Taking Burlesque Seriously

Abstract

At the close of the 1869 theatrical season in Boston, William Dean Howells reflected upon the entertainment sensation of the year, an English troupe he described as pretty, very blond, and very unscrupulously clever. Both fascinated and repulsed by the horrible prettiness and infuriate grace of Lydia Thompson's British Blondes, what most disturbed him was their hybrid sexuality. Without trying to conceal the voluptuous curves of their bodies, the Blondes were impersonating men. Not like men, wrote Howells, but unlike women, the British Blondes seemed instead to be creatures of an alien sex, parodying (Allen, pp. 25, 134). Their impertinent humor, irreverent songs, revealing costumes, and grotesque parodies of masculine gender seemed monstrously incongruous to theater critic Richard Grant White as well. In its defiance both of the natural and conventional, he wrote in 1869, burlesque casts down all the gods from their pedestals (pp. 13637). Although most Americans now associate burlesque with striptease and runway shows made famous at the Minsky brothers nightclub in the 1930s, as a genre of American entertainment burlesque has a much longer, more complex, and varied history. The essence of nineteenthand early-twentiethcentury burlesque entertainment was mocking, irreverent humor. Burlesque comedy built upon parodic imitation of literary and theatrical texts and styles (Shakespeare and classical texts were a favorite target), as well as contemporary social, cultural, and political fashions and foibles. In burlesque comedy, or travesty as it was sometimes referred to, established canons and sacred cows were debunked and ridiculed. Low was made high, and high