Vaudeville Quotes

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

Mae West, a famous vaudeville actress, once said, “A man’s kiss is his signature.” I grinned to myself. If that was true, then Ren’s signature was the John Hancock of kisses.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

The world's a stage, & everything else is Vaudeville.

Each couple is its own vaudeville act.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.

His sense of humor is purely cheap vaudeville, yet everyone falls for it.

as a lobbyist he had long ago concluded there was no difference in how Democrats and Republicans conducted the business of government. The game stayed the same: It was always about favors and friends, and who controlled the dough. Party labels were merely a way to keep track of the teams; issues were mostly smoke and vaudeville. Nobody believed in anything except hanging on to power, whatever it took. .....

Stargirl began to improvise. She flung her arms to a make-believe crowd like a celebrity on parade. She waggled her fingers at the stars. She churned her fists like an egg-beater. Every action echoed down the line behind her. The three hops of the bunny became three struts of a vaudeville vamp. Then a penguin waddle. Then tippy-toed priss. Every new move brought new laughter from the line.

I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.

Tilting his head back he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed.

...posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats...

On the Bowery, in the ornate carcass of a formerly grand vaudeville theater, a dance marathon limps along. The contestants, young girls and their fellas, hold one another up, determined to make their mark, to bite back at the dreams sold to them in newspaper advertisements and on the radio. They have sores on their feet but stars in their eyes.

My dad mumbled something unintelligible. "Woo!" Emmett suddenly boomed in his deep bass. "Go Gators!" Jacob and Charlie jumped. The rest of us froze. Charlie recovered, then looked at Emmett over his shoulder. "Florida winning?" "Just scored the first touchdown," Emmett confirmed. He shot a look in my direction, wagging his eyebrows like a villain in vaudeville. "'Bout time somebody scored around here.

nothing that exists can be comic; it was like a floating analogy, almost entirely elusive, with certain aspects of vaudeville.

Listen," Kirillov stopped, gazing before him with fixed, ecstatic eyes. "Listen to a big idea: There was one day on earth, and in the middle of the earth stood three crosses. One on a cross believed so much that he said to another: 'This day you will be with me in paradise.' They day ended, they both died, went, and did not find either paradise or resurrection. What had been said would not prove true. Listen: this man was the highest on all the earth, he constituted what it was to live for. Without this man the whole planet with everything on it is--madness only. There has not been one like Him before or since, not ever, even to the point of miracle. This is the miracle, that there has not been and never will be such a one. And if so, if the laws of nature did not pity even This One, did not pity even their own miracle, but made Him, too, live amidst a lie and die for a lie, then the whole planet is a lie, and stands upon a lie and a stupid mockery. Then the very laws of the planet are a lie and a devil's vaudeville. Why live then, answer me, if you're a man.

Often the things that pop out of my typewriter regale me, especially when I am trying to say something else and in a different way only to have a kind of metamorphosis take place during the act of typing and―­―­whammo!―­―a concept I hadn't counted on is strutting it's vaudeville on the page.

Do not permit yourself to fall in love with the end-game play to the exclusion of entire games. It is well to have the whole story of how it happened; the complete play, not the denouement only. Do not embrace the rag-time and vaudeville of chess.

For inst. when the telephone rings now days I am scared to death that its somebody asking us to go somewheres for dinner or somewheres. Six yrs. ago I was afraid it wasn't. At 29 home was like they say on the vaudeville stage, a place to go when all the other joints was closed up. At 35 its a place you never leave without a loud squawk.

You see, Evey, all the world's a stage. And everything else... ... is vaudeville.

Gussie opened his vaudeville career

Just scored the first touchdown,” Emmett confirmed. He shot a look in my direction, wagging his eyebrows like a villain in vaudeville. “Bout time somebody scored around here.

This urge to be kind to a relative stranger is unfamiliar and disconcerting, as if he's discovered in himself a hunger for raw meat or an enthusiasm for vaudeville.

Inefficiency is imagination. It’s singing in the rain and vaudeville shows and sandcastles and whimsy and falling in love and yearning for our dreams to come true. Inefficiency is the best part of who we are.

Sometimes on flat boring afternoons, he'd squatted on the curb of St. Deval Street and daydreamed silent pearly snowclouds into sifting coldly through the boughs of the dry, dirty trees. Snow falling in August and silvering the glassy pavement, the ghostly flakes icing his hair, coating rooftops, changing the grimy old neighborhood into a hushed frozen white wasteland uninhabited except for himself and a menagerie of wonder-beasts: albino antelopes, and ivory-breasted snowbirds; and occasionally there were humans, such fantastic folk as Mr Mystery, the vaudeville hypnotist, and Lucky Rogers, the movie star, and Madame Veronica, who read fortunes in a Vieux Carré tearoom.

Smiling victoriously, he crushed me against his chest and kissed me again. This time, the kiss was bolder and playful. I ran my hands from his powerful shoulders, up to his neck, and pressed him close to me. When he pulled away, his face brightened with an enthusiastic smile. He scooped me up and spun me around the room, laughing. When I was thoroughly dizzy, he sobered and touched his forehead to mine. Shyly, I reached out to touch his face, exploring the angles of his cheeks and lips with my fingertips. He leaned into my touch like the tiger did. I laughed softly and ran my hands up into his hair, brushing it away from his forehead, loving the silky feel of it. I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t expect a first kiss to be so…life altering. In a few brief moments, the rule book of my universe had been rewritten. Suddenly I was a brand new person. I was as fragile as a newborn, and I worried that the deeper I allowed the relationship to progress, the worse that the deeper I allowed the relationship to progress, the worse it would be if Ren left. What would become of us? There was no way to know, and I realized what a breakable and delicate thing a heart was. No wonder I’d kept mine locked away. He was oblivious to my negative thoughts, and I tried to push them into the back of my mind and enjoy the moment with him. Setting me down, he briefly kissed me again and pressed soft kisses along my hairline and neck. Then, he gathered me into a warm embrace and just held me close. Stroking my hair while caressing my neck, he whispered soft words in his native language. After several moments, he sighed, kissed my cheek, and nudged me toward the bed. “Get some sleep, Kelsey. We both need some.” After one last caress on my cheek with the back of his fingers, he changed into his tiger form and lay down on the mat beside my bed. I climbed into bed, settled under my quilt, and leaned over to stroke his head. Tucking my other arm under my cheek, I softly said, “Goodnight, Ren.” He rubbed his head against my hand, leaned into it, and purred quietly. Then he put his head on his paws and closed his eyes. Mae West, a famous vaudeville actress, once said, “A man’s kiss is his signature.” I grinned to myself. If that was true, then Ren’s signature was the John Hancock of kisses.

Yes, Jeeves?" The man had materialized on the carpet. Absolutely noiseless, as usual. "A note for you, sir." "A note for me, Jeeves?" "A note for you, sir." "From whom, Jeeves?" "From Miss Bassett, sir." "From whom, Jeeves?" "From Miss Bassett, sir." "From Miss Bassett, Jeeves?" "From Miss Bassett, sir." At this point, Aunt Dahlia begged us for heaven's sake to cut out the cross-talk vaudeville stuff. Always willing to oblige, I dismissed Jeeves with a nod, and he flickered for a moment and was gone.

It doesn't matter how cheap and tinny the show is...Soon as the house lights go down and the band starts up, I could cry.

My phone vibrates with a text. Grrrr. Just get home, would you? I don’t need any pics. My poor lonely dick is so hard. That reminds me of old vaudeville jokes. So I reply, How hard is it?

Within the space of a few shows you can hear the band morph between their various identities as savvy arena rockers, intense starship pilots, vaudeville nostalgists, modest American folkies, boundary-dissolving improvisers, roots-conscious spiritualists, and mind-fucking pranksters.

I know vaudeville isn't supposed to be art. It's supposed to be entertainment, which is different. But I think art...I think it's making something from nothing, basically. It's taking something as simple as movement, or a few notes, or steps, or words, and putting them all together so that they're bigger than what they ever could have been separate. They're transformed. And just witnessing that transformation changes you. It reaches into your insides and moves things around. It's magic, of a sort. I never really knew that until I saw your act. But when you walked out on that stage, I knew I was seeing something...different. Something maybe more amazing than what the professor and Silenus had done. You were making something up there, out of just the simplest elements possible, and seeing it changed something in me. I'd never encountered anything like that.

What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or talking about had any real interest for me. Only the object haunted me, the separate, detached, insignificant thing. It might be a part of the human body or a staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I had found in the gutter. Whatever it was it enabled me to open up, to surrender, to attach my signature. To the life about me, to the people who made up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature. I was as definitely outside their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of civilized society. I was filled with a perverse love of the thing-in-itself - not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately passionate hunger, as if in this discarded, worthless thing which everyone ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration.

Quand un bon vin meuble mon estomac Je suis plus savant que Balzac —Plus sage que Pibrac; Mon brass seul faisant l’attaque De la nation Coseaque, La mettroit au sac; De Charon je passerois le lac En dormant dans son bac, J’irois au fier Eac, Sans que mon coeur fit tic ni tac, Premmer du tabac. —French Vaudeville

But because delicatessens are oriented around the consumption of red meat, the iconic Jewish eatery did take on a manly vibe, one that was exploited, as we shall see, by vaudeville routines, films, and TV shows about Jewish men using the delicatessen to shore up their precarious sense of masculinity. The food writer Arthur Schwartz has pointed out that, in Yiddish, the word for “overstuffed” is ongeshtupped; the meat is crammed between the bread in a crude, sensual way that recalls the act of copulation.27 The delicatessen, after all, is a space of carnality, of the pleasures of the “flesh”—the word for meat in Yiddish is fleysh.

Yes, it’s too much to ask,” Alexander said when he returned with no ice (“Tomorrow”) but with an ax, a hammer and nails, a saw, a wood plane, and a kerosene-burning Primus stove. “I didn’t marry you so we could go over there every night.” He laughed. “You invited them inside? That’s very brave of you, my wife. Did you at least make the bed before they came in?” He laughed harder. Tatiana was sitting down on the cool iron hearth, shaking her head. “You’re just impossible.” “I’m impossible? I’m not going there for dinner, forget it. Why don’t you just invite them here afterward then, for the post-dinner vaudeville—” “Vaudeville?” “Never mind.” He dropped all of his goods on the floor in the corner of the cabin. “Invite them here for the entertainment hour. Go ahead. As I make love to you, they can walk around the hearth, clucking to their hearts’ content. Naira will say, ‘Tsk, tsk, tsk. I told her to go with my Vova. I know he could do it better.’ Raisa will want to say, ‘Oh, my, oh, my,’ but she’ll be shaking too much. Dusia will say, ‘Oh, dear Jesus, I prayed to You to spare her from the horrors of the marriage bed!’ And Axinya will say—” “‘Wait till I tell the whole village about his horrors,’” said Tatiana. Alexander laughed and then went to the water to swim.

Corruption hangs in the air around a great talent. Such a gift is unstable by nature, apt to embarrass its handlers. About her there is the whiff of the entertainer. Like vaudeville nipping the heels of grand opera. The maestro smells all this on Kathleen and cools his blood to a temperature undetectable by wild animals.

...Is it an inspiring sight to see a man commit a heroic gesture, and then learn that he goes to vaudeville shows for relaxation? Or see a man who’s painted a magnificent canvas—and learn that he spends his time sleeping with every slut he meets?” “What do you want? Perfection?” “—or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing.

In a strange twist on the concept of flu prevention, ‘vaudeville theaters were only allowed to be half full – members of the audience had to leave the seat on either side empty so that they would not breathe on one another. To further protect themselves many wore surgical masks, so that even when they laughed the sound was muffled.

Devia ter sido um palhaço. Isso ter-me-ia proporcionado o mais vasto campo de expressão. Mas subestimava a profissão. Se me tivesse tornado palhaço, ou até actor de vaudeville, teria sido famoso. As pessoas não me teriam compreendido, mas teriam compreendido que eu não era para ser compreendido. Isso pelo menos teria sido um alívio.

Slapstick was named after the battacio, or 'slap stick,' which made a dramatic popping sound when actors hit one another with it and which was used in the Commedia dell'arte, an Italian stage tradition whose blend of stereotype, sketch and shtick was passed down through circus and pantomime to vaudeville and burlesque and into cinema

Bixiou. “Don’t you think all that is a little too florid? I should tone down the poetry. ‘Imperial idol!’ ‘bent the knee!’ damn it, my dear fellow, writing vaudevilles has ruined your style; you can’t come down to pedestrial prose. I should say, ‘He belonged to the small number of those who.’ Simplify, simplify! the man himself was a simpleton.

Throughout his life, he was the opposite of all show business clichés. His marriage endured: by all accounts, he dearly loved his wife. Words most often used by those who knew him were “decent,” “genial,” “gentle,” and “generous.” He was a constant target of panhandlers and always had a roll of money in his pockets for handouts. He was not, apparently, a chummy man. His few real intimates, old friends like Doc Rockwell and Uncle Jim Harkins, had been with him in vaudeville and appeared occasionally on his show. He and Portland avoided crowds, lived simply in a New York apartment, and never owned a car. “I don’t want to own anything,” he once told a reporter, “that won’t fit in my coffin.

One person's molehill is another person's mountain

How to explain Time and Separateness back to God, Who had never thought of them, Who could let the whole world come to grief in a scattering moment?

At any given moment, four or five separate dialogues were going on across the table, but because people weren't necessarily talking to the person next to them, these dialogues kept intersecting with one another, causing abrupt shifts in the pairings of the speakers, so that everyone seemed to be taking part in all the conversations at the same time, simultaneously chattering away about his or her own life and eavesdropping on everyone else as well. Add to this the frequent interruptions from the children, the coming and goings of the different courses, the pouring of wine, the dropped plates, overturned glasses, and spilled condiments, the dinner began to resemble an elaborate, hastily improvised vaudeville routine.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” wrote the cultural critic Neil Postman, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville, then a nation finds itself at risk: cultural-death is a clear possibility.”72 Con artists and swindlers exploit the frustrations and anger of a betrayed people. They make fantastic promises they never keep. They prey on the vulnerable. They demand godlike worship. They conjure up a world of illusions and fantasy. And then it implodes. The workers and patrons at the Trump Taj Mahal were victimized first. Now it is our turn.

It is as if James Joyce, for his sins, had been forced to grow up in Queens; as if Sam Beckett had been mugged by Godot in a Flushing comfort station; as if Sid Caesar played the part of Moby Dick in a Roman Polanski movie shot underwater in Long Island City; as if Martin Heidegger has gone into vaudeville...Mr. Mano is Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson and Henderson the Rain King.

principal was on the stage singing and leading us in the old song “On the Road to Mandalay.” He would emphasize by winking after each line of the song like some vaudeville singer. Being so tall I stood out and he could look right at me. So every time he would wink I would imitate him and wink back at him. When we got done with the assembly he told me to wait in his office for him. I went and sat there in the chair in front of his desk. He was a pretty big man, my height, only he outweighed me. He walked into the office, came up behind me, and cuffed me hard on the back of the head just the way my father used to whenever I lost one of his beer bets for him. “You fat fuck,” I said and jumped up and decked him. I broke his jaw, and they expelled me permanently on the spot. Naturally,

Entertainment in its broadest sense- popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, pornography, pulp novels-- has not only been a primary mode of expression of LGBT identity, but one of the most effective means of social change. Ironically, the enormous political power of these forms was often understood by the people who wanted to ban them, not by the people who were simply enjoying them.

Living in the midst of a world where there was a plethora of the new I attached myself to the old. In every object there was a minute particle which particularly claimed my attention. I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object. Whatever set the object apart, or made it unserviceable, or gave it a date, attracted and endeared it to me. If this was perverse it was also healthy, considering that I was not destined to belong to this world which was springing up about me. Soon I too would become like these objects which I venerated, a thing apart, a non-useful member of society. I was definitely dated, that was certain. And yet I was able to amuse, to instruct, to nourish. But never to be accepted, in a genuine way. When I wished to, when I had the itch, I could single out any man, in any stratum of society, and make him listen to me. I could hold him spellbound, if I chose, but, like a magician, or a sorcerer, only as long as the spirit was in me. At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable. I should have been a clown; it would have afforded me the widest range of expression. But I underestimated the profession. Had I become a clown, or even a vaudeville entertainer, I would have been famous. People would have appreciated me precisely because they would not have understood; but they would have understood that I was not to be understood. That would have been a relief, to say the least.

Television didn’t attract much public notice until Bell Telephone demonstrated its new system in New York in April 1927. Shown on a screen two inches high by three inches wide—roughly the dimensions of a modern credit card—the broadcast consisted of a brief speech of encouragement from Washington by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, followed by some entertainment from the AT&T studio in Whippany, New Jersey—a vaudeville comic who first told some Irish jokes and then changed into blackface and told some “darky” jokes.

At elegant dinners," wrote the French historian Imbert de Saint-Armand a hundred years later in MARIE ANTOINETTE AND THE DOWNFALL OF ROYALTY (1891), "a little guillotine is brought in with the dessert and takes the place of a sweet dish. A pretty woman places a doll representing some political adversary under the knife; it is decapitated in the neatest possible style, and out of it runs something red that smells good, a liqueur perfumed with ambergris, into which every lady hastens to dip her lace handkerchief. French gaiety would make a vaudeville out of the day of judgement.

My life was such a careful balance, a fragile nexus of work and attention and preparation and planning, like the old vaudeville trick of spinning plates on poles all over a stage, running from one to another to another, not letting any of them fall. I’d been so good at it, the running and the spinning. I’d been getting up before dawn and staying late after school and running and spinning the plates for as long as I could remember. I was getting so tired. I didn’t want to run and spin anymore. But I didn’t know what would happen, I didn’t know who I would be, if one of the plates broke.

LONG, LONG AGO IN the Incubation Period of Man—long before booking agents, five-a-days, theatrical boarding houses, subway circuits, and Variety—when Megatherium roamed the trees, when Broadway was going through its First Glacial Period, and when the first vaudeville show was planned by the first lop-eared, low-browed, hairy impresario, it was decreed: “The acrobat shall be first.” Why the acrobat should be first no one ever explained; but that this was a dubious honor every one on the bill—including the acrobat—realized only too well. For it was recognized even then, in the infancy of Show Business, that the first shall be last in the applause of the audience. And all through the ages, in courts and courtyards and feeble theatres, it was the acrobat—whether he was called buffoon, farceur, merry-andrew, tumbler, mountebank, Harlequin, or punchinello—who was thrown, first among his fellow-mimes, to the lions of entertainment to whet their appetites for the more luscious feasts to come. So that to this day their muscular miracles are performed hard on the overture’s last wall shaking blare, performed with a simple resignation that speaks well for the mildness and resilience of the whole acrobatic tribe.

Ruth said, “It isn’t right to call me or any ballplayer an ingrate because we ask for more money. Sure I want more, all I’m entitled to. The time of a ballplayer is short. He must get his money in a few years or lose out. Listen, a man who works for another man is not going to be paid any more than he’s worth. You can bet on that. A man ought to get all he can earn. A man who knows he’s making money for other people ought to get some of the profit he brings in. Don’t make any difference if it’s baseball or a bank or a vaudeville show. It’s business, I tell you. There ain’t no sentiment to it. Forget that stuff.

Listen: this man was the highest on all the earth, he constituted what it was to live for. Without this man the whole planet with everything on it is--madness only. There has not been one like Him before or since, not ever, even to the point of miracle. This is the miracle, that there has not been and never will be such a one. And if so, if the laws of nature did not pity even This One, did not pity even their own miracle, but made Him, too, live amidst a lie and die for a lie, then the whole planet is a lie, and stands upon a lie and a stupid mockery. Then the very laws of the planet are a lie and a devil's vaudeville. Why live then, answer me, if you're a man.

They had grown out of childhood in the last few days. Christmas as Christmas had passed unnoticed since their father had died on Christmas day. Neeley’s thirteenth birthday had been lost somewhere in those last few days. They came to the brilliantly lighted façade of a big vaudeville house. Since they were reading children and read everything they came across, they stopped and automatically read the list of acts playing that week. Underneath the sixth act, was an announcement in large letters. 'Here next week! Chauncy Osborne, Sweet Singer of Sweet Songs. Don’t miss him!' Sweet Singer... Sweet Singer... Francie had not shed a tear since her father’s death. Neither had Neeley. Now Francie felt that all the tears she had were frozen together in her throat in a solid lump and the lump was growing... growing. She felt that if the lump didn't melt soon and change back into tears, she too would die. She looked at Neeley. Tears were falling out of his eyes. Then her tears came, too. They turned into a dark side street and sat on the edge of the sidewalk with their feet in the gutter. Neeley, though weeping, remembered to spread his handkerchief on the curb so that his new long pants wouldn't get dirty. They sat close together because they were cold and lonesome. They wept long and quietly, sitting there in the cold street. At last, when they could cry no more, they talked.

In Dream Street there are many theatrical hotels, and rooming houses, and restaurants, and speaks, including Good Time Charley's Gingham Shoppe, and in the summer time the characters I mention sit on the stoops or lean against the railings along Dream Street, and the gab you hear sometimes sounds very dreamy indeed. In fact, it sometimes sounds very pipe-dreamy. Many actors, male and female, and especially vaudeville actors, live in the hotels and rooming houses, and vaudeville actors, both male and female, are great hands for sitting around dreaming out loud about how they will practically assassinate the public in the Palace if ever they get a chance. Furthermore, in Dream Street are always many hand-bookies and horse players, who sit on the church steps on the cool side of Dream Street in the summer and dream about big killings on the races, and there are also nearly always many fight managers, and sometimes fighters, hanging out in front of the restaurants, picking their teeth and dreaming about winning championships of the world, although up to this time no champion of the world has yet come out of Dream Street. In this street you see burlesque dolls, and hoofers, and guys who write songs, and saxophone players, and newsboys, and newspaper scribes, and taxi drivers, and blind guys, and midgets, and blondes with Pomeranian pooches, or maybe French poodles, and guys with whiskers, and night-club entertainers, and I do not know what all else. And all of these characters are interesting to look at, and some of them are very interesting to talk to, although if you listen to several I know long enough, you may get the idea that they are somewhat daffy, especially the horse players.

It seems strange that George Burns and Gracie Allen would be discovered, as radio properties, by the British. They were doing a vaudeville tour in England, playing to packed houses everywhere. The British just loved Gracie; her routines became so well known during the six-month trip that the audience would sometimes shout out the punchline in unison. They were aided in this by radio, using the infant medium to promote their stage shows, doing short bits from their act on various BBC stations as they traveled. From the beginning, Gracie had severe mike fright. She never really lost her fear of the microphone, Burns would say in interviews and in his books, but she always coped with it. Returning home, they auditioned for NBC and Grape Nuts in 1930. But the agency executive thought Gracie would be “too squeaky” on the air, and they lost the job. It was an irony: a few years later, the same product would be carrying their radio show, then one of the most successful in the nation.

The cardboard that he stopped at had been written on in February, 1938. The handwriting, in blue-lead pencil, was his brother Seymour's: My twenty-first birthday. Presents, presents, presents. Zooey and the baby, as usual, shopped lower Broadway. They gave me a fine supply of itching powder and a box of three stink bombs. I'm to drop the bombs in the elevator at Columbia or ‘someplace very crowded’ as soon as I get a good chance. Several acts of vaudeville tonight for my entertainment. Les and Bessie did a lovely soft-shoe on sand swiped by Boo Boo from the urn in the lobby. When they were finished, B. and Boo Boo did a pretty funny imitation of them. Les nearly in tears. The baby sang ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir.’ Z. did the Will Mahoney exit Les taught him, ran smack into the bookcase, and was furious. The twins did B.'s and my old Buck & Bubbles imitation. But to perfection. Marvellous. In the middle of it, the doorman called up on the housephone and asked if anybody was dancing up there. A Mr. Seligman, on the fourth—

Paris,” a Seventh Army soldier wrote his wife. “It was wonderful, but I slept on the floor because the bed was just too much like sleeping in butter.” A woman working for the OSS described fleets of vélos, odd contraptions like “canvas-covered bathtubs and drawn or propelled by motorcycles or bicycles,” carting around GIs “who little count the cost in their exuberance at being alive.” The writer Simone de Beauvoir concluded that “the easygoing manner of the young Americans incarnated liberty itself.” Troops packed movie theaters along the Champs-Élysées, and two music halls featured vaudeville shows. Post Number One of the American Legion served hamburgers and bourbon, and bars opened with names intended to entice the homesick, like The Sunny Side of the Street and New York. Army special services organized activities ranging from piano recitals to jitterbug lessons, while distributing thousands of hobby kits for sketching, clay modeling, and leather craft. The Bayeux Tapestry, long tucked away for safekeeping, reemerged in an exhibit at the Louvre, with the segment depicting the Norman defeat of the Anglo-Saxons in 1066 tactfully

Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.

30 de Janeiro Os troncos afundam-se na escadaria no declive sumptuoso da superfície branca. São fantasmas, de costas geladas, vejo o lugar inteiro recolhendo os passos vagarosos da neve. A neve traz sucessivos dedos, figuras maiores como amantes fluídos que se concentram, se metem a caminho, para encontrarem fora dos astros a origem da fábula, da paródia, da tragédia do vaudeville. A neve escuta, e olha, regressa das cadeias abstractas onde também havia corações e noites de Agosto e a infância dos nomes em transformação. Na senda reclusa, o pinheiro argênteo feneceu. Dois homens hão-de chegar para cortá-lo. Desistiu, pensei. Cansou, atalhei remediando. Seria nas primeiras névoas de Novembro, foi nas branduras de Outubro. O pinheiro tornou-se num ramo de cabelos sem odor, irrompido de intrépida mudez. Mas agora, tão cândido por entre a cerração, grito de alvura, à despedida, sem nada já saber do apelo e da velocidade dos minutos, ainda os membros rendidos para o carambelo, asas púrpura de um cardeal a entrarem-lhe no corpo, ainda um pintarroxo a ver-se nos seus galhos, como em alcácer, como obra-prima no sítio de nascer. É meio-dia, bateu meio-dia no velho relógio sobre o jardim dos Prosoros. À distância, o sonho, com Moscow e a estonteada floresta passam, passa o limite lôbrego do rio. Abalada e giratória a luz vinda de todos os lados, a luz acordará Nicolai Lvovitch Tusenbach: «Uma árvore secou, mas eis que balança, a par das outras, tocadas pela brisa. Isto me diz que farei parte da vida mesmo depois de morrer»[1]. O tempo caminhando, a flecha do tempo a consumar o fogo e a rebentar as trevas, tudo é terrível de ambíguo enojo, vamos decerto arder depois de florirmos íngremes de mensagens, voar na planície ignota, mas não seremos esquecidos, Olga Prosorov, o pintarroxo além, como em alcácer, a nossa ressurreição, vê.

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief for suffering nor for well-being either. I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the "Palace of Crystal" it is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a "palace of crystal" if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.

And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that math- ematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacri ces his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to nd it, dreads, I assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be noth- ing for him to look for. When workmen have nished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station—and there is oc- cupation for a week. But where can man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is a er all, something insu erable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo bar- ring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes ve is sometimes a very charming thing too. And why are you so rmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive—in other words, only what is conducive to welfare—is for the advantage of man? Notes from the Underground Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of su ering? Perhaps su ering is just as great a bene t to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraor- dinarily, passionately, in love with su ering, and that is a fact. ere is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief for su ering nor for well-being either. I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being guaran- teed to me when necessary. Su ering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the ‘Palace of Crystal’ it is unthinkable; su ering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a ‘palace of crystal’ if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I think man will never renounce real su ering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, su ering is the sole origin of consciousness. ough I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the great- est misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for in- stance, is in nitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing le to do or to understand. ere will be nothing le but to bottle up your ve senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least og yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.

She had an old friend from the vaudeville days named Buck Mack who lived with her. Buck had been part of a vaudeville team called Miller & Mack and had been an extra in Citizen Kane. In modern terms, he was a personal assistant: he ran the house, kept everything running smoothly, and watched over her. At first, Buck regarded me as an interloper, but it wasn't long before he saw that Barbara and I genuinely loved each other, and he and I became good friends. Because of the age difference, neither of us wanted to have our relationship in the papers, and with the help of Helen Ferguson, her publicist and one of her best friends, we kept it quiet. There were only a few people who knew about us. Nancy Sinatra Sr. was one of them, because she and Barbara were close friends. I didn't tell anybody at Fox about our affair, although Harry Brand might have known, if only because Harry knew everything. Likewise, I always assumed that Darryl Zanuck knew, although he never said a word about it to me. That might have been because Darryl and Barbara had something of a history, a bad one: Barbara told me that Darryl had chased her around his office years earlier, and I got the distinct impression that she hadn't appreciated the exercise.

There is a tendency today to dismiss vaudeville comedy as unsophisticated and even simplistic. Burns himself often apologized when he quoted verbatim from old routines: “This doesn’t sound like much now” was usually the tone. But those fascinated by the history of show business cannot but be entertained. Gracie’s singing in the shows of the ’30s adds an element totally missing from the later run. In the sitcom years it all changed: the lines were perhaps funnier, but the comedy was somehow more predictable.

The troupe also made a 20,000–mile trip into the European war. Hope was the first American entertainer to perform in Sicily. He did a show at Messina just after the enemy had fled the town and was still bombarding the area with its artillery. By the end of the war, it was estimated that Hope had appeared at virtually every camp, naval base, and hospital in the country. He had made half a dozen trips overseas, including a tour of the South Pacific in 1944 that was highlighted by a crash landing in Australia. With him then was the same crew that had gone to Italy the year before: Langford, Colonna, dancer Patty Thomas, guitarist Tony Romano, and an old vaudeville pal, Barney Dean. Newsweek called it “the biggest entertainment giveaway in history,” a pace that no one in show business has ever equaled. “It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective,” novelist John Steinbeck said of Hope. For his service to the country, Hope was given more than 100 awards and citations and two special Oscars. He was voted a place in the Smithsonian’s Living Hall of Fame.

Life as a retiree took some adjustment. My first trip through self-checkout at the grocery store had all the makings of vaudeville comedy, and the short-term protective-detail officer assigned to me seemed quite amused.

--Birthday Star Atlas-- "Wildest dream, Miss Emily, Then the coldly dawning suspicion— Always at the loss—come day Large black birds overtaking men who sleep in ditches. A whiff of winter in the air. Sovereign blue, Blue that stands for intellectual clarity Over a street deserted except for a far off dog, A police car, a light at the vanishing point For the children to solve on the blackboard today— Blind children at the school you and I know about. Their gray nightgowns creased by the north wind; Their fingernails bitten from time immemorial. We're in a long line outside a dead letter office. We're dustmice under a conjugal bed carved with exotic fishes and monkeys. We're in a slow drifting coalbarge huddled around the television set Which has a wire coat-hanger for an antenna. A quick view (by satellite) of the polar regions Maternally tucked in for the long night. Then some sort of interference—parallel lines Like the ivory-boned needles of your grandmother knitting our fates together. All things ambigious and lovely in their ambiguity, Like the nebulae in my new star atlas— Pale ovals where the ancestral portraits have been taken down. The gods with their goatees and their faint smiles In company of their bombshell spouses, Naked and statuesque as if entering a death camp. They smile, too, stroke the Triton wrapped around the mantle clock When they are not showing the whites of their eyes in theatrical ecstasy. Nostalgias for the theological vaudeville. A false springtime cleverly painted on cardboard For the couple in the last row to sigh over While holding hands which unknown to them Flutter like bird-shaped scissors . . . Emily, the birthday atlas! I kept turning its pages awed And delighted by the size of the unimaginable; The great nowhere, the everlasting nothing— Pure and serene doggedness For the hell of it—and love, Our nightly stroll the color of silence and time.

He was the first of the top stars of vaudeville and burlesque to also reach the top in radio. Almost a full year ahead of Al Jolson, Ed Wynn, Fred Allen, and Jack Benny, three years ahead of Bing Crosby, seven years before Bob Hope: Eddie Cantor trailed only Rudy Vallee, but Vallee was cut from a different log.

His wit surfaced early: once, reviewing a vaudeville act, he noted that the performer could not be heard beyond the third row and advised patrons to request seats at least four rows back.

Punk nostalgia, on the other hand, is a grotesque oxymoron. What can it mean to pine for a time when you were young and nihilistic? To look back twenty years to when you believed there was no future?

Most of the theaters in Jersey City and the surrounding area have been closed, demolished, renovated or restored, but nothing remained the same. The Stanley Theatre still stands in Journal Square, completely restored as a Jehovah’s Witnesses Assembly Hall. Originally built as a vaudeville and movie theater, having 4,300 seats, it opened on March 22, 1928 as the second largest theater in the United States. With only Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan across the Hudson River being larger, many celebrities attended the gala occasion. The well liked but notorious Mayor Hague was present to cut the ribbon. Famous and not-so-famous headline acts performed here, including the Three Stooges, Jimmy Durante, Tony Bennett and Janis Joplin. It was here at the Stanley Theatre that Frank Sinatra was inspired to become a professional performer. Being part of the audience, he watched Bing Crosby doing a Christmas performance. By the time the show was over, Sinatra had decided on the path he would follow. In 1933 Frank’s mother got him together with a group called the “Three Flashes.” They changed their name to the “Hoboken Four” and won first prize performing on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour show. Frank worked locally until June of 1939, when Harry James hired him for a one-year contract, paying only $75 a week. That December, Sinatra joined Tommy Dorsey’s band as a replacement vocalist for Jack Leonard, and the rest is history!

And all this terrible change had come about because he had ceased to believe himself and had taken to believing others. This he had done because it was too difficult to live believing one's self; believing one's self, one had to decide every question not in favour of one's own animal life, which is always seeking for easy gratifications, but almost in every case against it. Believing others there was nothing to decide; everything had been decided already, and decided always in favour of the animal I and against the spiritual. Nor was this all. Believing in his own self he was always exposing himself to the censure of those around him; believing others he had their approval. So, when Nekhludoff had talked of the serious matters of life, of God, truth, riches, and poverty, all round him thought it out of place and even rather funny, and his mother and aunts called him, with kindly irony, notre cher philosophe. But when he read novels, told improper anecdotes, went to see funny vaudevilles in the French theatre and gaily repeated the jokes, everybody admired and encouraged him.

Try describing a few of the most wildly successful pop albums of the twentieth century without mentioning the artist and title. A concept rock album about a fictional Edwardian military band, featuring musical styles borrowed from Indian classical music, vaudeville, and musique concrete, its sleeve design including images of Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Monroe, Carl Gustav Jung, Sir Robert Peel, Marlene Dietrich, and Aleister Crowley? That’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, one of the biggest selling records of all time. How about a record exploring the perception of time, mental illness, and alterity? Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which has to date sold around 45 million copies worldwide. Ask any of those 45 million who bought a copy of The Dark Side of the Moon if they thought themselves pretentious for listening to an album described by one of the band members as “an expression of political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy,” and the answer would almost certainly be no.

banjo. A plucked, fretted lute where a thin skin diaphragm is stretched over a circular metal frame amplifying the sound of the strings. The instrument is believed to have evolved from various African and African-American prototypes. Four- and 5-stringed versions of the banjo are popular, each associated with specific music genres; the 5-stringed banjo, plucked and strummed with the fingers, is associated with Appalachian, old-time and bluegrass music, while the four-stringed versions (both the “plectrum” banjo, which is an identical 22-fret banjo, just like the 5-string instrument but without the fifth string and played with a plectrum, and the tenor banjo which has fewer frets [17 or 19], a shorter neck, is tuned in fifths and is played with a plectrum) is associated with vaudeville, Dixieland jazz, ragtime and swing, as well as Irish folk and traditional music. The first Irish banjo player to record commercially was James Wheeler, in the U.S. in 1916, for the Columbia label; as part of The Flanagan Brothers duo, Mick Flanagan recorded during the 1920s and 1930s as did others in the various dance bands popular in the U.S. at the time. Neil Nolan, a Boston-based banjo player originally from Prince Edward Island, recorded with Dan Sullivan’s Shamrock Band; the collaboration with Sullivan led to him also being included in the line-up for the Caledonia and Columbia Scotch Bands, alongside Cape Breton fiddlers; these were recorded for 78s in 1928. In the 1930s The Inverness Serenaders also included a banjo player (Paul Aucoin). While the instrument was not widely used in Cape Breton, a few notable players were Packie Haley and Nellie Coakley, who were involved in the Northside Irish tradition of the 1920s and 1930s; Ed MacGillivray played banjo with Tena Campbell; and the Iona area had some banjo players, such as the “Lighthouse” MacLeans. The banjo was well known in Cape Breton’s old-time tradition, especially in the 1960s, but was not really introduced to the Cape Breton fiddle scene until the 1970s when Paul Cranford, a 6-string banjo player, arrived from Toronto. He has since replaced the banjo with fiddle. A few fiddlers have dabbled with the instrument but it has had no major presence within the tradition.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces two historical trajectories for the use of the term "cross-talk" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One derives from theatrical stagecraft. The earliest example cited by the OED is a reference in 1909 to a "carefully rehearsed 'cross-talk' dialogue between two knock-about artistes of the Variety firmament". "Cross-talk" of this kind has roots in the nineteenth-century minstrel show olio, which featured a "cross-fire" passage in which an interlocutor, placed centermost in a line of blackface performers, served as the straight man for a rapidly paced series of jokes delivered by the "end man". The OED flags this earlier usage when explaining the related term, "cross-talker", citing a 1907 reference to "those pioneer cross-talkers, the Christy Minstrels". A common term for a particular kind of two-person comic routine (or "two act") by vaudeville performers in the early twentieth century, "cross-talk" also survives in critical commentary on later theatrical forms influenced by vaudeville or music hall traditions, as in references to the "cross-talk" in Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; cultural-death is a clear possibility.

At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable. I should have been a clown; it would have afforded me the widest range of expression. But I underestimated the profession. Had I become a clown, or even a vaudeville entertainer, I would have been famous. People would have appreciated me precisely because they would not have understood; but they would have understood that I was not to be understood. That would have been a relief, to say the least.

Rose’s dreams are primarily visions of a personal future, but they are linked to a social vision and to a larger mythos of America by an offhand remark Herbie makes. He tells Rose that when he first saw her, she “looked like a pioneer woman without a frontier.”11 The frontier thesis, as articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner, is a particular manifestation of the American Dream in which the continual movement west in the nineteenth century was a means both of personal advancement (owning land, expanding business, starting over, striking it rich) and of societal evolution (claiming territory, controlling it, exploiting it—all justified and mandated by the guiding master narrative of Manifest Destiny). But by the 1920s, when pioneer woman Rose and her brood set out in pursuit of her dream, there is no more frontier—the West Coast, where the action of the play’s first scenes takes place, is settled. It seems significant that Rose’s father worked for the railroad, that key player in the expansion westward, but is now retired.12 No longer able to head west toward a frontier, Rose loops back into already settled America, Manifest Destiny’s straight, east-to-west line now giving way to a circle, the vaudeville circuit. Gypsy makes use of dreams in multiple senses to articulate a vision of an American society folding back on itself entropically and becoming an image—a dream—of its own myths.

It was not always possible to take that war seriously. In the first place I could not understand why we, the French, and the English were fighting the Germans and the Austrians. Being in vaudeville all of my life had made me international-minded. I had met too many kindly German performers—singers and acrobats and musicians—to believe they could be as evil as they were being portrayed in our newspapers. Having known Germans, Japanese jugglers, Chinese magicians, Italian tenors, Swiss yodelers and bell-ringers, Irish, Jewish, and Dutch comedians, British dancers, and whirling dervishes from India, I believed people from everywhere in the world were about the same. Not as individuals, of course, but taken as a group.

Julius, who had a sour, bitter nature, became Groucho. (He was also the quartet’s treasurer, storing their wages in what vaudeville actors called a “grouch bag.”) Adolph, who played the harp, naturally became Harpo. Leonard the pathological womanizer Fisher dubbed Chico, pronounced “Chick-o.” Milton, so the story goes, became Gummo because, as a hypochondriac, he put on waterproof sneakers, known as “gumshoes,” at the first sign of rain. Their

in Banjo on My Knee (December 11, 1936). He plays Joel McCrea’s father, a wizened old river denizen and musician who goes off in search of his son, who is himself looking for his estranged wife (Barbara Stanwyck). Brennan dominates scene after scene. He becomes iconic, the very spirit of the fiercely independent and rugged river people. William Faulkner was assigned this picture, and though he was taken off it early, the spirit of the novelist’s country people seems to suffuse Brennan’s performance. He plays a character thirty years older than his actual age—not through makeup or mannerisms, so much as with his reedy voice, semi-toothless grin, and adroitly mussed and thinning hair, all of which projects an age-old and indomitable presence. When Brennan gets to Memphis, just north of Faulkner’s Jefferson, Mississippi, he becomes a hit performer after a club owner discovers him. Brennan’s performance on banjo, harmonica, drums, and various other instruments—while also singing the “Saint Louis Blues”—is pure vaudeville, which is to say, pure Walter Brennan. And it’s worth noting that the scene is also a ruse, since Brennan played no instruments; six musicians actually produced the sound that seems to be coming out of his nimble fingers.

In a letter dated May 30, 1937, Arthur McNamara, a friend from Brennan’s youth, recalled what a versatile and agile artist Walter already was in his early twenties, “where [Brennan] did a quick change from black face to that English dialect part.” Those were happy days, spent performing in the St. John’s Temperance Minstrels when he was not cavorting on the beach. Walter appears, tall and thin, as the centerpiece in a photograph taken in 1916 on the “Fishies” beach, with five pals forming a human chain by their hands on one another’s shoulders. They all have their left feet thrust out, with their toes sticking up in a chorus line of youth. Walter continued playing “oldsters” on stage. It was the kind of employment he enjoyed, but he wanted to make it pay. “I was never really stage-struck,” he later insisted. “Acting has always been a business with me, something to make a living by.” But in another mood, he admitted that doing comedy and vaudeville “awakened the ham in me.

Will" Rogers, known as "Oklahoma's Favorite Son,” was born on November 4, 1879, in what was then considered Indian Territory. His career included being a cowboy, writer, vaudeville performer, movie star and political wit. He poked fun at politicians, government programs, gangsters and current events, in a home spun and folksy way, making him one of the most idolized people in America. He became the highest paid Hollywood movie star at the time. Will Rogers died on August 15, 1935 with his friend and pilot Wiley Post, when their small airplane crashed in Alaska. He once said that he wanted his tombstone to read "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn’t like.

García Lorca: El teatro es uno de los medios más expresivos, más útiles para edificar un país, el barómetro que registra su grandeza o su declive. Un teatro sensible y bien orientado en todos sus niveles, de la tragedia al vaudeville, puede transformar en algunos años la sensibilidad de un pueblo. Mientras que un teatro donde el zueco sustituya a las alas puede adormecer una nación entera. El teatro es una escuela de lágrimas y de risa; una tribuna abierta donde se puede defender la moral y hacer permanentes las eternas leyes del corazón y los sentimientos del hombre.

Charlie touched her face gently with long, tanned fingers. “Sometimes I don’t know half of what you say, but I’m damn glad I get to hear it.” “I bet you say that to all the mortals,” she joked, then winced as the pain shot through her again. “You’ve been hurt,” he said, as if noticing for the first time all the blood and gore and exposed body goo. “Yeah, but it only hurts when I laugh.” “Then don’t laugh,” he murmured, finishing the old routine as if he’d been born into Vaudeville. His hands gently probed the edges of the gash.

long before reality TV and Facebook or Instagram — media analyst Neil Postman ominously warned, “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; [and] culture-death is a clear possibility.

I slam the car door behind me and march to the side entrance of the McDonald’s. The glass door opens more easily than I expect, and the handle hits the brick wall, bouncing the door back into me and pushing me inside like I’m in some sort of vaudeville act. Hollis watches the whole embarrassing scene from the car, his eyebrows raised in what could be either confusion or amusement.

Listen: this man was the highest on all the earth, he constituted what it was to live for. Without this man the whole planet with everything on it is—madness only. There has not been one like Him before or since, not ever, even to the point of miracle. This is the miracle, that there has not been and never will be such a one. And if so, if the laws of nature did not pity even This One, did not pity even their own miracle, but made Him, too, live amidst a lie and die for a lie, then the whole planet is a lie, and stands upon a lie and a stupid mockery. Then the very laws of the planet are a lie and a devil’s vaudeville. Why live then, answer me, if you’re a man.

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive—in other words, only what is conducive to welfare—is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief for suffering nor for well-being either. I am standing for … my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the “Palace of Crystal” it is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a “palace of crystal” if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

They've forgotten the drama of it at all. You see, they abandoned their scripts when the world withered in the glare of the nuclear footlights. [...] The world's a stage. And everything else... is vaudeville.

When a population is distracted by trivia,” wrote Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk. Culture death is a real possibility.

The inside of my skull is more like a wall upon which decades of posters have been plastered - for circuses, for trials, for vaudevilles and public exorcisms - their images (some garish, some spare) pasted on top of one another. In places, the more recent additions have been torn and gouged away, revealing glimpses of events that have long since passed from view, but whose fragments are here patched with more modern entertainments, creating a sum far weirder than its parts. in others, an image has gathered echoes, and is now surrounded by bizarre puns and riffs upon itself.

when I first started to play all the vaudeville theaters. Terrible theaters. I played small towns. One town was so small the local hooker was a virgin.

En esos veinte años desde 1885 hasta 1905 y saltando por tres continentes, una pequeñísima anécdota de la vida portuaria japonesa se convirtió, en diferentes manos, en nouvelle francesa, opereta europea, cuento norteamericano, vaudeville atlántico y, por fin, gran ópera italiana. En ese itinerario, el personaje fue cambiando diametralmente de signo, desde su hierático materialismo inicial (símbolo del traicionero Oriente a los ojos occidentales) al lírico romanticismo que la convirtió en heroína por excelencia del rubro inmolación por amor.

The situation was rather like that of the mid-twentieth century, when the old vaudeville comedians – with their distinctive repertoire of hand-me-down material culled from many years of touring music halls – found themselves displaced by the university-educated satirists of the television age who wrote their own fresh material every week.

The movie may be slapstick, but it is not slapdash. It has been conceived and completed as a coherent whole, done in luminously perfect black and white. Everything, most particularly the music, is poignantly faithful to the spirit of old times…. There are Vaudeville jokes that may well be older than Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley herself…but they are spaced along a carefully developed story line which is executed by a team of hugely talented comic actors rather than one-lining comics.

Paul “Mousie” Garner, a first-rate talent, was often referred to as the “grand old man of vaudeville”. As the last surviving Healy stooge, he died at the ripe of old age of 95 August 8, 2004 after a movie career that began in 1929. His last on-screen appearance in 2008 was yet another testament to his talent and longevity in the business.