The minstrel show had been the predominant form of theatrical variety entertainment for the middle and lower classes from about 1830 to the 1860s. Then the public lost interest in the minstrel craze, but its format was made up of perenially-popular parts. Audiences never tire of the “burlesque.” Broad comic parodies of serious theater (in the dictionary sense, “burlesques”) have been popular for centuries. See the film “Amadeus” for a fine portrayal of a lower-class burlesque, done by one of Mozart’s actor friends as a bawdy parody of his opera “Don Giovanni”. In 1866, as the minstrel show entered serious decline, “The Black Crook” brought the genre’s ribald humor and immodestly-dressed women to Broadway, with five hours of spectacular stage effects and a hundred chorus girls in flesh-colored tights. The success of this frankly stimulating offering was so great that Barnum quickly imported the British burlesque troupe “Lydia Thompson and her Bevy of British Blondes.” Shows like these proliferated, and were warmly received by the press and the male public, but they were too coarse for women and children to attend.
At this point, producers looking to capitalize on the underserved family audience created Vaudeville, advertising it as clean entertainment suitable for the most discriminating genteel audiences. As everyone knows, vaudeville enjoyed immediate and immense success – but more about Vaudeville later.
“Burlesque” was a package of variety entertainment aimed at the lower- and middle-class audience and made up of almost identical components, without the “slaves on the old plantation” theme. These irreverent topical shows made fun of (or “burlesqued”) highbrow entertainments and current events. While vaudeville “cleaned up” musical theater for family audiences, burlesque remained racy of variety fare for patrons who had no objection to stronger stuff. Harking back to the origins of variety entertainment as barroom fare, theatrical burlesque programmed frank songs, coarse humor by baggy-pants comics, variety acts, skimpy-costumed chorus numbers and sometimes a sketch lampooning current politics or news (the genre gets its name from the literary term “burlesque” describing such topical material). Burlesque theaters generally had a staff of regular performers, “house people” who stayed permanently, complementing the name acts who toured together as a troupe for an entire forty-week season at a time. At first, burlesque shows were considered coarse but still suitable for respectable men and women who enjoyed rough humor and the occasional leggy chorine. But by the late 1920s frank sexual content came to define burlesque, coinciding with an up-tick in sexual content in movies and in popular culture as a whole. You’ll hear many stories about the “first striptease,” one story as apocryphal as the next and all sounding like the fanciful plot of the movie The Night They Raided Minsky’s. When producer Billy Minsky introduced striptease acts into his shows in 1908, burlesque reached its penultimate form as steamy, seamy entertainment suitable for men only. The shows became largely striptease with a liberal dose of blue comedy, a kind of racy and explicit forbidden pleasure with which movies and radio couldn’t begin to compete. Minsky even boosted ticket sales by hiring strippers whose acts had been censored in other towns, billing them as “the act that was too hot for Boston [or wherever]“, and added a runway extending into the first rows of seats from center stage (many other houses followed suit).Nonetheless, burlesque was solid entertainment that was thoroughly enjoyed by its audience. Dixie Evans, once billed as “The Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque” and now proprietor of the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, explains the popularity of burlesque: “Every major city in the United States had at least two or three burlesque theaters. Cleveland had five burlesque theaters! You had a lot of working people. Prior to burlesque, they would pay quite a few dollars to go to some big show [with] long, drawn-out plots, and their minds would wander: ‘How we gonna put food on the table for the family, how am I gonna get a job, what am I doing here?’ But for 25¢, there were no plots, there was no storyline, and the working people can relate to that dumb, stupid comic on the stage who was trying to scramble and get by. So that’s why the burlesque theaters flourished, especially during the 30s and the 40s. We did three shows a day. Ten in Norfolk, when the fleet was in.”
Ann Corio, whose record album “How to Strip for your Husband” was a big seller in 1963, explained: “It’s comedy, pretty girls, bubble gum, stepping on toes, the kind of stuff you can leave your brains home for. It’s burlesque.” As much as standard theater histories credit vaudeville as the birthplace and training ground of many famous entertainers, most of the performers cited in thise histories “cut their teeth” in burlesque, where a talented and motivated newcomer could more easily get a start. By the time most performers reached vaudeville, they were already experienced professionals. Once they emerged from their lower-class training ground they looked down on burlesque and saw it as a haven for “washed up” performers, though many a vaudeville veteran hit the burlesque stage during dry spells (under an assumed name, of course.) A performer had to perfect his skills of timing and delivery to be able to please the moody animal called “the audience,” and working your material through several shows a day was the best way to do it.
And burlesque comics originated almost every gag and storyline used in television comedies today. Take comedian Joey Faye, for example. His trademark routines “Niagara Falls” and “Floogle Street” were translated to film word for word by the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello and Lucille Ball. In “Niagara Falls” the straight man meets a down-and-outer whose life has been ruined by an unfaithful wife, and who goes berserk at the mention of Niagara Falls, where he caught her and the man who stole her: “Slooooowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch” he narrates, quickly working himself into a frenzy as he recalls the confrontation and re-enacts his rage on the hapless straight man who is repeatedly tricked into mentioning Niagara Falls and suffering the abuse. The audience roars in rising waves of laughter as they recognize that the straight man has let himself in for another beating as they hear “NIAGARA FALLS! Slooooowly I turned…” again. In “Floogle Street,” the straight is lost in the city, trying to deliver a carton of straw hats to the Susquehanna Hat Company on Floogle Street. Each passerby he asks for directions has a different reason to fly into a rage at the mention of the company or the street, destroying the hats one by one.
The best strippers became stars in a very real sense, and their signature acts became legends … and what acts they were! They live on in memory today as vividly as the acts of the great stars of vaudeville. Strippers may have been at the bottom of the entertainment hierarchy, but many became nationally-known attractions, like Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm, Gypsy Rose Lee and the magnificent “Lady with the Fan,” Sally Rand, whose “do you see anything or don’t you” dance with gigantic fans or balloons kept her working into her seventies. You can see her portrayed very fondly in the movie The Right Stuff, as a special attraction at a huge party thrown for the astronauts at the Cow Palace.Legal crackdowns began in the mid-1920s with the advent of the striptease, and increased with the developing raunchiness of the entertainment. Mayor LaGuardia closed New York’s burlesque houses altogether (for a time) in 1937. By that time, burlesque had become little more than a series of bump-and-grind strip routines interrupted by the occasional half-hearted comic bit. The few remaining talented comics abandoned burlesque. Vaudeville, once the usual place to look for work, was gone. Fortunately, ready work was available in radio, film and television, and the comics took many classic burlesque routines with them. You know their names from those “new” venues: names like Jack Benny, Bert Lahr, Abbott and Costello, Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, Red Buttons, and Phil Silvers.
At the same time, live entertainment of even the crudest sort was becoming increasingly expensive to produce. Several “exploitation” film producers filmed complete burlesque shows in the 1950s, simply shooting the acts from front-row-center or (as in the case of “Varietease”) in cheesecake photographer Irving Klaw’s incredibly cheaply curtained office.
Burlesque breathed its last in the early 1960s, when courts determined that depictions of graphic nudity were not, per se, obscene. The “dirty movie,” once a relatively tame affair presented under the guise of “education about the facts of life” or limited to endless shots of bouncing breasts, was now unleashed to show “pickles and beaver,” eliminating any remaining reason to pay live performers or musicians.
Burlesque took what seemed certain to be its final form in the preserved, sanitized, self-conscious revival seen in Las Vegas revues and in novelty presentations suitable for dinner theaters. Ann Corio’s revival show “This Was Burlesque” ran over 1600 performances on and off-Broadway. After extensive research, Professor Ralph G. Allen identified more than 1,800 basic burlesque comedy sketches that performers had “borrowed” and recycled for decades (you know many of them from TV.) These skits formed the basis for a college revue that eventually grew into Sugar Babies, a 1979 Broadway hit.
But you can’t keep a good genre down, it seems, and dozens of “new burlesque” performers are bringing the art of striptease to modern venues like comedy clubs and cabarets.
(Revised in response to comments – thanks, historians!)
Posted on September 21st, 2007 by Wayne Keyser
Filed under: Burlesque
