Jacques Ze Whipper: The Mustachioed Renaissance Man

Dylan Thuras: When you meet someone at a party and they say, “Oh, what do you do?” What do you say to them?

Jack Lepiarz: I try to avoid that conversation as much as possible to be very honest with you. If there’s no way out of it, what I’ll do is I’ll say I kind of work in stand-up comedy. But if I say I’m in the circus or I’m on social media, then that becomes a whole extra extra conversation.

Dylan: This is Jack Lepiarz. We talked over Zoom and on the screen, you know, Jack’s clean-shaven. He’s in his 30s. He’s got a bookshelf behind him with a painting of a cat on it, very normal stuff. But the thing about Jack is that he’s got an alter ego, an alter ego that you can only encounter in some pretty specific places and only after he has drawn on a very large mustache and then he becomes Jacques Ze Whipper.

Jack: Jacques Ze Whipper is the character that I play when I am performing at Renaissance fairs. He is French because I didn’t want to do an English accent because I thought being French would be funnier. And as Jacques Ze Whipper, I crack whips and I sing songs and apparently that tickles some part of the world’s lizard brain that it has gotten me millions of views on social media.

Dylan: And I’m sure as soon as you explain what your act is, people are like, “Do your act.” Like, “Show me. What do you mean?” Do people try and get you to perform once they find out what you do?

Jack: They used to sometimes like when I was in college, thankfully like I don’t carry a whip around me and it’s not something that most people have like just lying around for me to demonstrate with. So thankfully I don’t get asked to do it all that often. I did have a weird family reunion a couple years ago with a bunch of—a whole side of my family. I had not seen since I was like nine years old. And I walk in and they’re just like playing videos of mine on an iPad and I’m like, all right, okay.

Dylan: This is the price of being the famous cousin. You know what I mean?

Jack: This is what we get. Yeah.

I’m Dylan Thuras and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. If you have ever wondered what it’s like to run away and join the circus, this episode is for you. We are talking to Jack Lepiarz, also known as Jacques Ze Whipper, about how he created a life for himself on the Renaissance Fair circuit.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Jacques Ze Whipper performingJacques Ze Whipper performing Fool4myCanon / CC BY 2.0

Dylan: Let’s talk about how this all began. You were born into the circus. Can you talk about your childhood with the circus?

Jack: So my dad was a performer with the Big Apple Circus. So he had started performing circus work in the late ’70s, started doing Renaissance Fairs in the early ’80s, and he left the Renaissance Fair circuit basically right as I was born to go do the Big Apple Circus.

So the way I always describe it is just imagine a bunch of feral toddlers in varying states of unwashedness, just roaming around a fenced-in circus lot, just getting into antics, you know, sneaking underneath the circus tent to watch the show from underneath the risers, eating the stale, half-eaten cotton candy that falls down underneath.

We were so gross, so disgusting, but it was this kind of thing where because you were in this fenced-in environment where everyone knew you, you didn’t need to worry about really a whole lot of safety because everyone was kind of watching you at all times, which meant that we had a lot of freedom, a lot of independence to just kind of roam around and just play.

There was school, but school was very limited, and we left before I was really school-age. We left when I was six, at least the circus world itself. My dad kept performing in Renaissance Fairs, other states of being, but I was technically in the same school system, K through 12. I just missed a lot of school.

Dylan: How did it feel for you? I mean, do you remember thinking as a kid—like sometimes we see what our parents do and we think, “I want to do the exact opposite of that.” And sometimes you see what your parents do and you think, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s for me.” Do you remember when you started thinking, “Oh, that’s for me”? Like, “I think I want to, performing is something that really calls to me.”

Jack: I went through phases. I think when I was really, really young, I didn’t want to leave the circus. My dad has told me that the first thing I said to him when he informed me that we were leaving the circus was that I said, “I’m going to go get a new dad.” I was not pleased about leaving the Big Apple Circus when we left the Big Apple Circus, and for a long time, I wanted to go back to the circus.

And then I was in kind of normal school in, you know, the suburbs of New York, and I was not, being the circus kid was not, was no longer a social benefit. You know, it’s great when you’re seven years old. It’s not so great when you’re 14.

And so I went through this phase where I wanted nothing to do with the circus. I wanted to be maybe a writer, maybe an actor, you know, something that people respect. And then I was working at Cold Stone Creamery. I was making $6.25 an hour, and my dad asked me to help him with a show, and I think he paid me the equivalent of $25 or $50 an hour. And I was like, oh, okay. All right, let’s talk about this. Let’s revisit this. And so when I came up to school in Boston for college, I decided to just try street performing rather than try and get a normal job.

Dylan: Tell me about when you started performing as Jacques Ze Whipper.

Jack: So I was a junior in college the first full year I did Jacques Ze Whipper. But the first year, in the first couple years, it was like, it was this weird experience where I was going from either performing my show to class at 8:00 a.m. the next day. I was doing my homework backstage and kind of trying to figure out, okay, how do we do a show like how I had gotten a lot of reps in, so to say, doing street performing. I’d done street performing for a couple years at that point, but I was still very, very green and I was kind of finding the character.

I initially did not have a mustache drawn on. The first two days I was Jacques Ze Whipper, it was just me just doing a French accent in a Renaissance costume. And I decided to try the mustache for the third day. And it was like people got it suddenly that the show is dumb. The show is meant to be laughed at. And that seemed to calm everyone down and kind of get them on the same wavelength that I wanted the audience to be. But then it was still, you know, seven years of just really figuring out the character and getting in tune and in touch with the character.

Dylan: And I guess we should say, Jacques Ze Whipper, you don’t just speak in a French accent. That would be a kind of a relatively limited act. You have a talent. So maybe you could talk about some of the things you do in your act.

Jack: Yeah. So the act was born out of, you know, I watched my dad’s act growing up in the circus and he has like every skill known to man. But what I really enjoyed when I was a kid was I liked the whips, because they were loud, they were cool, and you know, my dad was cool, Indiana Jones was cool. So I gravitated towards learning the whips. And as that went on, I was like, oh, you know, this is actually a lot of fun.

Dylan: After putting in tons of time as a street performer, Jack started taking the act on the road. By this time, he had graduated from college. He had gotten a part-time job at a news radio station in Boston. But whenever he could, he would drive to a local Renaissance fair and do his Jacques Ze Whipper Show.

Set the scene for me. You’re backstage. You’ve got to get ready. Walk me through getting into character, into costume, how you prepare yourself, how you warm up before you step out in front of an audience.

Jack: Ideally, I’ve already done that prep work two hours in advance. Ideally, you know, costume goes on at like 9:00 a.m. for my 11:00 show, or at least most of the costume. The makeup is already on. All the props are set. And ideally, I’ve had like half an hour somewhere to just listen to some unhinged music to kind of get myself into the weird headspace that I want to be when I’m on stage.

Dylan: What kind of unhinged music?

Jack: Oh, you have no idea. Do you want to go to this dangerous place?

Dylan: I do. I really do.

Jack: So I think let’s go with the safest option. I think the safest option for me to share with you is the heavy metal covers of old video game music. So the Street Fighter 2 soundtrack for me lives rent-free in my brain. It was what I played when I was nine years old. I still know most of the music, you know, so that’s a nice, easy, safe option to share with the world.

Dylan: Okay, awesome. So you’re listening to unhinged music. You’re getting into that headspace. You’ve already got your outfit, your mustache on, or does your mustache go on late? Your mustache is already on.

Jack: Mustache goes on early. Yeah, that’s got to be done. That’s got to be done very carefully.

Dylan: What is the mustache made—is it grease paint? What is it?

Jack: Eyeliner. It’s eyeliner. CVS. Cheap eyeliner from CVS. It works, man. Somehow, it’s pretty durable. I mean, like the sweat means it’s going to run and the way, you know, I smile and, you know, my cheeks fold together and it runs a little bit, but I’m pleased with its durability. You know, I have several layers of setting spray on at all times, but, you know, it’s fine. We’re doing all right.

Dylan: Got it. Okay. And then you step out in front of the crowd. Do you have a—how do you start an act? What does Jacques Ze Whipper say to the crowd when he first greets them?

Jack: So it used to be I would come out and I would yell, “Whippy Show” in a long, drawn-out way. I would come out and say, “Whippy Show!”

Dylan: And then the whip tricks begin.

Jack: So now my show is 30 minutes of, you know, various whip cracking stunts, tricks, jokes, whatever it may be. Whether it’s singing songs with the whips providing a beat to the songs, whether it’s, you know, doing some of the more advanced whip tricks that I’ve learned in almost 30 years of whip cracking now, whether it’s target cutting or whether it’s the fire whip routine that I have at the end of the show where I light a whip on fire and hopefully don’t light anything else on fire in the process.

Dylan: By the way, in case you thought we were interviewing just any old mid-tier whip skill guy, Jack actually holds the Guinness World Record for the most bullwhip cracks in one minute, which is 298. And there’s a huge musical component to your act. How did that develop and how do you choose songs that work in the act?

Jack: It was initially a pre-show routine, something you do to build a crowd, something that’s loud, energetic, people can hear from far away and they come and see the show. And so what I found was We Will Rock You is one that everyone knows immediately, they recognize, everyone knows that song. So that is a song that is always, almost always the song that starts the show.

But then beyond that, when I go to the audience for requests, I’m looking for a couple of things. I’m looking for a song, number one, that I know, but I’m also looking for a song that I haven’t done 20 times in the last month. And that’s how we got the banned list, the list of songs that I am no longer accepting, which is Freebird, Barbie Girl, Sweet Caroline, Sephiroth, Sailor Moon, Pokemon, Fire and Flames, anything by Taylor Swift or anything from Hazbin Hotel and lately, Hot To Go as well, because that was every song for about four months.

And basically, it’s the kind of thing where I’m looking for a song like, okay, do I know the song well enough that I can parody the lyrics on the fly? Is it a song that I think most of the audience is going to know? And then is it a song that I haven’t done a bajillion times? And that’s what I’m looking for when I’m going for audience requests.

Dylan: So for a while, being Jacques Ze Whipper, it was Jack’s other life. It was the Mr. Hyde to his Dr. Jekyll. During the day, he was at the radio station. He was Jack Lepiarz, the serious newscaster guy. And then on weekends or whenever he could get away, he would become Jacques Ze Whipper. But a couple of years ago, Jack started thinking about changing this balance around.

Jack: It’s a combination of things I want to say in 2021, you know, so I was in person the whole of the pandemic and it was starting to grate on me. I had kind of hit a wall with radio where I was like, okay, for my career to go any further in this industry, I need to put in a lot of extra work. I need to level up my radio game, and I knew what I had to do and none of that work excited me. And I thought about doing the same kind of work to do circus work full-time and that excited me. I wanted to do that.

And then in October of 2021, longtime fans of mine came to my show, posted clips of it on TikTok and those clips got, first one got 300,000 views and then the next two got more than 2 million views. And I was like, oh, okay. All right. Apparently there’s a demand for Jacques Ze Whipper on the internet. Let’s start posting some videos of my show on the internet. Let’s just start putting it out there.

Dylan: That’s awesome. Okay. So, well, now you do this full-time. What does your life look like?

Jack: It’s either 60 miles an hour nonstop or there’s a whole lot of nothing going on. And right now we’re in a brief period of a whole lot of nothing, thank God. But so this year has been basically since mid-May, nonstop until mid to late October.

So mid-May, I did the New Jersey Ren Faire and then we went to Colorado, eight weeks in Colorado, two weeks in Seattle, six weeks in Baltimore. And then we got home, immediately went to Paris and then immediately went to New York Comic-Con. So it’s like from May 20th to October 20th, if I was home, I was home for like three days max. So it’s been a lot of going, a lot of everything.

Dylan: And you’re doing a ton of traveling. Mostly driving or mostly flying?

Jack: About a 50/50 split. If it’s within eight hours drive, I’m probably driving.

Dylan: Am I right in thinking you travel with your cat? My cat is there for emotional support and sometimes content. Scipio, my cat, he’s getting there. He’s got some work to do. When we drove to Colorado this summer, he evacuated all of his bodily fluids in the first 20 minutes. And then I got food poisoning in solidarity with him on the third day of that drive. We were just a pair of cat bros, just struggling with the drive.

Dylan: In a highly fragrant car.

Jack: Yes, exactly.

Dylan: Perhaps you saw it, but there was a mini documentary series on HBO called Ren Faire. I liked it. And it was all about this Renaissance fair in Texas run by a very colorful character, older guy who started the festival. And the show is about all the people around him who are kind of jockeying to take over the Renaissance fair for him. It is very sort of a high drama. I did have to ask Jack if this was what it was actually like.

I do have to ask, obviously there was a big HBO series about Renaissance fair life that sort of, I think for a lot of people, maybe was their first time even contemplating what that world is or what it looks like. What did you think about that series?

Jack: I had a couple of takeaways from that show. One was that some parts of it were so outrageously scripted that it was very difficult for me to take any of it without a grain of salt. There were only a couple of spots there where I’m like, okay, that looks like it, that’s an actual interaction. I also feel the need to say that TRF, Texas Ren Faire, Ren Fest, Ren Faire, I forget, is not every fair. The ownership there is a little eccentric, let’s put it that way.

Dylan: Is there any, is there drama? Is there behind this, in the theater world, there’s drama sometimes, it comes with the territory. Is this a part of the job?

Jack: It’s like any office. I mean, I think it’s, any office is gonna have, you’re gonna have coworkers you like and coworkers you don’t like. At the end of the day, it is a business. It’s a, I would say it’s a looser business culture or office culture than you would get, I would say, working at a normal office.

Dylan: How is the Ren Faire culture distinct from the circus culture? Because you have experience with both.

Jack: They’re pretty similar, to be very honest with you. It’s, I mean, I think the Ren Faire world is, I think it’s easier to get into just because there’s so many of them. With circus, there are fewer and fewer circuses every single day. I mean, Big Apple Circus went out of business, I think once, maybe twice now. Ringling stopped shows. So the circus, the traditional circus, as we think about it, is not a thriving industry.

Ren Faires are doing amazing right now, which I attribute to Game of Thrones. But the culture of the world is, what I love about it is it is a place, and I say this with love, it is a place for the freaks and the geeks and the people who don’t fit neatly into normal society. You know, whatever your history, whatever your background, as long as you’re not a menace or a danger to yourself or others, there’s a place for you at the Renaissance Faire, and there’s a community for you at the Renaissance Faire world, because everyone is a little bit of an outcast. I love that for the Ren Faire world.

Dylan: Jack, this has been really, really fun to talk to you. Really interesting. Congratulations on all the success, on the great act, and hopefully I’ll get to see it in real life sometime.

Jack: With any luck. Thank you for having me, Dylan.

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This episode was produced by Amanda McGowan. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.

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