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The history of theater has always been checkered at best.
A form of theater existed in Egypt before 4000 B.C. but little else is known about it. Surviving theatrical knowledge begins in 6th Century B.C. Ancient Greece. Although the poet Thespis (from which we get the word 'thespian') was hailed as the world's first true actor, most stage performers were viewed on a par with prostitutes. In Ancient Rome, theater was so disreputable that, by senatorial decree, upper level members of society were forbidden to appear in plays. Actors who gave bad performances could face public floggings and/or exile. One such performer, Pylades, was thrown out of Italy for making an obscene gesture with his middle finger to a heckler. (The extent of my knowledge of Latin as well.)
Being not a historian, I will skip forward a few thousand years. What data I have accumulated has not only come from written sources but oral ones as well. Theater is not dead, as some critics would proclaim. Radio, the cinema and television have simple joined the menagerie. Today, performers bounce from one media to another, going to where the work is and creating quality in all branches of the performing arts.
If you wish more information about theater's earlier times, visit your local library. Skip, however, texts written for grade school to high school levels. They edit out the lewd albeit fascinating tidbits that bring history to life.
The last great era of live American theater was vaudeville in the early part of the 20th Century. Hundreds of vaudeville houses blanketed the nation, bring professional entertainers to most major cities. By today's standards, however, many of its acts were incredibly politically incorrect. Because vaudeville is a major section of this work, I would be remiss in not including criticism along with the accolades.
ETHNIC HUMOR
The most remembered facets of vaudevillian ethnic humor were the Minstrel shows and blackface acts. White men and women blackened their faces, whitened their lips, wore kinky wigs and ridiculed another race. In later vaudeville, Black people themselves donned burnt cork to do similar acts. Black entertainers that did not put on blackface were forced to perform before scenery depicting old plantations or in front of giant watermelons even though such sets had nothing to do with their routines.
How could audiences or Black entertainers tolerate such behavior?
It was a different time. Even though it had its upper crust fans, vaudeville was a working class form of entertainment. The general public was neither as educated nor enlightened as we are today. Plus, 'Negroes' were not the only ones getting razzed. Every ethnic group was mocked. Jewish comedians dressed up as ignorant Germans. Catholics portrayed money grubbing Jews. White gentlemen in tuxedos sang tunes in cheesy Japanese accents while real Japanese crooned cowboy songs. The Irish. The Italians. The American Indians. The East Indians. The Chinese. Everyone ridiculed every ethnic group and religion other than their own. No one was safe.
Much of that has been forgotten because today we do not look at strange beards & European clothing and think, "That comedian is portraying a German immigrant." The public does not relate to those stock characters anymore. But entertainers in blackface? We still recognize those images.
How did performers, mostly comics, get away with such material?
It was a time of segregation, of a supposedly 'separate but equal' system. Black people were normally barred from watching vaudeville shows than were not on the all 'colored' Negro circuit. Those Blacks who did see typical White vaudeville kept their mouths shut. Whites vastly outnumbered them and any objections could have curtailed what few rights Black people had gained. They were a silenced minority.
Because of few or no Blacks in the audience, it was safer for entertainers to play 'Negroes' than any other racial stereotype. Most vaudevillians did not alter their routines from city to city. Two comics playing drunken 'Micks', a hit in one town, would receive a different reaction while performing their act before an Irish audience in another locale. Stories of such performers having to flee through a theater's rear windows to prevent an angry mob from tar and feathering them were not uncommon. Black people then did not have the political clout they do now. If they did, they too would have ridden blackfaced White entertainers out of town on a rail.
Most northern Whites then did not have a clue as to how Black people behaved. Many Whites truly believed that some Blacks pined away for the simpler times when, to quote song lyrics of that day, 'all the darkies' had to do was pick cotton and sing in the fields. The idea that people of different colors could think complicated thoughts like White folks was ludicrous to the Caucasian lower classes. Plus, Whites were fearful that Blacks would take away their jobs. They wanted to see 'Negroes' only in harmless, childlike ways. A Black man with a gun, even if he was faithfully serving in a branch of the American military, scared the holy hell out of many Whites.
So why did Black people put on blackface and prance around on the vaudeville stage?
Mainly for the money. Even though Black performers were segregated into different hotels and rooming houses on the road, even though they earned less money for their acts than their White brethren, entertaining was still better than digging ditches for a living. Black performers on a vaudeville circuit received pay ranging from three to fifty times the weekly salary of Black factory workers.
Vaudeville performers, regardless of their race or religion, were also a democratic lot. If a restaurant served Whites only, a White vaudevillian would fetch carry-out orders for the Black and Asian performers. Vaudeville was a profession based more upon talent than skin tone. Yes, it contained levels of bigotry but to a lesser degree than the bulk of American society.
Finally, some people are born entertainers. Forget skin tones or faiths, social classes or birthplaces. They have to find a stage, any stage, and perform before an audience. That is what and who they are. And they will not be denied.
Blacks, despite those racial insults, were often depicted kinder than other groups. Blackfaced performers created characters that were naive but harmless. Silly but happy. 'Negroes' sang and danced. Even a sophisticated 'colored' con man trying to bilk a 'darkie' stooge was seen as someone to laugh at. Blacks were rarely pictured as sinister villains out to harm or kill others.
What changed the perception of Blacks on stage from stereotypes to real people?
Show Boat.
Jerome Kern wanted audiences cringing at Show Boat's social inequities when it debuted in 1927. That is why he gave a tired, overworked Negro dock worker that song which began about how the "Darkies work while the White men play." The tune was Old Man River, the anthem that not only revealed Blacks as flesh and blood people but which also transformed Broadway and the American musical theater forever. That one showcased showstopper did more for civil rights than an encyclopedia of scholarly text.
All vaudevillians, regardless other pigment, eventually learned that if you are going to mock a race or religion, make fun of your own. In that way, a vulnerable real person radiated through the clown. Those who turned ethnic humor around onto themselves are remembered fondly while those that did not faded away. Ethnic humor is still the backbone of much of today's stand-up comedy. We have just learned to laugh at ourselves.
Comedy and drama periodically require villains. No one is more threatening than those with seemingly omnipotent power over both the audience members and the performers: Authority figures and political enemies.
THE AMERICAN CASTE SYSTEM
An American caste system still thrived in the early 1900's. Social Registers spelled out which individuals, families and clubs were acceptable in fashionable society. Those not listed in those tomes were looked down upon as being unworthy. Most elitists traced their ancestry back to early American settlers. Many possessed 'old money', wealth first accumulated generations before they were born. Recent immigrants and those who had acquired money within their lifetimes were considered beneath proper high society.
The working class was both envious of and angered by the upper class, viewing the rich in two diverse ways:
- As frivolous fools who did not have a care in the world and who spent money like water. They were overeducated simpletons who sponged off of great-grandfather's wealth & did nothing but play or have romantic escapades.
- As greedy, heartless tyrants who gained their wealth from the sweat and blood of the downtrodden lower classes. They were regarded as grasping misers trying to suck up all the capital and power they could, always at the expense of others.
Sadly, the working class was not from the truth. The rich isolated themselves from other levels of society. Only when the wealthy entered a public forum like politics, did they lower themselves to the level of the common man (to gain votes. for example). Industrial working conditions were deplorable, with everything from slavish hours to child labor. Unions were beginning to combat such conditions, sometimes militantly. The general public could not turn to the government for aid. Politics was either bastions of the rich or corrupted by their influence. It was a time of those seeking social reform versus The Powers That Be.
High society became a growing anachronism in a democracy. All men and women were supposedly created equal... but those listed in the Social Register were considered superior. The aloof rich did not mingling with the poor. Even public transportation, such as trains, had separate cars for the upper class. One such example was the 'unsinkable' ship Titanic that had opulent luxury for its first class passengers while the poorer ones were locked below in steerage.
The conceited wealthy, especially those who demanded money from the poor, became prime villains in everything from melodramas to vaudeville skits. Bankers, moneylenders and landlords were especially hated. Those characters were always twirling their mustaches while either evicting hard working people or closing down orphanages. Corporate leaders were also favorite targets. They were ogres who denied raises in salaries, keeping their overworked employees in abject poverty.
The legal system was also theatrically trashed. Policemen were depicted as everything from lecherous fools stealing apples to heartless rule spouters ready to haul the innocent off to jail for the smallest infractions. Judges were simpletons and their courtrooms were containers of chaos. The blameless were in jail and the guilty were in charge of the criminal justice system. Considering that, in reality, the rich were the only ones who could afford lawyers to keep themselves out of prison, the poorer classes had valid reasons for distrust all levels of the law. It is a distrust that exists today.
Doctors and teachers were also ridiculed in vaudeville sketches but usually not to the level of the rich or the law. This group attempted to help the lower classes but often fell short of the mark. They were over-educated numskulls short on common sense. Their hearts might have been in the right places but their brains were not.
Politicians had a dual edge. All were considered crooks but, hopefully, crooks working for their voters' interests. The working class wanted them to be the biggest thieves possible as long as they were thieves working for them.
Naturally, anyone or any group that threatened the United States was prime villain meat. Topical humor was perfect for monologists but poor subject matter for other acts. Most vaudevillians refused to change their routines. Targeting a 'current' villain meant constantly updating material. That sometimes meant throwing out old surefire gags to remain contemporary, something no old vaudevillian would ever do. It was easier to employ generic stereotypical characters with 'insured' laughs rather than constantly experiment on new material that could fail.
That inflexibility helped kill vaudeville. Many performers' acts never changed. Once an audience had seen it, they had seen it, even though decades had passed. In some cases, the audience knew the acts as well as the performers, shouting the routine's lines back at the stage. Movies also killed vaudeville by not only replacing it but by recording performers' acts. Once the acts were film and viewed by the world, the performers had to come up with new material. Unfortunately, many could not. It took them years to perfect their routines and many could not start from scratch again. Only those performers who were adaptable enough to creative new material went on to movies, radio and television.
SEX
Surprisingly, many of the burlesque routines looked down upon by vaudevillians and audiences of the time are more socially acceptable today than they ever were. Burlesque routines were geared to a male audience as a break between half-naked chorus girls and fully naked strippers. Many of their routines consisted of sexual innuendo, lewd dialog and scantily clad bimbos fighting off the advances of much older men who should have known better. Sexual farce that, if read today, seems mild. Television and movies still have those images, although the women portrayed today usually have more brains than their burlesque counterparts. The males, though, are still not too bright. Sex continues to forever cloud men's minds.
Female nudity, or the promise of it, was a staple for everything from burlesque theater to carnival hootchy-kootchy. Scandalous striptease dancing remains. The male animal has not changed and will always pay to watch jiggling female flesh.
CHILDREN & ANIMAL ACTS
One legendary vaudevillian tale involved a man with a dancing duck act. He would place the duck on a small elevated platform, play a harmonica and the duck would dance. The faster the man played, the faster the duck would dance. By the end of the act, the man would be playing wildly and the duck would be hoppimg around just as madly. His act was a hit.
One day at rehearsal in a new theater, the man was seen on the stage crawling around on his hands & knees. The stage manager asked the man what he was doing. The man replied that he was looking for an electrical outlet so he could plug in the hot plate under his duck's platform.There were no animal rights. Coney Island advertised a horse and rider taking a high dive into a tank of water daily. Circus geeks bit off the heads of live chickens. Animals in vaudeville acts were mere props. Human entertainers, when they were fired, created new acts or sought other employment. If an animal was not working out, it was replaced with another and sent to the pound. When some animal acts with pigeons or rabbits fell onto hard times, the human counterparts sometimes slaughtered and ate their stage partners.
Child performers were considered only a notch above animal performers. Almost every bill had one 'kid' act. Children performed with their parents, with other children or as soloists. Old vaudevillians despised them because children could get away with limited talent & experience by just being cute. Many vaudevillians refused to follow a child or animal act because of audience reaction carry-over.
To be free to travel the vaudeville circuits, child performers were pulled out of schools. Their education suffered. Tutors were few. Many parent taught their children the act but little else. Some child performers never learned to read or write. The stage was their school and their only way to earn a living. When they got older, some could not adapt. An adult doing the routine of a child frequently failed. Without even a grade school education, those grown children were ill equipped to handle life in the outside world. What happened to many of them is unknown. They simply fell through the cracks of society, never to resurface again.
Throughout much of vaudeville, there were no child labor laws. Some communities and groups, most notably the Gerry Society, towards the end of vaudeville tried to established such statutes but those laws were often curtailed by phony arrests or fines that no one was expected to be paid. Those rules were generally placed on the books just to placate local religious and/or social groups. Usually, such legalities were ignored. Vaudeville promoters and managers brought money into communities. That meant more revenues for related businesses such as restaurants & hotels to bribes under the table. It was not until years later, during the early days of talking movies, that such laws nationally were given any real teeth.
BAD TASTE
Then there were acts that defy conventional descriptions. By today's standards, they were nothing short of shockingly bad taste.
The most notorious was La Pitomain, a professional flatulator who worked the European vaudeville circuit, mostly in Paris. What does a flatulator do? He farts. La Pitomain lit candles with his farts. He blew out candles with his farts. He blew a horn with his farts. He farted smoke rings and the French national anthem, The Marseillaise. And, as a finale, he sat in a basin half-filled with water and farted out every drop up and over its sides.
There were regurgitators, performers who vomited up object or liquids for a living. One such performer, The Great Hadji Ali, would swallow glasses of water then kerosene. He would vomit up the kerosene, setting fire to a miniature house. Then he would puke up the water with the force of a fire hose, extinguishing the blaze. Old movie footage of his act has to be seen to be disbelieved.
Other performers ate things, like ukuleles or parts of pianos or even light bulbs. Many of those edible props were rigged... but others were not. Some died from splinters and broken glass getting lodged in their intestines. Some performers 'caught' bullets with their teeth, but even guns supposedly loaded with blanks sometimes went fatally awry.
Other fatal acts were copiers of Houdini who weren't quite the escape artists they thought they were. A few who tried to break his records of being buried alive or of holding their breath underwater discovered that, if there was a minor glitch in their act, it would be final curtains for them. Nobody wants to see a dead magician.
With one exception.
An unconfirmed tale tells of a vaudeville magician with a great closing trick. He would get into a coffin. The casket would be raised into the air by ropes. Suddenly, it would appear that something went wrong with the trick. A rope or pulley would jam and the casket would flip over, its lid popping open, to drop its occupant onto the stage below. Only the coffin was now empty. The magician would magically appear in the back of the theater and walk down the main aisle, proving that The Coffin of Death could not hold him.
The magician, however, died one day of natural causes. Since he already had a coffin (and vaudevillians were notoriously cheap), he was to be buried in it. Pallbearers were carrying him to his grave when they heard a click. The bottom of the casket opened and the dead magician fell out. It was fondly remembered as his Final Escape. A vaudeville entertainer to the end... and a day after the end, too. What amazed his fellow vaudevillians was not that it was a trick coffin but how did the dead fellow flick the switch?
POSTSCRIPTS
Back then, people thought nothing of acts that were dangerous to animals. Now we are shocked by such cruelty. Some specialty acts consisted of entertainers using so many lit cigarettes and cigars for stunts that, by the end of the performance, there was a haze drifting across the stage and into the audience. Today, we would consider that to be a violation of our breathable air.
Attitudes and concepts are constantly changing. Much of what happened then would shock us today. We must not ignore or forget what previously occurred. A society cannot advance if it cannot remember where it has been. But to judge vaudevillians by our current standards would be unfair. It is important to remember that those times were different. Correct? No, but different. Besides, what activities do we do today will be considered shocking a hundred years from now? Only time will tell. Let us hope that time will retell of our imperfections with a dash of forgiveness as well.
Why do I use the term 'Black' for those of African-American descent? Because a growing number of Black Americans (especially those who have served in the armed forces) hate the term African-American. They feel that that hyphenated description is not only pretentious and snobbish but is another barrier between them and other races. To be proud of your ancestry is one thing. To hold it over other people's heads like those in the archaic Social Register did is quite another matter. America is their homeland, not Africa. They wish to be known as Black Americans or, better yet, simply as Americans. Segregation is dying off in other parts of American life. Why shouldn't it die in our language as well? How can I argue with logic like that?
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