrough, many had speculated on the possibility, but no one had tried it. For instance, Aristotle wrote of spoon-balancing in his Physics, but ultimately rejected it as an improbability, saying "it is both clear and true that the balancing of a spoon on one's nose may be achieved in certain circumstances, but those circumstances are neither to be desired nor expected, so by observation we reject the notion that a spoon may be balanced on one's nose."

In Halloway's case, spoon-balancing was not just a feat but a source of amusement. By 1933, Halloway had become a phenomenon. Wherever Halloway went, large crowds would gather to watch his shows and attempt to perform his trick themselves. Unfortunately, Halloway's breakthrough stunt proved too popular: once people realized that they could perform the trick themselves with a little practice, they began to do so. Some theorists estimate that as much as seventy-percent of the population of American learned the trick. Soon, Halloway's act proved redundant. By 1934, Halloway was no longer able to book even small crowds and he joined the swelling ranks of the unemployed during the Great Depression.

Halloway never recaptured his fame. He ultimately became a bicycle repairman like his father and made a modest living. He had a son with his wife, Mary Coolidge, in 1938, who went on to operate his own silverware company. Halloway died January 12, 1998 of a heart attack brought on by his weight problems. He was eighty-five.