Monday, September 17, 2007

IT MAY BE A KIND OF LUNCH-COUNTER ART, BUT THEN ART IS SO VAGUE AND LUNCH IS SO REAL: Last night, The Daily Show won its fifth consecutive Emmy for "Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series." If you look back over the list of previous winners for that category, you'll see that there actually hasn't been much "variety" over the past couple of decades, which have been dominated by late-night comedy shows. But as a recent article in Variety pointed out, that category used to belong to true "variety programs," from Your Show of Shows to Laugh-In to The Carol Burnett Show. And where did those variety shows come from? In large part, from vaudeville.

Vaudeville emerged in the late 19th century, growing out of several different sources: the "olio" segment of minstrel shows, the multiple acts of the circus, the rapid-fire musical/comedy/dance routines of concert saloons and burlesque. A key figure in American vaudeville was Tony Pastor, whose New York theatres offered more family-friendly "variety shows" during the 1880s and 1890s. But the real vaudeville business didn't really take off until Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward F. Albee (grandfather of the playwright) established a whole circuit of cheap vaudeville theatres that promised continuous, wholesome, entertaining shows for all classes of patrons. The Keith-Albee "Sunday School" circuit -- so-called for its strict regulation of both performers' routines and audience members' behavior -- quickly became the industry standard, and vaudeville took its place as the leading form of stage entertainment for the next several decades. Observers hailed vaudeville as a quintessentially American format; as Edwin Milton Royle put it in the statement quoted in the post title, it was a "lunch-counter art," a product of "the era of the department store and the short story."

Conveniently, motion pictures arrived right around this time, so we actually have some film records of early vaudeville performances. The variety is quite remarkable: animal acts, acrobats, dramatic sketches, dancers, strongmen, escape artists, and especially comedians. As producers liked to say, vaudeville had "something for everybody," and if you didn't like one act, you only had to wait a few minutes for the next one to come along.

Yet while film did provide a way to record vaudeville, the movies also eventually challenged vaudeville's pop-culture supremacy, as would radio and television in their time. Some performers made the transition to new media, as did the variety format, but over the past generation or so, vaudeville has largely disappeared. Or has it? Are there any elements of today's popular culture that seem indebted to vaudeville? Do you see any chance for the variety format making a return to pop-culture prominence?

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