Humor and Ethnic Stereotypes in Vaudeville and Burlesque

Abstract

The halcyon days of the American vaudeville and burlesque theater, roughly from 1890 through 1910, compose the period in which ethnic humor on stage was most manifest. These decades were also years in which American humor changes significantly, moving away from the familiar literary and journalistic pseudo-folklore, the Yankee and Southwestern wise fools, commonsense philosophers, tricksters and con men, to the more universal little man of the twenties and the modernist and post-modernist comedy which would develop after the golden age (roughly from the end of the first World War to the early 1930s) (see McLean, Jr., chapter 3, Pinsker). The period was also one in which two other genres, film comedy and comic strips, as well as the popular theater, emerged to compete with the published word and to a lesser extent the platform lecture, as the forum for American humor. While it is easy to see the differences in the humor of the nineteenth century with the emerging modern forms, it is important to note similarities and continuities as well and to be reminded that cultural changes take place neither suddenly nor absolutely. All of the familiar characters of earlier American humor can be located throughout twentieth century sources, in all genres, and many important motifs recur as well. In his recent book, American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and 1930's Film Comedy, Mark Winokur presents the interesting argument that American literary comedy was always, in a sense, ethnic, in its contrasting of immigrants to the new land with Europeans and immigrants to the western frontier with more established easterners (23-73, for reference to vaudeville, see esp. 6373). Ethnic humor in the popular theater has a lot in common with the dialect humor of nineteenth century writers, and it reaches forward as well as backward in the literary humor of writers such as Roth, Heller, Malamud, Bellow and Reed, among others, though not always overtly.