Health & Well Being XXVI

HW26: Humor I: Vaudeville

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Humor I: Vaudeville

We had a hunger for something more important than fame. Food!

—George Burns, vaudevillian

Introduction
From the 1880s to the 1920s, vaudeville was the most popular form of public entertainment in the United States. It was America’s first big-time show business, a coast-to-coast enterprise that at its height reached thousands of theaters and over the years employed close to 50,000 people full- or part-time as entertainers and a similar number in related businesses and crafts. The growth was made possible by the nationwide expansion of railroads after the Civil War (1861-65).

Initially, vaudeville carried a whiff of disrepute, for it grew out of the rowdy, alcohol-drenched variety shows of the mid-1800s. Before the Civil War, variety was performed in “less cultured venues,” often beer halls and saloons that catered to men only. Its two main features: 1) girls prancing about on stage while showing their bloomers, and 2) knockabout comedy, often racist and always violent. Bare knuckle boxing was sometimes a prime attraction, as was gambling and prostitution.

With a flair for the risqué, these old variety shows were associated with burlesque, medicine shows, dime museums, and other forms of low-brow entertainment suitable, as one historian put it, “only for an audience of boozed-up, working-class men, cheering the performances through a haze of cigar smoke.”

Vaudeville found its niche in the 1880s when it pivoted to squeaky-clean entertainment suitable for the whole family. Impresario Tony Pastor, known as the “father of vaudeville,” insisted that nothing close to an obscenity ever be uttered on his stage. Profanity, sexually suggestive or vulgar expressions could get a comedian fired on the spot. One performer remembered a sign backstage:

No hells or damns.
No deity of any sort to be mentioned at any time
Ladies must wear silk tights.

Pastor’s idea was to provide “affordable, family-friendly entertainment where a child could bring his parents without fear of embarrassment.” Seen as occupying a space somewhere between seedy old-time variety and legitimate theater, vaudeville was firmly in the middle—middle-of-the-road, middlebrow, middle-class. And since the word “variety” had been tarnished, the name “vaudeville” was adopted: polite entertainment fit for the whole family.

By 1910, nearly every midsized town across the country had a vaudeville theater. A typical venue sat more than a thousand paying customers and were frequently sold out. Many people came two or three times during a show’s tenure in town. Vaudeville was the first real iteration of “mass entertainment.”

Tony Pastor and other promoters continued to find new ways to put variety in vaudeville. The guiding principle was, “If you don’t like this act, wait a couple of minutes.”

Audiences were entertained by a series of eight or more unrelated acts that might include any of the following: singers, dancers, comics, comedy teams, singing comedians, contortionists, jugglers, animal acts, children’s acts, midget acts, quick-change artists, escape artists, trapeze artists, billiard trick-shot artists, impressionists, cyclists, whistlers, sketch performers, family acts, puppeteers, one-act plays, acrobats, orators, mimes, clowns, female impersonators, magicians, ventriloquists, plate spinners, professional regurgitators, cowboys, and ukulele players. Lots of ukulele players, for whatever the act or level of talent, the prerequisite emotion was enthusiasm.

Much in demand was the comedy monologist, an early incarnation of the stand-up comic. Lone comedians were prized because they worked at the front of the stage, the area between the curtain and the footlights. Called “performing in one,” these acts gave stagehands behind the curtain time to set up for the next act.

Vaudeville was organized like professional baseball. The top tier, the major leagues, was referred to as “big-time vaudeville.” The lower tier was the minor leagues and known as “small-time vaudeville.” For about a decade, the Marx Brothers traveled the circuits of small-time vaudeville.

“Theatrically, we were at the bottom of the social ladder,” Groucho wrote in his memoir. “Five performances a day in a ten-cent vaudeville theater was about as low as you could get. The only things below us were the carnival shows, one-ring circuses, and the crooked medicine hustlers selling fake nostrums on street corners.”

Playing big-time vaudeville meant touring with one of two major theater chains—the Keith-Albee circuit or the Orpheum circuit. Keith-Albee controlled most of the big-time houses east of the Mississippi River while Orpheum presided over the rest of the country and parts of Canada. Through their centralized booking offices, they operated like cartels—protecting their turf, jealously guarding their most profitable performers, and constantly trying to run the competition out of business.

For decades, these two corporations booked thousands of acts into fancy theaters that featured state-of-the-art acoustics. Performers in big-time vaudeville usually performed only twice a day, a matinee and an evening show. Headliners could make up to $2,000 per week, at a time when the average salary of an American worker was less than $3,000 a year.

For every headliner, however, there must have been a thousand aspiring performers who never sniffed big-time vaudeville. Moreover, even big-time stars faced challenging working conditions.

Working Conditions
At the turn of the 20^th century, the goal of every comedian chasing success was to make it up the ladder into big-time vaudeville. But most performers, despite a willingness to grind it out year after year, never got close. A few tasted the big-time, couldn’t sustain it, and were sent back to the minors.

Any glamour that attached to vaudevillians onstage was absent offstage. Vaudeville as a business was established and designed to enrich the circuit owners while remaining affordable to audiences. The inevitable result was that non-star performers were paid and treated poorly. It was an itinerant lifestyle not for the faint of heart.

Here’s how one researcher described working conditions endured by most performers:

Petty theft was a common occurrence backstage and in their cheap boarding houses, so cash and valuables would often disappear. They lived in fear of crossing one of the theater manager’s arbitrary lines, and were frequently exhausted from overnight, third-class train rides from places like Ada, Oklahoma to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to face an identical set of conditions.

Transportation. For most of vaudeville’s history, even big-timers had to travel by train. But according to Fred Allen, their destination towns could seldom be reached by just one railroad. “There never seemed to be a direct way the actor could go from one date to another without changing trains once or twice during the night and spending endless hours at abandoned junctions waiting for connecting trains. Through the years I have spent a hundred nights curled up in dark, freezing railroad stations.”

Harpo Marx concurred: “Looking back, I simply don’t know how we survived it. Those early days on the road were sheer, unmitigated hell.”

Accommodations. While vaudeville performances were welcome in small-town America, the performers themselves were often shunned as low lifes. Most “decent” establishments wouldn’t take in “show folk,” consigning them to vermin-infested boardinghouses.

A typical room in those boardinghouses contained an iron bed, a lumpy mattress, a thin rug, and a bowl and pitcher. Draped over the pitcher would be two tattered face towels and two threadbare bath towels, the supply for the entire stay. “By the end of the week,” Groucho wrote, “the towels would be so dirty, you’d bypass them and fan yourself dry. I think I was in show business ten years before I had a room with a bath.”

Harpo Marx remembered chilly receptions by locals, especially in the Midwest and South: “We had to brazen our way into strange towns, where we knew we had three strikes against us. One: we were stage folks, in a class with gypsies and other vagrants. Two: we were Jewish. Three: we had New York accents.”

Comedian Benny Rubin called some of the places he played in the Deep South “hate towns . . . places where they hated Catholics, Blacks, and Jews. So anybody like that didn’t have a chance.”

Venues. In stark contrast with the plush theaters of big-time vaudeville, small-timers performed their acts in considerably “sketchier” venues. One comic remembered trying to generate laughs in a cramped restaurant below a noisy bowling alley, where “the three-piece orchestra was a piano player, a piano, and a stool.” And unlike those fancy two-a-day vaudevillians, small-timers were contracted for up to six shows a day.

Theater managers. Local operations were handled by individual theater managers. As more than a few performers told it, those managers tended to be petty tyrants who liked to impose draconian rules on them just to see them suffer. Theater managers had complete freedom to fine or fire performers if they stepped out of line, or if they simply didn’t like them. Repeat offenders would be blacklisted, banned from all circuits. Managers also filed reports with the head office detailing how the acts were received by audiences and adding their own editorial comments. Poor report cards could mean a salary reduction or outright dismissal.

Here’s how Groucho captured the power disparity in the manager-performer collaboration:

What Torquemada was to the Spanish Inquisition, the theater manager was to vaudeville. His powers were absolute. If you incurred his displeasure, he could fine or cancel you. “Cancel” being a euphemism for throwing you bodily out of the theater. There was no appeal. He was judge, jury, and prosecuting attorney. Even if you were lucky enough to have a written contract, it meant nothing. He could tear it up and throw it in your face.

Dressing rooms. They were usually cramped, dismal affairs. “To gain access to the dressing rooms of the average vaudeville theater,” Groucho remembered, “you first looked for the dirtiest alley in town. Somewhere down this alley would be the stage door. You would then grope your way down a flight of grimy stairs and enter a dimly lit, damp, and frequently rat-infested cellar, where the dressing rooms were located.”

Censorship. Local theater managers scrutinized and graded each act and sent reports back to the home office in New York City. Starting opening night, a comedian would receive a blue envelope containing a list of any offensive material. If that material wasn’t immediately removed from the act, the comedian would be removed from the show. Performers who used onstage profanity were said to be “working blue.”

Drugs. Given the challenging conditions, including the special kind of loneliness that accompanies life away from home, it’s no surprise that many performers turned to mind-altering substances. According to historian Kliff Nesteroff, “The opiate of the vaudeville people was opium, and morphine was a close second.”

Narcotics use and addiction was so common that vaudeville comedian Lew Kelly became famous for his dope-fiend act. Late in his career he said, “I have been playing the character so long that many think I must have been a dope fiend at some time. I take it as a great compliment.”

Alcohol, of course, was always available, even during Prohibition. Starting in 1919, when the Noble Experiment dropped the curtain on legal alcohol, performers had to scramble to acquire their booze from new, illicit sources. For the alcohol-dependent, traveling the country meant panic if they didn’t have a contact lined up in the next town. “Prohibition posed great problems for the drinking vaudeville actor,” said Fred Allen. “He had to find a bootlegger in each city and take the word of some newly made acquaintance as to the quality of the hooch available. Some of the stagehands were themselves bootleggers and could be counted on for this information.”

Alcohol was the drug of choice for vaudeville patrons as well. It was not uncommon for performers to peer out at an audience of mostly passed-out drunks. Fred Allen remembered playing the Jefferson Theater in Manhattan, where “alcoholics of all sizes and in varying conditions used the theater as a haven from the elements and a slumber sanctuary. At some performances the Jefferson took on the appearance of a flophouse that had put in vaudeville.”

Race. When we use the term “vaudeville,” we refer to a predominantly white institution. Black variety performers were relegated to minstrel shows, medicine shows, tent shows, carnivals, roadhouses, and the circus. Bert Williams and his partner George Walker were among the few Black performers allowed to cross over and perform in mainstream vaudeville.

Though a few other African-American acts (Ernest Hogan, Irving Jones, the Hyers Sisters) played to both white and black audiences, early vaudeville performances for white audiences were limited to one Black act per show.

Faced with crushing racial discrimination on stage and off, some Black promoters like Sherman Dudley started their own touring companies, took on theater ownership, and created Black Vaudeville circuits.

Blackface. Racial and ethnic caricature was prominent in Vaudeville, especially in its early years. One element that didn’t disappear until after World War II was blackface. Everyone from Fred Allen to W.C. Fields to Mae West spent some time on stage smeared in burnt cork. It was often less a matter of racial prejudice than conformity and “giving the public what it wanted.”

Blackface became a craze. “Nearly all the solo acts started to do blackface,” said one promoter. “But it wasn’t like the old-time minstrels who tried to portray a distinctive character. These new minstrels just put on black and talked white. No dialect. But people felt like real actors when they had blackface on. And besides, working in white face demanded a personality, which many of the guys didn’t have.”

Female impersonators. Since the dawn of theater in ancient Greece, men have played women’s parts on the stage. For much of that time, women were banned from performing in public. Even after women on stage became respectable, acts in which men impersonated women remained popular.

Both vaudeville and its more daring cousin burlesque had their share of female impersonators, men who fooled the audience with their feminine clothing, voices, makeup, and mannerisms. The most famous female impersonator in vaudeville was Ray Monde.

Monde began his act as a woman. Near the end, while the audience was applauding, he would take off his wig to show he was a man. Many in the audience were fooled and they reacted with more applause. Monde wasn’t done. As he bowed, he removed his man’s wig and revealed a head of long blond hair. The audience was now thoroughly confused, and even more so when Monde removed the blond hair and became a man again.

The act made an especially good finale before intermission. As the crowd filed out, they left arguing among themselves about whether Monde was male or female.

The hook. For many unfortunate performers, life on stage could be a misery too. The method of using a hook to yank acts from the stage in midperformance seems like the stuff of cartoons, but it was disturbingly common in vaudeville. A showman named Henry Clay Miner created it in the 1880s for his amateur night at Miner’s Bowery Theater. If the act was deemed rotten, a stagehand was cued to remove the performer with a massive hook and a violent tug. Much to Miner’s delight, the audiences loved it and profits soared.

Given the popularity of such cruelty, why stop with the hook? George Burns recalled a theater owner who used an even more humiliating and dangerous instrument—the hoop. “A man with a hoop would sit in the front row during the performance, and if he thought the act was lousy, he’d use the hoop to pull the performer right over the floodlights.”

The next step was to encourage audiences to show their displeasure by pelting performers with all manner of objects. “If an audience didn’t like us, we had no trouble finding out,” said Harpo Marx. “We were pelted with sticks, bricks, spitballs, cigar butts, peach pits, and chewed-up stalks of sugar cane.”

But it was the projectile-potential of produce that really caught on. Turn-of-the-century impresario Oscar Hammerstein came up with the idea of encouraging the hordes to pitch overripe fruits and vegetables at the stage. Tomatoes were a special favorite for their splatter-ability. Promoter Billy Rose seized on the idea. He approved newspaper ads for his theaters that aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator: “Sunday Nite—Amateur Nite. Come and throw vegetables at actors!”

Four Notable Acts

The Three Keatons. Buster Keaton was part of the most controversial act in vaudeville—when he was only five years old. As the curtain rose on the act, billed as “The Three Keatons,” patriarch Joe Keaton was seen focused on a serious task—doing the taxes, say, or fixing a flat—when his tiny son Buster bounded on stage, brimming with frenetic energy. As importunate as a mosquito, a chattering Buster poked, prodded and generally annoyed his father until the old man suddenly flew into a rage. One reviewer called what followed “a mesmerizing session of acrobatic cruelty.”

As Joe Keaton went after the little boy, Mother Keaton played it straight, screaming at her husband to have mercy on the child. When a furious Joe reached little Buster, he picked him up and threw him through the air, slamming him against a backdrop. Then he did it again and again.

It’s a stunt that surely would have killed an ordinary child. But besides his extraordinary physical gifts and pain tolerance, young Buster wore a specially designed outfit with a suitcase handle sewn to the back of his coat. It allowed his father to easily catch, grab, and toss the kid, and presumably offered Buster some protection.

During one performance, Joe misjudged a move and accidentally kicked Buster in the head, knocking him unconscious for 18 hours. For obvious reasons, The Three Keatons caught the attention and disapproval of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The SPCC tried to put them out of business. Joe fought back.

Buster explained: “What most burned up Pop was that there were then thousands of homeless and hungry children of my age abandoned on the streets of New York, selling newspapers, shining shoes. Pop couldn’t understand why the SPCC people didn’t devote all their time, energy, and money to helping them.”

The family spent much of their time and energy fighting their critics, in and out of court. Though the Keatons almost always won the legal battles, much of their earnings went to paying lawyers.

According to Buster, it never should have happened. “The law barred children only from performing on a high wire or trapeze,” he said. “There was not one word that made it illegal for my father to kick me in the face or treat me like a human mop.”

Marx Brothers
The Marx Brothers (usually a trio, although occasionally joined by their brothers Zeppo and Gummo) were children when their mother, Minnie, thrust them onto the stage. Minnie believed her sons had the potential to make a name for themselves—as singers. They began as a group called the Three Nightingales (later the Four Nightingales) whose musical numbers were interspersed with rapid-fire patter.

The singing was iffy at best. Harpo’s voice was so poor that his mother told him to just open his mouth when his brothers were singing. Then a performance in Nacogdoches, Texas, changed everything. In midsong, they were interrupted by shouts from outside. It was a runaway mule, and the audience hurried out to see what was happening. Groucho was angered by the interruption and, when the audience returned, made several snide comments at their expense (“The jackass is the flower of Tex-ass”). Instead of taking offense, the audience laughed. Even Minnie had to concede that the brothers had more potential as comedians than singers.

Many vaudeville comics relied on ethnic stereotypes—characters familiar and appealing to their largely working-class audiences—and the Marxes were no exception. Though Jewish, each brother adopted a recognizable ethnic persona. Groucho played a German, Chico an Italian, and Harpo was vaguely Irish. With quick-witted brothers who were verbal masters of the malapropism and double entendre, Harpo, clad in a curly red-haired wig, went silent, letting his horn (and occasionally his harp) do the talking for him.

In the summer of 1922, facing a lack of bookings in the United States, the brothers took their act to England, where they performed shows in London, Bristol, and Manchester. E. F. Albee, who ran one of the two big-time circuits, required that acts contracted to his theaters get his permission before playing other venues. Because the brothers failed to do that, they were blacklisted upon their return to the United States.

As the vaudeville door closed on the Marx Brothers, another one flew open: motion pictures.

W.C. Fields: Tramp Juggler
Born William Claude Dukenfield in 1880 in Philadelphia, W.C. Fields was wooed by acting at age nine when he saw a juggling act in a vaudeville show. The boy taught himself to juggle, practicing the craft for hours each day and incurring his father’s wrath when he fumbled the fruits and vegetables from his father’s peddling cart.

Inspired by the success of a performer named James Edward Harrigan, who billed himself as “The Original Tramp Juggler,” Fields adopted a similarly scruffy look and entered vaudeville in 1898 as another tramp juggler with a new name: W.C. Fields.

To conceal a mild stutter, Fields did not speak onstage. In 1900, seeking to distinguish himself from the many “tramp” acts in vaudeville, he changed his costume and makeup and began touring as “The Eccentric Juggler.” To set himself apart from the many jugglers of balls, Fields deftly manipulated cigar boxes, hats, and other objects in his act. He was particularly adept at flirting with failure—nearly dropping a ball, for example—then recovering just in time to the delighted gasps of the audience.

But there were many accomplished jugglers performing on stages across America. One of them could supposedly juggle 14 balls while riding a horse, which Fields declared was “nine balls and one horse better than I could do.” And so he was forced to develop a speaking character, one that could get laughs.

He became a headliner in North America and Europe, and in 1903 toured Australia and South Africa. Using the time-tested method of keeping what worked and discarding what didn’t, Fields added muttered patter and sarcastic asides to his routines. According to W. Buchanan-Taylor, a performer who saw Fields’s performance, “W.C. would reprimand a particular ball which had not come to his hand accurately and mutter weird and unintelligible expletives to his cigar when it missed his mouth.”

We will meet W.C. Fields in the next two lessons when we explore humor in radio and the movies.

Will Rogers
Among his many show business achievements, Will Rogers is honored by people who know as the original trailblazer of political humor. Born as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation (now Oklahoma) in 1879, he liked to joke that his ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but rather “met the boat.”

Rogers began his show business career in 1902, when he was hired as “lasso expert” for Texas Jack’s Wild West Show and Dramatic Company. A Native American playing a rope-twirling cowboy, he was billed as the “Cherokee Kid.”

Capitalizing on the larger-than-life mythology of the American frontier, Wild West Shows were circus-inspired performances that competed with vaudeville. They featured the usual western-based stunts: horseback trick riders, sharp shooters, bucking broncos, buffalo racing, cowboy vs. Indian reenactments, and lassoing demonstrations. They also included variety acts: singers, clowns, contortionists, trapeze artists, jugglers, and acrobats. Some of the largest Wild West companies included a traveling zoo.

Although Rogers didn’t speak during his lassoing demonstration, he later gave credit to Texas Jack for teaching him the basics of showmanship—how to capture and hold the attention of an audience, how to build anticipation and produce a satisfying conclusion.

After nine months touring with Texas Jack, Rogers had developed a stage presence and some impressive rope tricks. He quit, bounced around a bit, and eventually landed in New York City, where he persevered until he broke into vaudeville.

At first his act was still categorized as “dumb,” meaning he didn’t speak on stage. But then one day he broke his silence to explain a couple of his rope tricks and found he got laughs. He kept at it. Urban audiences were charmed by his western drawl and self-deprecating wit.

As the years passed, Rogers’s act included less rope-trickery and more comedy-philosophy, much of it political and social criticism:

I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.

We have the best congress that money can buy.

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the entire government working for you.

A simple man may rob from a freight train, but give him a college degree and he’ll steal the whole railroad.

By 1916, Rogers was a featured star in Ziegfeld’s Follies on Broadway, having transformed himself from the “Ropin’ Fool” to the “Talkin’ Fool.” At a special performance, with President Woodrow Wilson in the audience, Rogers improvised a “roast” of presidential policies that had the entire audience in stitches, including the president himself. The performance showcased Rogers’s remarkable ability to deliver witty, off-the-cuff commentary on current events while retaining high likeability. He built the rest of his career around that talent.

Writes historian Wayne Federman: “It’s ironic that this bashful roper, who initially wouldn’t dare speak onstage, transformed himself into a verbal comedy legend, all delivered in his aww-shucks, country-boy, gum-chewing style.”

Over the next 20 years, Will Rogers blossomed into a beloved and revered American folk hero and media superstar. Besides his stage successes, on and off Broadway, he made records, broadcast a weekly radio show, lectured across the country, wrote a popular syndicated newspaper column (later compiled into bestselling books), organized hundreds of benefits, completed three world tours, and starred in more than 70 films.

Then, in one horrific moment, it was all over. On August 15, 1935, Will Rogers died in a plane crash in Alaska. The loss so devastated the country that all federal buildings lowered their flags to half-mast. On the day of his funeral, both NBC and CBS suspended broadcasting, and 12,000 movie theaters nationwide shut down their projectors for “two minutes of silence.”

Burlesque
Burlesque rose to prominence in the 1840s, four decades before vaudeville, and starting in the 1880s, the two forms of entertainment competed for paying customers. While vaudeville performers had to abide by strict speech codes, burlesque comics had greater latitude. The rowdier burlesque humor, considered “low comedy,” targeted working-class audiences, not families.

The common element of all burlesque shows was scantily clad women parading around (“leg shows”). Eventually, burlesque began openly branding itself as an adult alternative to “polite” vaudeville. The Minsky Brothers in New York City put up a huge sign outside their theaters: “Burlesque As You Like It. Not A Family Show.”

Burlesque offered a specific brand of comedy. It was sketch-based, with the comics adopting a particular look: baggy pants, loud ties and hats (think Fozzie Bear). They all learned how to use slapstick, seltzer bottles, and pratfalls to elicit laughs.

Sexual innuendo was more common in burlesque performances. One sketch that played for 50 years featured the following cringe-worthy dialogue:

Straight man: They need a quartet down at the Gaiety Theater. Can you sing?

Comic: Sure. I used to sing in a queer.

Straight man: No, no. You mean a choir.

Comic: It was a queer choir.

Straight man: A queer choir?

Comic: Yes. We weren’t even sure about the man who played the organ.

Comedians who spent some time in burlesque include Red Buttons, Burt Lahr, Red Skelton, Phil Silvers, Zero Mostel, and Abbott & Costello.

Final Curtain
As the 1920s dawned, investors were still bullish on vaudeville. Blind to growing threats on the horizon—radio and talking pictures—and one just below the horizon—the stock market crash of 1929—promoters invested heavily in new ventures and big fancy theaters. They shelled out for ornate lobbies with oil paintings that cost thousands of dollars, rugs that cost thousands more, and dressing rooms with baths that compared to the finest hotels.

As the decade wore on, however, the fancy new theaters had more and more empty seats. As George Burns remembered it, “At the five o’clock show there might be 15 people sitting in a 1200-seat house.”

By 1932 big-time vaudeville was dead except for a handful of big-city venues; small-time vaudeville hung on “here and there” into the early 1950s when TV delivered the fatal blow. One joke that was told right up to the final curtain: “Do motion pictures harm children? They do if their parents are in vaudeville.”

If vaudeville had been given the funeral it deserved, Groucho Marx would have been the ideal choice to deliver the eulogy. Despite the years of hardships he and his brothers endured on one vaudeville circuit or another, he was able to look back on those formative years with some fondness:

There is only one school for entertainers in the world, and that is vaudeville. The reason is that the reaction of an audience in vaudeville is instant. They tell you as soon as you speak a line just how good you are or how bad you are. If you are really good, that’s the only way you will ever know it, for the agent and the booking office will keep it a dark secret from you. The people in the theater not only tell you instantly, but they keep on telling you all through your act, in a kind of free and unrestrained way that teaches you something about the reactions of an audience. That is what the legitimate actor misses.

Aftermath & Analysis

1) Desperate to get on stage, some vaudevillians created acts that demonstrated more imagination than talent. Here are three of them:

Chaz Chase. Billed as “The Eccentric Comedian,” Chaz Chase built his entire vaudeville career on an ability to eat seemingly inedible things, like cardboard, paper flowers, and lit matches, cigars and cigarettes. Although some critics claimed he was hiding the objects in his clothing (lighted matches?), a YouTube video of his performance makes that hard to accept.

Joseph Putjol. Putjol became famous for his ability to pass gas at will, voluminously and melodically. He would fart to music he played on a phonograph. You can also see a short clip of Putjol performing on YouTube.

Helen & Olga Myra. Billed as a “bio-contortionist,” Helen was a ballerina who performed Pavlova’s “Dying Swan” while playing the violin. Her sister Olga played the violin as she performed acrobatic feats.

2) In the early 20^th century, African-Americans challenged the prevailing blackface stereotypes played by white performers by bringing their own authenticity and style to the stage. They created original music, comedy, and dance routines and laid the groundwork for distinctly American cultural phenomena like blues, jazz, ragtime, and tap dance. Black composers wrote many of the songs that were popularized onstage by white singers, helping to pave the way for African-American musical theater.

3) One year before his shocking death, Will Rogers became the first comedian to host the Academy Awards ceremony.

4) If you were famous in the early 20^th century, for whatever reason, chances are good that you appeared on a vaudeville stage at least once. Babe Ruth, for example, performed a musical number that revealed a canyonesque disparity between his talent on a baseball diamond and on a stage. In contrast, Charles Lindbergh, following his 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic that instantly transformed him into the most famous person in the world, was offered $100,000 per week to appear in vaudeville—and turned it down.

Ruminations

1) If you had been forced onto a vaudeville stage, what would have been your act of choice? For some ideas you haven’t considered, check out the PBS documentary on vaudeville.

2) Have you ever seen a memorable stage show that made you laugh out loud?