November 3, 2022 • 51 mins
In today's episode, you will learn everything you ever wanted to know about vaudeville, whether you like it or not.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
chuckles Clark, there's Chuck Josh's chuckles. Bryant. Yeah, that would
have been way better. And there's Jerry just Jerry rolling
(00:22):
hanging out too, and that makes this stuff you should
Know about Vaudeville. Uh, my favorite day of the year
is today, Uh, Vaudeville Day. No, I mean, you can
never tell when it's gonna happen, and it will get
hot again. But it's that first whiff of fall. Oh,
I love that so much. It's so nice, isn't it.
(00:43):
It's one o'clock in Atlanta and it's seventy three degrees humidity,
which is for Atlanta that means zero humidity. Yeah, exactly,
a little cool breeze blowing. Yeah, it's beautiful out Those
leads are gonna start turning any second. No, we'll get
hot as hades again before October. It just does Yeah,
(01:04):
it does that, like it makes sure it's nice and
balmy and muggy on Thanksgiving for some reason. And then
in the winter it'll start to get nice, like you're like, okay,
spring is here, and then bam, they dumped you with
the only snowfall of the year in mid February. But
is an odd place at least for this one day
we get a little a little whiff of fall, a
(01:26):
little whiff of football in the air. Yeah, the stank
of football is in the air. So we're not talking
about football, although I'm sure somebody did a jokey football
routine at some point in the history of vaudeville, which
is what we're talking about. We're talking about vaudeville. Like
I just said, yeah, and this was an idea by
(01:49):
the very guy who wrote it for us, or old
pal Dave Ruse. He said, uh. He got very aggressive
and said, hey, Chuck, since it's your turn to pick one.
You know this thing on vaudeville or saw something on vaudeville.
It sounded interesting, And I said, all right, smarty pants,
good do it. He said, oh, you want me do it?
(02:10):
Huh huh. Very. I'm surprised we haven't done this before though,
because it's really cool and kind of I think it's
appropriate that it's uh, sort of nearby our sitcoms too,
for right, because this was like this was it, this
was TV baby before there was TV. Yeah, and there's
before we get started. I'm hoping you can help me
(02:32):
figure this out. But we have definitely talked about the
vaudeville circuit at length in another episode, and it's been
driving me bananas because I cannot think of what the
episode was. Was it freak Shows? No, I think it
was more recent than that, within the last year or
two it was. I don't think it was freak shows, man,
(02:55):
I really don't. But I looked. I was like, wait
a minute, have we done Vaudeville? But warm we definitely
have not, because we talked about the circuit on another
episode exactly. Yeah, that was so we talked about like
the Poconos, the borsched Belt and all that. Yeah. I
don't remember what we would have been talking. I don't
think it had anything to do with desert survival. Luckily,
(03:16):
we have a thousand people that listen to our show
every week, at the very least eight hundred. Uh. Yeah,
it's it's very familiar to me. I don't I don't
know unless we did. Boud Villain just spaced both of
us and didn't title it appropriately. We titled a podcast
to remember, so we are talking vaud Villain. I think
(03:38):
it's one of those things where even if you're gen Z,
even if you're a boomer, it doesn't matter. Everybody's at
least somewhat familiar cognizant that Vaudeville existed at some time
in the past and had to do with um jokes,
There were yucks involved. Um, it happened on stage. It
was deeply racist in a lot of places, and for
(04:00):
a lot of people that's like the sum total of
what they understand about Vaudeville. But it is not h
an overstatement to say that Vaudeville basically gave birth to
every form of entertainment that we know and love today.
It was a strange midwife between the theater and mass
(04:21):
um commercial media. Yeah, did you write that down? That
was good? I did. I didn't, but I'm like furiously
rubbing it off in my form. Uh. You know, it's
for sure deeply racist in some ways at times, which
we'll talk about, but also deeply inclusive and that uh,
(04:42):
all kinds of people performed Vaudeville. Everybody loved Vaudeville. I
mean it spanned every sort of demographic you could imagine,
from old to young and ethnic ethnicity to uh, wealthy
people to poor people because it didn't cost a whole lot.
You know, people would would literally save their pennies to
(05:04):
get into these cheap dime Uh I was about say
dime store, but whatever dime a ticket entry shows, right,
and it was family friendly too, as we'll see, which
was kind of revolutionary. Um and that actually established vaudeville
is like a like a genuine American phenomenon. Yeah, I
mean that was the deal. And you know, we were
(05:26):
sort of the Vaudeville of podcast fifteen years ago in
some ways because everyone else came out of the gate, say,
you know what, FCC doesn't care what we say, Phil Florence,
Phil foul And uh, looking back now, we were lucky
enough to have a I guess fortunate enough to have
a company at the time that was like you're not
(05:49):
allowed to cuss and stuff, Uh, I don't even try stuff.
We didn't and uh we we had to park our
notoriously foul tongues at the door. And I think that's
what helped our show out in a lot of ways,
is that people listen to it in classrooms and in
the car with their families and stuff like that. Right, absolutely,
and like to to think today like of just randomly
(06:10):
cursing casually and stuff. You should know. It's it seems weird.
We could now if we wanted to. I mean, I
don't want to chuck. Don't make me oh cus cuss nay. Instead,
let's talk about Vaudeville. And we're gonna keep it clean
and family friendly, just like Vaudeville. And we're gonna start
chuck with actually the word vaudeville, which it sounds French,
(06:32):
vaguely French, and um correctly so because it actually originates
in the French language. That's right, apparently. And this is
I think Dave was right on point. He says it
has a pretty interesting etymology as far as etymologies go,
this one seems to be kind of ironclad and interesting. Yeah,
it's rare, because yeah, it's very rare. So uh. In
(06:53):
the fifteenth century in France, it was a poet. His
name was, I guess you would say Olivier Bassilie. But
the ironic thing is he didn't know it. It took
me a half a beat to get that one. It did.
I was like, is there a latency here? Uh? And
he was a poet who wrote a satire. He was
(07:16):
I guess sort of like the Ray Stevens of his time.
That's something that gen Z will not get for sure.
God bless you for that, gen Z. And so what
was the deal that? Where was he from? He was
from the vau de Vie, which is the Vier Valley
in French. And so um, these kind of silly, folksy
(07:39):
country songs, often satirical, that you know, found their origination
in the fourteen hundreds in France came to be known
as chanson de vaudeville, so songs from the Vier Valley
and basically, yeah, that would have that would have absolutely
been a chanson de vaudevie. So um. Over time, I
guess in France, everybody's sick of, you know, putting the
(08:02):
Vier Valley on the map, and they just changed veer
to veal, which means town. So technically vaudeville means valley town,
which makes zero sense if you stop and think about it.
But it doesn't matter because it gets the point across,
because it's evolved to take on a different meaning over time. Yeah,
and these in France they had uh fiata du vaudeville,
(08:27):
which were these parody plays. And then when America, you know,
Vaudeville is a uniquely American thing. Uh. Well, not uniquely American,
because there were precedents in other countries, but Vaudeville itself
became very American, and you'll see why. But they basically
just said, hey, that sounds kind of fancy and French,
and that was at a time in America and when
(08:47):
they liked to name things fancy French things. Well, yes, also,
so one of the things about Vaudeville that it's important
to realize is that it was created for this burgeoning
middle class where there like a lot more there's people
had a little more spending money than they did before.
There weren't conditions stunk, as we'll see, but there was
(09:09):
a middle class developing and this was designed specifically to
target those people. And they wanted to differentiate themselves from
some of the predecessors, which were much bodier, much racier,
much more drunken um and Vaudeville was like, no, we're different,
even though it's a lot the same stuff. Yeah, England, Italy,
they all had these sort of body plays where people
(09:31):
would get hammered in the audience or and or on stage. Uh.
In America, even pre Civil War, the shows were um,
you know, they were very risque. They were kind of
burlesque in nature, or you might have like, you know,
sort of uh scantily clad. At the time, of course
there was nothing like you would see today, but like
(09:52):
a scantily clad uh ladies dancing, uh and then like
two guys bare knuckle boxing right afterward and everyone is
getting drunk. And I bet those were a lot of fun.
But uh, you know, it sounds a lot like a
Chelsea Handler show today. But a few gentlemen came along,
in particular in the United States that said, hey, why
(10:13):
don't we, like you said, open this up to the
middle class, make it for everyone, and make it where
families could come. Because they wanted to make money. I
don't think they're on a crusade to clean up America's act.
Is they wanted to get rich. No, but they were
the kind of strict um like I guess taskmasters that
(10:34):
that like, they had some really strange requirements as we'll see.
Well we'll get to that in a second. But um,
in addition to the variety shows, circuses were a thing.
I think they we've never done an actual circus episode,
have we. We've done a lot of the circus arts,
but I don't know that we've done a full like
circus apply. I think very us it's hilarious. So circuses
(10:58):
were kind of coming of age at the time. UM.
There were also side shows something called dime museums, which
is basically like a storefront um where people would pay
and just come look at some exhibits. And I saw
I found this amazing contemporary yes, reporting from the Saturday
Evening Post from June and it was basically UM an
(11:22):
article written by one of the big vaudeville producers at
the time, Percy G. Williams, and it was called Vaudeville
and the Vaudevillians, and he's talking about some of the
origins of vaudeville and he says that one of them
the three biggest people to establish vaudeville was Benjamin Franklin Keith,
and his first role as a manager was of a
(11:44):
store show that featured a fat baby as the main attractions.
Did that baby grow up to be? Is there a
great ending there? Then the baby grew up to be
DC Fields. Let's you should just say that everybody would
believe you? Sure, I know that's It wasn't as funny
(12:05):
because it was sobelievable. No, no, no, I love it.
So b F. Keith was one of the guys. A
guy named e F. Albie was another guy. They teamed
up um As Cohorts in Boston and opened up the
Bijou Theater and basically developed a and as you'll see,
kind of with vaudeville, it wasn't just like, hey, listen,
(12:27):
you know, we'll just do a show every now and then.
They developed these circuits in these systems, in these tours
and these basically management companies where they would just send
people out all over the country, and it really kind
of quickly became like a big, big business. Chuck asked
me again, who the fat baby grew up to be? He?
Is there a great ending like who that fat baby
(12:48):
grew up to be? Yeah? That fathe? Take three? Hey?
Yeah that who that fat baby? Take four? Hey, does
have a great inning here that that baby grow up
to be Tony Danza even better? Okay, that's Tony Dance
(13:11):
is a better punch line in almost every joke. Agreed, man.
And apparently Who's the Boss is having some sort of
reboot in I saw it on Entertainment tonight. So um
so it's true. So Tony Pastor was the guy who
supposedly coined the term vaudeville or adopted the term vaudeville
to describe this thing that was basically like those variety shows,
(13:34):
except no not body. Um there was no liquor on
the premises, which was a big one at the time. Um,
the skits and the performers were all family friendly. The
language was family friendly. It was like the kind of
thing that like the whole family, from the little kids
to the grandma and the parents could all go sit
(13:54):
down and enjoy this this show together. Right. Um. And
like I said, they had some really like strict requirements.
I saw BF Keith, Benjamin Franklin Keith particularly did not
like certain kinds of language. Um, he's he didn't like
it if you said slab okay, son of a gun,
(14:18):
holy g, which I think is maybe gali G. Yeah,
I don't get that one. That one's weird. And the
kuda gra chuck pants. Do not say pants around b F. Keith.
You better say trousers or else you're gonna get what
was referred to as a blue envelope. Right Yeah, and
here's where it gets, Um, the whole notion of blue comedy,
(14:41):
which is comedy that is got like foul language or whatever,
like if you're doing blue work or blue comedy. There
are a lot of different because you know, Dave said
in here, uh, and Dave didnt make this up, but
he saw that that may have been one of the
origins of some people think it's the origin of the
term working blue. We're doing blue comedy. And I looked
(15:02):
into it and there were there there are a lot
of different explanations. Um, I mean I saw like eight
or ten and they all sounded pretty realistic. Everything from
this one uh comedian named Max Miller who kept all
his adult jokes in a blue notebook. That's kind of
roundly been dismissed to In England after the Theater Act
(15:23):
of eighty three, they had to submit plays to the
Examiner of Plays like Capital the Capital p to audit
the scripts and then send them back and say you
can't get a permit with the script. And apparently they
would do that in blue pencil. That sounded really realistic.
But there were a bunch of different stories. But at
any rate, perhaps if you got a blue envelope from
(15:46):
Benjamin Franklin Keith that that could have been the origin
as well. Who knows. Yeah, because it meant like he
was sending you a note to say, like, you better
tone your act down or you're gonna get the boot. Basically,
that's right. And in addition to blue, a lot out
of the terms we used today came out of Vaudeville.
I saw um like killing them, killing them, not that
(16:08):
word I just made up, just killed on stage, Yes, exactly, headliner,
sure fire, lemon for like a bad thing, like a failure, um,
a bunch of different stuff that I had no idea of.
This just completely part of the common vernacular. Just came
out of the vaudeville world. It's the origins of origins
(16:30):
of popular entertainment. We're having a hard time today. I
don't know what's going on. I got marbles in my mouth.
I'm all excited about fall. Maybe just take a break, okay,
Oh yeah, let's do that, all right. I'm gonna get
these marbles out and we'll be right back. Okay. So
(17:00):
this is something we've talked a lot about in various
episodes over the years. But um, pre Civil War and
post Civil War America were very different in how people lived.
Pre Civil War about nine of Americans lived in the country.
Um by the you know, mid eighteen eighties or so. Um,
the industrial the Second Industrial Revolution comes around all of
(17:23):
a sudden, it is almost flip flopped. It's about half
and half of people living in cities and people still
hanging out in the country. And in those cities there
are obviously a lot of immigrants coming in like really
really quickly, especially in places like New York obviously, and
they were you know, didn't make a lot of money,
but they worked really really long hours and had very
(17:44):
little free time. And all of a sudden, there was
this thing that you could do with your very little
free time that costs like a nickel or a dime,
and you could go in there for a few hours
and kind of forget the drudgery of living in a
tenement building and working in a factory. Yeah, and so like,
not only did it bring like the people from the
(18:05):
neighborhood around, because like one vaudeville theater owner might own
ten theaters in one city like New York, so that
they were they catered to the neighborhood, so you don't
have to go very far. Um. Dave also points out
that through some of like the the most cringe e
and outright racist ethnic jokes and slurs that were part
(18:26):
of the acts of some of these not all the acts,
but enough of them that it was definitely a thing
that it wasn't meant to be mean spirited, um, at
least not in the vaudeville world that had definitely been
means spirited before. UM. But say like if you were
poking fun at Chinese immigrants and how they talked, or um,
Irish immigrants and how they talked, um, it was a
(18:49):
form of assimilation in a weird way because those very
people were out there in the audience laughing along with
everybody else. Or sometimes, as we'll see, um, people of
that ethnicity may have been playing those you know, over
the top stereotype versions of their ethnicity and and in
a weird way it does. It is kind of how
(19:11):
people came together and initially melted together when America was
just beginning to be a melting pot. Yeah, was the
initial melt right. Um. So let's talk a little bit
about how these things went down, because there was a
very kind of great motto for vaudeville, which was, if
you don't like this, wait a few minutes and that's
(19:32):
how it went down. They were variety shows in every uh,
every essence of that word. Um. We've done a few
variety shows over the years, and I definitely enjoy our
stuff you should know live, which, by the way, look
for some announcements soon for early next year. Yeah, West Coast,
(19:52):
Hint Antonia. I definitely prefer those. But early on we
did a few variety shows where we would have like
some music and it can median and someone you were
reading and uh, you know the someone uh interpretive dance.
That's the one thing we liked. But those are always
a lot of fun because I think we both enjoyed
that spirit of the variety show. When you're a kid
(20:15):
of the seventies and eighties, those were still very much
a part of television growing up. Um, and they they're
they're the you can draw a direct line from what
you saw on you know, the Mandrell Sister Show or
he haw right back to vaudeville. Uh. And the whole
idea was, if you don't like it, wait a few minutes.
They would have you know, maybe ten fifteen minute, twenty
(20:38):
minute at the longest, the thirty minute act and then
somebody completely different would come out next. Yeah, and um,
Percy Williams kind of put it pretty plainly in that
Saturday Evening Post article that like a vaudeville theater manager
is entirely different from what he called the legitimate theater
manager um in that every week you were coming up
(20:59):
with a new you like show of ten twelve acts
that you had to arrange just the right way to
keep the audience entertained. You lull them into like complacency
with a beautiful like ballet act, and then after that,
like two acrobats who may or may not have been
brothers came bounding out onto the stage, and after that
there was a comedian who would just slay everybody. Um Like.
(21:22):
It was very much laid out in the way that
um that it was supposed to be, and it was
all all vaudeville shows were laid out in the exact
same way, but they're the different kinds of acts. Dave
dug up a handbook from nineteen fourteen called how to
Enter Vaudeville Your Favorites, Yes, proceed though I'm marked down
(21:43):
five six seven. All right, Uh, well, my first favorite
was the first one on the list, a shadow list,
because those are just fun those are people who I
guess do like the hand shadows and things, right, that
would be my take on it too, Yeah for sure. Yeah. Um.
My first him was a hobo act. And the reason
why the reason why I chose hobo acts because I
(22:05):
saw that, Um, Benjamin Franklin Keith's shows at his theaters.
Even if you're doing a hobo act, you still had
to wear a clean shirt. That's pretty funny. Yeah, You're like, no,
but this is my outfit and said sorry sorry. The
next on my list was the human Calculator act. Okay,
I'd like that too. Yeah. Um, I've got one electrical act,
(22:30):
which I mean we're talking like the beginning of the
twentieth century, so electricity was really strange and exotic, and
there were people who would have different acts. So, um,
I found this site called uh Vaudeville America, and every
single Vaudeville act that ever performed would have a little
note card with like a little summation about their show,
(22:51):
how it was received by the audience, how long it ran, um,
and Vaudeville America has all of these things, and I
found him for electrical act. It was all over the place,
like it could be electricity used to trigger special effects
or um it could be like a scientist demonstrating different
things with electricity, or sometimes people took massive electrical shocks
(23:14):
to the body to perform, like that was what they
did as part of their electrical show. So that was
definitely one of my favorites too. Yeah, I mean there
were definitely some sort of Jim Rose Circus adjacent things
like sword swallowing and stuff like that. Um, but my
favorite my last two our statuary posing and uh paper tearing. Yeah,
(23:39):
paper tearing. It was like I don't know about that one.
I mean it must be well, I don't know. I
was gonna say it must be like ripping phone books
in f but it might not have been. Maybe it
was tearing paper like a reverse or a gami or something. Yeah,
that's what I would take it as for sure. It's
basically a vaudeville show. Was uh comp elation of stuff
(24:00):
that you would see today at halftime at NBA games.
You know, like there'd be a dude like balancing a
chair on his chin and on top of that or
eight other chairs and at the very top of that
is his wife. Like like that's the kind of stuff
that you would see at vaudeville, and then you'd also
see serious stuff too, Like there were tabloid plays where
they would distill like a three four act play down
(24:25):
into fifteen minutes, and it wasn't necessarily a comedy. It
could be a tragedy. And these people just figured out
how to do the reader's diegt version. So it was
all over the place, and they they were laid out
in just the right way by the vaudeville theater managers. Yeah,
that was a great quote from this. Did you watch
any of that PDS documentary? Yeah, it was very good.
It was good. Uh. The quote from there was there
(24:47):
was everything from a guy playing a piano to a
guy eating a piano. Did you see that agent who
described the guy who would eat a baby shark and
then throw it up back into like a are and
the shark would just swim around afterwards. It's I mean,
that was vaudeville, um, And you know, like you said,
they had to lay it out in such a way
(25:08):
it was. It wasn't just willy nilly, you know, it
was very intentional. And apparently the first act to be
the first act of the last act wasn't a great sign. Uh,
for you that well, probably what it probably meant is
that you were either brand new or just not very good,
and you didn't really have a great act. But they
needed somebody because the opening act would be kind of
(25:29):
the seating act, like people are still sort of getting
in their seats and doing their thing, but they wanted
to have something up there. I was about to say
on the screen on the stage. Um. And then the
last one, which is hysterical and goes counter to every
show biz rule now, which was like leave them with
something great. They wanted to purposely leave them with something
not so great so they could just turn the house
(25:51):
over and get people the heck out of there and
they wouldn't be like more and more so they would
It was like in Mexicali Grill in Athens when we
would uh, we would crank like you know Public Enemy
or you know, some really heavy metal or something at
the end of the night, just to get people out
of there. For sure, they called the last act on
the bill of the haircut act because that performer would
(26:14):
just see the back of everybody's heads on their way out.
To be clear, we loved Public Enemy. The people that
dined at Mexicali hated it. Sure, just wat chocolate and
public Enemy to get people out of there if you need.
The clientele at Mexicality, Rill and Athens in the mid nighties,
you know, yeah, some email are just just like yeah,
(26:34):
same draft. Um. So what that meant was that second
to the last act was is what you would look
at as sort of the the best act of the night.
And sometimes yeah, that could be like a really big name.
I mean it could be Harry Hudini on any given night.
It could be um, you know, Al Jolson for better
or for worse on any given night, like a huge,
(26:57):
massive star. Like these the people who were um, who
were the second to last act on a bill at
a big vaudeville theater in a big city were probably
the most famous people in the United States and Europe
in a lot of cases. Like they were as famous
as you can possibly get, legendary in their fields, beloved
(27:19):
by all, like and you could go spend ten or
twenty five cents, depending on how good the show was,
and see those people like in your neighborhood, you know,
depending on what city it was. Because like you said,
the um, the whole thing that kind of spread Vaudeville
far and wide was the fact that they created these
circuits and so you didn't even necessarily have to live
(27:41):
in a big city to see these people alive. Um,
because if you had a theater in your town that
was part of a circuit that originated in New York,
they might end up there performing as the second to
last act on the bill. And we'll, I mean, we'll
talk more about circuits in a minute, but I just
got very excited about that. Yeah, let's go back to racism. Yeah, okay,
(28:03):
So you know we made the point that um or
I don't know if we made this original point. Um,
when the someone was doing what you would call like
an ethnic dialogue act or a dialect act um, they
would go up there and do this racial ethnic stereotype
and it could be anything. It was like nobody was safe.
(28:25):
It could be a big Italitian guy doing this is
big spicy meatball thing. That's the only one I'm allowed
to do, so that's all I'm gonna do. No, it
could be like German, Irish, uh in any sort of
European immigrant. They could be making fun of Jewish people,
Chinese people, Native Americans who also had as we'll see,
their own circuit, and they would also make fun of themselves.
(28:47):
So it was interesting in that it was sort of
a uh, it was sort of the great leveling ground,
and that no one was really spared right right, And
in a lot of ways, it was because a lot
of the members of those same ethnic groups, like I
was saying, performed those dialect acts where they were really
(29:10):
hamming it up and really going over the top with
these stereotypes of their own ethnicity. Um. And even black face,
depending on the context was um depending on who is
doing it was anti racist because one of the overlooked
things about black faces as far as vaudeville is concerned,
there were a number of African American vaudeville performers who
(29:34):
did black face and actually preferred to do black face
because it changed everything. It said, we're in an alternate
universe here and the rules are kind of out the window.
And then they could all of a sudden do it
a take on a satire, let's say about the white
guy who's running the vaudeville show and get away and
get away with it, yeah, or make fun of the
(29:57):
idea of black face done by white people, like make
fun of black face acts as a black face act
performed by an African American, So yeah, it gave them
a lot more leeway to just kind of set things
straight a little more. But um, the history of black
faces terribly horribly racist. Um, but everything leading up to vaudeville,
(30:20):
and some vaudeville acts were still terribly racist. But um,
the stuff leading up to it was indisputably vilely racist. Yeah. Absolutely. Um.
One of the biggest stars in the early twentieth century
was a black man named Burt Williams. Very handsome, smooth,
cool looking dude. If you look at pictures of this guy,
(30:41):
he's like, he's like the Billy D. Williams of his time,
Billy D. Williams. Did I get that right? Yeah? Okay,
I don't know why that sounded wrong all of a sudden.
Do you ever do that? Yeah, and you're like what
it's called semantic satiation, really where you you do or say,
you're speak something so much that it just loses its
(31:04):
meaning and like doesn't look right spelled and all that stuff.
You know, I thought I got it wrong, actually just
figured out because in my head I had D as
D period like an initial and not D e E
like d Wallace, Billy D Wallace Williams anyway, Uh, he
kind of looked like Billy D a little bit, very
(31:24):
smooth looking guy. And he was the first black performer
to star to star in the Zike Field Follies, which was,
you know, one of the biggest vaudeville reviews in New
York City at the time. And he and also all
white too. Well, yeah, exactly. That's why it was important
that he was the first black performer. Sure, but he
(31:44):
was um. He did black face, of course, and he
was on record as saying, like he said, quote, it
was not until I was able to see myself as
another person, and I think he meaning black face, that
my sense of humor developed. So for him, I think
he said it a lot of to come out of
his shell sort of comedically. Fully. Yeah, there's um. They
(32:05):
covered him really well in that PBS documentary and there
was a quote from W. C. Fields. No word what
Tony Danza had to say, but W. C. Fields said that, um,
Burt Williams was the funniest man I ever saw and
the saddest man I ever met. And what he was
referring to is that Burt Williams is called the Jackie
Robinson of of vaudeville because he broke that color. Berrier
(32:27):
was the first one. But he also like seemed to
feel like the weight of history on his shoulders, and
he spent He just worked tirelessly to prove that he
was at least as good, if not better than any
white Carville performer, and supposedly, according to this PBS documentary,
essentially worked himself to death at age forty. Yeah, but
(32:47):
he was a great talent and um even even in
his time he was considered just a legendary star and
comedian but like beloved by all. Yeah, I'm gonna take
issue with PBS and if someone else right in saying
the same thing, I don't think you can say that
someone is said Jackie Robinson of something before Jackie Robinson
(33:09):
what people like to say, but like Jackie Robinson was
the Burt Williams of baseball if anything, very nice, very nice.
That's a great, great correction. Well, I think a lot
of people just use that term now, you know, like
somebody could say so and so is the Jackie Robinson
of cave People. It took took was the Jackie Robinson
of cave People. All right, I mean it still gets
(33:32):
the point across into a prescriptive no no, no, no no.
I'm moving on. Uh to al Jolson, who he mentioned earlier.
He was one of the biggest stars in the world
as well. He very famously uh don blackface. Uh. And
he is someone who went on to have a huge
career once movies came around. And won't you know, we'll
get to the effect movies had on all that. But
(33:54):
he started he was Jewish and he started the jazz singer,
which was the big sort of first huge feature length
talkie in n Yeah. And it's interesting that this vaudeville
star became the first um talkie star for movies because um,
that was that was a transition that that quickly took over. Actually,
(34:18):
as we'll see um and I say, we take a break,
chuck and come back to more vaudeville stuff about that.
Let's do it. So now finally we're onto that part
(34:43):
that I was so excited about. Circuits. Yeah, the circuit
was the business model basically, uh, that allowed everybody to
make a lot of money. Certainly the owners of these
theaters and the people who UM had lots and lots
of these performers signed up to exclusive contracts. Yeah, and
just as an aside about that big money, UM, I
(35:06):
put together Percy Williams Saturday Evening post information with our
friends at west Egg the inflation calculator. Some of the
some of the amounts that he was thrown out, like
three dollars a week was not out of the question,
um for a good like performer on vaudeville, and that
(35:29):
meant you automatically made half a million dollars a year.
But it just kept going up from there, like UM,
I think the highest paid that he mentioned, um was
a performer who pulled in three thousand dollars a week
a week, yes, which is forty seven grand a week today,
which is like over five million dollars in today's money
for a year. It's like mid level podcaster money, right. Uh,
(35:55):
the average American was making about bucks at the time.
So if you're making three fifty dollars a week, and
you know, it's the same today that the big entertainers
sort of have always made lots and lots and lots
of money because they could charge a lot or not
a lot of money, but they could charge a lot
(36:16):
of people money to buy to the cell tickets. Yeah,
and Percy Williams also said one of the other distinctions
between a legitimate theater house and a vaudeville theater house
is that that legitimate theater might be happy to have
five thousand patrons in a week, whereas on a really
good week with a really good bill of vaudeville house
might pull in thirty five thousand people in that week.
(36:37):
So that kind of gives you an idea of just
how popular it was because it wasn't high brow, it
wasn't high falutin, it was understandable, it was funny, it
was moving, um, and just about anybody could could tap
into it and get it and be moved by it.
So um. The The thing is, though, is if they're
charging ten cents apiece, that's still only thirty dollars. So
(36:58):
one of the ways these theaters made money is to
have really good performers that they just squeezed because three
hundred bucks a week was not the average, and apparently
there were plenty of performers who all they wanted to
do was perform, and if you could give them just
enough money to get to the next show and maybe
eat along the way, they would just keep doing it
year after year. And that's how they really made their
money was with those acts. Yeah, and they I mean
(37:20):
these people were performing, um, fourteen to twenty times a week,
you know, definitely two shows a day. Sometimes on the
weekend they would do three or more. And they were
you know, I'm not sure how much I guess the
bigger star you get, you know, leverage is always worked
the same way. You might have had a little more say,
but unless you got to that tippy top point, like
(37:43):
you were kind of doing what you were told and
you were getting paid handsomely for it. But these people
were working themselves to the bone on stage every day. Yeah.
And I also have the impression that if you're a
Volueville performer, even the top of the pile, uh, to
to act like a a normal star, like a theater star,
would be anathetical to the whole spirit of vaudeville. I
(38:05):
think even like the biggest stars were still like, you know,
work people, like they just got to work, and they
didn't they didn't put on airs. I guess you could
say is they would put it in Scotland, right, Uh,
there was a black vaudeville circuit that was fully its
own thing. Uh. Generally black owned theaters and there was
a booking circuit of vaudeville circuit um called the Theater
(38:28):
Owners Booking Association or TOBA t O b A. And
they were again they were, you know, grinding these people
through the entertainment grinder. Still paying them pretty well though
although it was less than people on the white vaudeville circuit.
We're getting paid and I think the theaters probably were
cheaper as well. Um, but the performers used to joke
(38:49):
apparently that t O b A uh stood for tough
on black asses. Yeah, because they really like put them
through the grinder, like you need to be here, and um,
the gigs were guaranteed and there was you know, good money,
like you said, but it was I get the impression
too that it was more grueling. They're also a little
bit looser, so you could get away with a little
(39:11):
less family friendly content, a little more sexual innuendo and
body humor. Um. There was one example they found called
It was a husband wife duo called butter Beans and
Susie and their big hit song was uh that Susie
saying was I want a hot dog for my role m.
So you know, just there you have it. One of
(39:34):
the other um stars of the Black vaudeville circuit was
Mom's Madly Isn't Madly? Or Maybely? Okay, that's what I
thought too. So Mom's maybe was a star UM into
the sixties and I think maybe even the seventies on
television with this one vaudeville character that she came up
with way back in the twenties, Um, and I saw
that she was a trailblazer in that she came out
(39:57):
as a lesbian in N one. Yeah, and they called
her Moms. Her real name was Jackie, but they called
her Moms because she was such like a maternal figure
to all of the other performers on the vaudeville circuit,
whoever she was on the bill with. You know, backstage,
she's had kind of a maternal presence, so everybody nicknamed
her Mom's and that led to that character that just
(40:18):
carried her for decades on. Yeah. I mean she if
you look up a picture of her, like I forture
saw her on television in the seventies, right, she definitely
looks familiar. So, um, did you see that there is
still a theater, a black owned theater from the black
vaudeville circuit? Um in Athens, still in operation today, the
Morton Theater. Did you know that I've been to a
(40:40):
play there. Yeah, so it started in nineteen and it's
still going. It's awesome. There's another one in make in
Georgia called the Douglas Theater. Uh. So it's it's cool
that these are still around. I love it. Yeah. Uh.
And then in addition to the Um Black Vaudeville Circuit,
there was also a Yiddih Vaudeville circuit Um which Fanny
b Ice, the inspiration for Funny Girl, came out of.
(41:03):
There was that Native American volb Will Circle that you
talked about. And I don't remember what episode we talked
about it, and maybe Geronimo, yeah, or the Apache Wars
episode we talked about how Geronimo joined Buffalo Bill's Wild
West Show. That would be an excellent example of native
Native American vaudeville from what I understand. Yeah, and they
(41:23):
would do you know, they would uh sort of play
up their ethnic stereotype as well for yucks, but then
also do stuff like, you know, show off some of
their their skills, like whether it's roping or dancing or
you know, shooting arrows and stuff like that. So you know,
it had something for everyone, and I think their audiences, um,
we're pretty much exclusively although that's not true. They would
(41:46):
perform for uh all kinds of audiences, right, yeah, I
think basically everybody that It wasn't a segregated performance from
what I understand, unless, of course, the theater was strictly segregated.
Good point, So I should also I think we should
point out, Chuck that when we're saying yuck's in this episode,
we're saying it without a seat, like not yuck, but
(42:08):
like a laugh, right, Just want to make sure everybody
knows that because we're always talking about yuck in somebody's
yum and they might be confused at this point. Oh yeah, yeah,
yuck like a comedic yuck. Yeah, uk, exactly. I guess
we can go over here towards the end some of
the bigger stars who came out of vaudeville. I mean,
(42:29):
it's sort of a a hit list of some of
the most famous people of early televised entertainment when that
came along, everyone from Jack Benny to Fred Astaire and
Will Rogers and Bob Hope. You know they you think, like,
were they old enough? They were generally child performers in vaudeville. Yeah,
(42:49):
um so uh. I Also I saw George Burns one
of them, and he apparently had been in vaudeville since
he was seven, and he finally met his wife, Gracie Allen,
and they became this amazing comic duo that went onto
the radio and went onto the TV. Like they followed
the trajectory that um that most like the the absolute
(43:11):
cream of the crop, most successful vaudeville performers followed um.
And for our younger listeners, George Burns played God in
the John Denver vehicle, Oh God and Joker more familiar
folk singer who you should listen to because he was
the best. Would you call him a folk singer? Yeah, singer, songwriter,
(43:32):
folk singer? What would you call him? Just called? I
mean he was kind of his own thing. It was yeah, yeah,
I mean he was definitely not like yacht rock or
anything like that, because he was a mountain lion sure,
who liked flying his plane high on cocaine. Was he
high on cocaine? Yes, but that's not why you crashed.
(43:54):
I think he ran out of gas. But they he
did have cocaine into the system when they did the autopsy.
That's sad. Uh. Quickly, I do want to mention Jack
Benny's story because it's kind of cool. Uh. He was
born Benjamin Kubelski and he was a violin prodigy. So
his act at first as a vaudevillian as a child
was a very serious sort of let me play my violin.
(44:16):
But as the story goes, he bombed really bad one
night and like cracked a really great one liner which
made everyone laugh really hard, and then started sort of
working jokes into his act, and before he knew it,
he was a comedian. Yeah. Yeah, I guess Will Rogers
had the same thing happened to him. He was a
rope trick roper, roper, sure, and um he failed at
(44:40):
some trick and made a joke and everybody laughed, and
he's like, maybe I should try adding jokes to my act,
and that kind of went from there. He became America's
most beloved humorous after a while. That's right. Uh, But
you teased earlier about movies, and I think I teased
it too, And I think everybody sees where this is
headed is movies came along, and movies throwing a movie
(45:02):
on a TV on a on a movie screen in
a theater as a heck of a lot easier than
booking eight or ten human animal acts every single day
of the week. Yeah, and um, apparently movies kind of
started out as a vaudeville act, like you might see
a ten or twenty minute short film as part of
the show. Um and Keith Benjamin Franklin Keith and his
(45:24):
partner Mr. Albi I don't remember his first thing. They
are aptly they were the first ones to actually start
showing movies at vaudeville shows. And then it started a transition, chuck,
because they would need time to cool down the projector
in between shows, and um, they would have vaudeville acts
in between movies. So it went from a movie is
(45:46):
just one part of a vaudeville bill to vaudeville just
getting narrower, narrower and smushed down into these lesser roles.
And then movies just kind of took off from there,
and vaudeville got left in the dust, left in the dust.
But again, if you look at early TV, uh, and
even again into the fifties, sixties and seventies, that those
(46:08):
were vaudeville shows. Heehaw and the man drell sisters and
uh solid gold maybe not solid gold, kind of still
dance focused. Yeah. What about Ed Sullivan? Yeah, probably so.
Supposedly when he was canceled in nine seventy one, he said,
Vaudeville has died at second death. Wow. Yeah, he dropped
(46:32):
his mind after that. I love it. This is good stuff.
You got anything else about Vaudeville? I got nothing else.
Go out and support your local Vaudeville theater, that's all right,
and then maybe see your roller Derby after that. Uh.
And since I said roller Derby everybody, of course, that
means it's time for listener mail. Al Right, what we're
(46:53):
gonna do today instead of listener mail is, uh, do
a way overdue plug for a couple of things. But
certainly our Kiva team, Um, many years ago, what year
was this, I'm trying to see you two two thousand
nine October two thousand nine, So this is close to
the anniversary actually of when we started this team in
(47:15):
the very early days of stuff. You should know. Kiva
is a micro lending organization who uh does great work.
Micro Lending organizations aren't perfect, but Kiva is a good
one and they do a pretty good job of getting
very small amounts of money sourced from around the world
into the hands of entrepreneurs and uh sometimes in America.
(47:37):
We usually in in developing countries who really need it. Right. Yeah,
it's like you said, it's a great organization. We've our
team has been going gangbusters for years. So let me
just update everyone with a couple of stats. If you
want to join, Kiva, doesn't cost anything to join, but
to make a donation. I think you can donate as
little as like twenty five bucks. Yeah, if you want
(47:58):
to just get the ball rolling. And the idea is
that these people pay the stuff back almost all the time,
and then you can re lend that money. And I've
been relending the same you know, from the same kitty
of money I started with years ago. But we have
now raised as a collective stuff you should know, team
over twelve million dollars, which is staggering, uh four hundred
(48:20):
and fifty five thousand loans uh plus you know and
change and then for an average of almost forty loans
per member and eleven thousand, five hundred and six team members.
That's fantastic. It's really congratulations to everybody on the Kiva team.
(48:40):
Keep it up and what else we got going, Well,
hold on one other thing about the Kiva team. I
always wanted to make sure to say, like, it's extremely
inclusive and they're always happy to let any new member joined,
so don't feel shy about it at all. And then
the other thing we just found out about recently we
didn't know is we have not one, but two Red
Cross blood donation teams Stuff you Should Know teams. I
(49:03):
didn't know. I didn't know that was a thing. I
didn't know there were blood donation teams at all. Now
you do. So if you donate blood to the Red Cross,
you can do it as a part of the stuff
you Should Know team if you want, we'll be happy
to support you anyway. We can't with T shirts, maybe UM,
small grants, UM or just you know, our thanks in
(49:25):
advance for being a good person. Let's go get a go,
donate some blood butters in our name, get your sweet cookies. God,
I love Nutter butters. Yeah they're great, but they're particularly
great when you're down a pine of blood in your
head swimming a little bit. That's the only time I
have I m I can't buy Nutter butters and keep
them in the house. You know. It's one of the
(49:46):
weird things of America is that there's two types of
Nutter butters and they're totally different. Have you noticed there's
like a wafer like there's a wafer e kindly, Yes, No,
it's square, it's very basic hashtag basic. But then there's
the peanut shaped one that's a cookie. It's got you know,
(50:07):
it's a cookie sandwich. This is like a filled wafer. Um. Yeah,
And they're both Nutter butters, same logo, same packaging, just
two different types of peanut butter cookies. Man, you know
how disappointed I would be if I bought the wrong package.
Hopefully this happening more than one person for sure, all right,
So pay attention at the cookie everyone. So if you
(50:30):
want to join our keyva team, go ahead. Uh it's
at kiva dot org slash team slash stuff you should Know.
If I'm not mistaken, or just go to kiva dot
organ search Stuff you should know. I'm quite sure you
can do the same thing on the Red Cross Blow
Good donation site. And you can also get in touch
with us at stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com.
(50:53):
Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeart Radio
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio
app app podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite
shows h m hm
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
chuckles Clark, there's Chuck Josh's chuckles. Bryant. Yeah, that would
have been way better. And there's Jerry just Jerry rolling
(00:22):
hanging out too, and that makes this stuff you should
Know about Vaudeville. Uh, my favorite day of the year
is today, Uh, Vaudeville Day. No, I mean, you can
never tell when it's gonna happen, and it will get
hot again. But it's that first whiff of fall. Oh,
I love that so much. It's so nice, isn't it.
(00:43):
It's one o'clock in Atlanta and it's seventy three degrees humidity,
which is for Atlanta that means zero humidity. Yeah, exactly,
a little cool breeze blowing. Yeah, it's beautiful out Those
leads are gonna start turning any second. No, we'll get
hot as hades again before October. It just does Yeah,
(01:04):
it does that, like it makes sure it's nice and
balmy and muggy on Thanksgiving for some reason. And then
in the winter it'll start to get nice, like you're like, okay,
spring is here, and then bam, they dumped you with
the only snowfall of the year in mid February. But
is an odd place at least for this one day
we get a little a little whiff of fall, a
(01:26):
little whiff of football in the air. Yeah, the stank
of football is in the air. So we're not talking
about football, although I'm sure somebody did a jokey football
routine at some point in the history of vaudeville, which
is what we're talking about. We're talking about vaudeville. Like
I just said, yeah, and this was an idea by
(01:49):
the very guy who wrote it for us, or old
pal Dave Ruse. He said, uh. He got very aggressive
and said, hey, Chuck, since it's your turn to pick one.
You know this thing on vaudeville or saw something on vaudeville.
It sounded interesting, And I said, all right, smarty pants,
good do it. He said, oh, you want me do it?
(02:10):
Huh huh. Very. I'm surprised we haven't done this before though,
because it's really cool and kind of I think it's
appropriate that it's uh, sort of nearby our sitcoms too,
for right, because this was like this was it, this
was TV baby before there was TV. Yeah, and there's
before we get started. I'm hoping you can help me
(02:32):
figure this out. But we have definitely talked about the
vaudeville circuit at length in another episode, and it's been
driving me bananas because I cannot think of what the
episode was. Was it freak Shows? No, I think it
was more recent than that, within the last year or
two it was. I don't think it was freak shows, man,
(02:55):
I really don't. But I looked. I was like, wait
a minute, have we done Vaudeville? But warm we definitely
have not, because we talked about the circuit on another
episode exactly. Yeah, that was so we talked about like
the Poconos, the borsched Belt and all that. Yeah. I
don't remember what we would have been talking. I don't
think it had anything to do with desert survival. Luckily,
(03:16):
we have a thousand people that listen to our show
every week, at the very least eight hundred. Uh. Yeah,
it's it's very familiar to me. I don't I don't
know unless we did. Boud Villain just spaced both of
us and didn't title it appropriately. We titled a podcast
to remember, so we are talking vaud Villain. I think
(03:38):
it's one of those things where even if you're gen Z,
even if you're a boomer, it doesn't matter. Everybody's at
least somewhat familiar cognizant that Vaudeville existed at some time
in the past and had to do with um jokes,
There were yucks involved. Um, it happened on stage. It
was deeply racist in a lot of places, and for
(04:00):
a lot of people that's like the sum total of
what they understand about Vaudeville. But it is not h
an overstatement to say that Vaudeville basically gave birth to
every form of entertainment that we know and love today.
It was a strange midwife between the theater and mass
(04:21):
um commercial media. Yeah, did you write that down? That
was good? I did. I didn't, but I'm like furiously
rubbing it off in my form. Uh. You know, it's
for sure deeply racist in some ways at times, which
we'll talk about, but also deeply inclusive and that uh,
(04:42):
all kinds of people performed Vaudeville. Everybody loved Vaudeville. I
mean it spanned every sort of demographic you could imagine,
from old to young and ethnic ethnicity to uh, wealthy
people to poor people because it didn't cost a whole lot.
You know, people would would literally save their pennies to
(05:04):
get into these cheap dime Uh I was about say
dime store, but whatever dime a ticket entry shows, right,
and it was family friendly too, as we'll see, which
was kind of revolutionary. Um and that actually established vaudeville
is like a like a genuine American phenomenon. Yeah, I
mean that was the deal. And you know, we were
(05:26):
sort of the Vaudeville of podcast fifteen years ago in
some ways because everyone else came out of the gate, say,
you know what, FCC doesn't care what we say, Phil Florence,
Phil foul And uh, looking back now, we were lucky
enough to have a I guess fortunate enough to have
a company at the time that was like you're not
(05:49):
allowed to cuss and stuff, Uh, I don't even try stuff.
We didn't and uh we we had to park our
notoriously foul tongues at the door. And I think that's
what helped our show out in a lot of ways,
is that people listen to it in classrooms and in
the car with their families and stuff like that. Right, absolutely,
and like to to think today like of just randomly
(06:10):
cursing casually and stuff. You should know. It's it seems weird.
We could now if we wanted to. I mean, I
don't want to chuck. Don't make me oh cus cuss nay. Instead,
let's talk about Vaudeville. And we're gonna keep it clean
and family friendly, just like Vaudeville. And we're gonna start
chuck with actually the word vaudeville, which it sounds French,
(06:32):
vaguely French, and um correctly so because it actually originates
in the French language. That's right, apparently. And this is
I think Dave was right on point. He says it
has a pretty interesting etymology as far as etymologies go,
this one seems to be kind of ironclad and interesting. Yeah,
it's rare, because yeah, it's very rare. So uh. In
(06:53):
the fifteenth century in France, it was a poet. His
name was, I guess you would say Olivier Bassilie. But
the ironic thing is he didn't know it. It took
me a half a beat to get that one. It did.
I was like, is there a latency here? Uh? And
he was a poet who wrote a satire. He was
(07:16):
I guess sort of like the Ray Stevens of his time.
That's something that gen Z will not get for sure.
God bless you for that, gen Z. And so what
was the deal that? Where was he from? He was
from the vau de Vie, which is the Vier Valley
in French. And so um, these kind of silly, folksy
(07:39):
country songs, often satirical, that you know, found their origination
in the fourteen hundreds in France came to be known
as chanson de vaudeville, so songs from the Vier Valley
and basically, yeah, that would have that would have absolutely
been a chanson de vaudevie. So um. Over time, I
guess in France, everybody's sick of, you know, putting the
(08:02):
Vier Valley on the map, and they just changed veer
to veal, which means town. So technically vaudeville means valley town,
which makes zero sense if you stop and think about it.
But it doesn't matter because it gets the point across,
because it's evolved to take on a different meaning over time. Yeah,
and these in France they had uh fiata du vaudeville,
(08:27):
which were these parody plays. And then when America, you know,
Vaudeville is a uniquely American thing. Uh. Well, not uniquely American,
because there were precedents in other countries, but Vaudeville itself
became very American, and you'll see why. But they basically
just said, hey, that sounds kind of fancy and French,
and that was at a time in America and when
(08:47):
they liked to name things fancy French things. Well, yes, also,
so one of the things about Vaudeville that it's important
to realize is that it was created for this burgeoning
middle class where there like a lot more there's people
had a little more spending money than they did before.
There weren't conditions stunk, as we'll see, but there was
(09:09):
a middle class developing and this was designed specifically to
target those people. And they wanted to differentiate themselves from
some of the predecessors, which were much bodier, much racier,
much more drunken um and Vaudeville was like, no, we're different,
even though it's a lot the same stuff. Yeah, England, Italy,
they all had these sort of body plays where people
(09:31):
would get hammered in the audience or and or on stage. Uh.
In America, even pre Civil War, the shows were um,
you know, they were very risque. They were kind of
burlesque in nature, or you might have like, you know,
sort of uh scantily clad. At the time, of course
there was nothing like you would see today, but like
(09:52):
a scantily clad uh ladies dancing, uh and then like
two guys bare knuckle boxing right afterward and everyone is
getting drunk. And I bet those were a lot of fun.
But uh, you know, it sounds a lot like a
Chelsea Handler show today. But a few gentlemen came along,
in particular in the United States that said, hey, why
(10:13):
don't we, like you said, open this up to the
middle class, make it for everyone, and make it where
families could come. Because they wanted to make money. I
don't think they're on a crusade to clean up America's act.
Is they wanted to get rich. No, but they were
the kind of strict um like I guess taskmasters that
(10:34):
that like, they had some really strange requirements as we'll see.
Well we'll get to that in a second. But um,
in addition to the variety shows, circuses were a thing.
I think they we've never done an actual circus episode,
have we. We've done a lot of the circus arts,
but I don't know that we've done a full like
circus apply. I think very us it's hilarious. So circuses
(10:58):
were kind of coming of age at the time. UM.
There were also side shows something called dime museums, which
is basically like a storefront um where people would pay
and just come look at some exhibits. And I saw
I found this amazing contemporary yes, reporting from the Saturday
Evening Post from June and it was basically UM an
(11:22):
article written by one of the big vaudeville producers at
the time, Percy G. Williams, and it was called Vaudeville
and the Vaudevillians, and he's talking about some of the
origins of vaudeville and he says that one of them
the three biggest people to establish vaudeville was Benjamin Franklin Keith,
and his first role as a manager was of a
(11:44):
store show that featured a fat baby as the main attractions.
Did that baby grow up to be? Is there a
great ending there? Then the baby grew up to be
DC Fields. Let's you should just say that everybody would
believe you? Sure, I know that's It wasn't as funny
(12:05):
because it was sobelievable. No, no, no, I love it.
So b F. Keith was one of the guys. A
guy named e F. Albie was another guy. They teamed
up um As Cohorts in Boston and opened up the
Bijou Theater and basically developed a and as you'll see,
kind of with vaudeville, it wasn't just like, hey, listen,
(12:27):
you know, we'll just do a show every now and then.
They developed these circuits in these systems, in these tours
and these basically management companies where they would just send
people out all over the country, and it really kind
of quickly became like a big, big business. Chuck asked
me again, who the fat baby grew up to be? He?
Is there a great ending like who that fat baby
(12:48):
grew up to be? Yeah? That fathe? Take three? Hey?
Yeah that who that fat baby? Take four? Hey, does
have a great inning here that that baby grow up
to be Tony Danza even better? Okay, that's Tony Dance
(13:11):
is a better punch line in almost every joke. Agreed, man.
And apparently Who's the Boss is having some sort of
reboot in I saw it on Entertainment tonight. So um
so it's true. So Tony Pastor was the guy who
supposedly coined the term vaudeville or adopted the term vaudeville
to describe this thing that was basically like those variety shows,
(13:34):
except no not body. Um there was no liquor on
the premises, which was a big one at the time. Um,
the skits and the performers were all family friendly. The
language was family friendly. It was like the kind of
thing that like the whole family, from the little kids
to the grandma and the parents could all go sit
(13:54):
down and enjoy this this show together. Right. Um. And
like I said, they had some really like strict requirements.
I saw BF Keith, Benjamin Franklin Keith particularly did not
like certain kinds of language. Um, he's he didn't like
it if you said slab okay, son of a gun,
(14:18):
holy g, which I think is maybe gali G. Yeah,
I don't get that one. That one's weird. And the
kuda gra chuck pants. Do not say pants around b F. Keith.
You better say trousers or else you're gonna get what
was referred to as a blue envelope. Right Yeah, and
here's where it gets, Um, the whole notion of blue comedy,
(14:41):
which is comedy that is got like foul language or whatever,
like if you're doing blue work or blue comedy. There
are a lot of different because you know, Dave said
in here, uh, and Dave didnt make this up, but
he saw that that may have been one of the
origins of some people think it's the origin of the
term working blue. We're doing blue comedy. And I looked
(15:02):
into it and there were there there are a lot
of different explanations. Um, I mean I saw like eight
or ten and they all sounded pretty realistic. Everything from
this one uh comedian named Max Miller who kept all
his adult jokes in a blue notebook. That's kind of
roundly been dismissed to In England after the Theater Act
(15:23):
of eighty three, they had to submit plays to the
Examiner of Plays like Capital the Capital p to audit
the scripts and then send them back and say you
can't get a permit with the script. And apparently they
would do that in blue pencil. That sounded really realistic.
But there were a bunch of different stories. But at
any rate, perhaps if you got a blue envelope from
(15:46):
Benjamin Franklin Keith that that could have been the origin
as well. Who knows. Yeah, because it meant like he
was sending you a note to say, like, you better
tone your act down or you're gonna get the boot. Basically,
that's right. And in addition to blue, a lot out
of the terms we used today came out of Vaudeville.
I saw um like killing them, killing them, not that
(16:08):
word I just made up, just killed on stage, Yes, exactly, headliner,
sure fire, lemon for like a bad thing, like a failure, um,
a bunch of different stuff that I had no idea of.
This just completely part of the common vernacular. Just came
out of the vaudeville world. It's the origins of origins
(16:30):
of popular entertainment. We're having a hard time today. I
don't know what's going on. I got marbles in my mouth.
I'm all excited about fall. Maybe just take a break, okay,
Oh yeah, let's do that, all right. I'm gonna get
these marbles out and we'll be right back. Okay. So
(17:00):
this is something we've talked a lot about in various
episodes over the years. But um, pre Civil War and
post Civil War America were very different in how people lived.
Pre Civil War about nine of Americans lived in the country.
Um by the you know, mid eighteen eighties or so. Um,
the industrial the Second Industrial Revolution comes around all of
(17:23):
a sudden, it is almost flip flopped. It's about half
and half of people living in cities and people still
hanging out in the country. And in those cities there
are obviously a lot of immigrants coming in like really
really quickly, especially in places like New York obviously, and
they were you know, didn't make a lot of money,
but they worked really really long hours and had very
(17:44):
little free time. And all of a sudden, there was
this thing that you could do with your very little
free time that costs like a nickel or a dime,
and you could go in there for a few hours
and kind of forget the drudgery of living in a
tenement building and working in a factory. Yeah, and so like,
not only did it bring like the people from the
(18:05):
neighborhood around, because like one vaudeville theater owner might own
ten theaters in one city like New York, so that
they were they catered to the neighborhood, so you don't
have to go very far. Um. Dave also points out
that through some of like the the most cringe e
and outright racist ethnic jokes and slurs that were part
(18:26):
of the acts of some of these not all the acts,
but enough of them that it was definitely a thing
that it wasn't meant to be mean spirited, um, at
least not in the vaudeville world that had definitely been
means spirited before. UM. But say like if you were
poking fun at Chinese immigrants and how they talked, or um,
Irish immigrants and how they talked, um, it was a
(18:49):
form of assimilation in a weird way because those very
people were out there in the audience laughing along with
everybody else. Or sometimes, as we'll see, um, people of
that ethnicity may have been playing those you know, over
the top stereotype versions of their ethnicity and and in
a weird way it does. It is kind of how
(19:11):
people came together and initially melted together when America was
just beginning to be a melting pot. Yeah, was the
initial melt right. Um. So let's talk a little bit
about how these things went down, because there was a
very kind of great motto for vaudeville, which was, if
you don't like this, wait a few minutes and that's
(19:32):
how it went down. They were variety shows in every uh,
every essence of that word. Um. We've done a few
variety shows over the years, and I definitely enjoy our
stuff you should know live, which, by the way, look
for some announcements soon for early next year. Yeah, West Coast,
(19:52):
Hint Antonia. I definitely prefer those. But early on we
did a few variety shows where we would have like
some music and it can median and someone you were
reading and uh, you know the someone uh interpretive dance.
That's the one thing we liked. But those are always
a lot of fun because I think we both enjoyed
that spirit of the variety show. When you're a kid
(20:15):
of the seventies and eighties, those were still very much
a part of television growing up. Um, and they they're
they're the you can draw a direct line from what
you saw on you know, the Mandrell Sister Show or
he haw right back to vaudeville. Uh. And the whole
idea was, if you don't like it, wait a few minutes.
They would have you know, maybe ten fifteen minute, twenty
(20:38):
minute at the longest, the thirty minute act and then
somebody completely different would come out next. Yeah, and um,
Percy Williams kind of put it pretty plainly in that
Saturday Evening Post article that like a vaudeville theater manager
is entirely different from what he called the legitimate theater
manager um in that every week you were coming up
(20:59):
with a new you like show of ten twelve acts
that you had to arrange just the right way to
keep the audience entertained. You lull them into like complacency
with a beautiful like ballet act, and then after that,
like two acrobats who may or may not have been
brothers came bounding out onto the stage, and after that
there was a comedian who would just slay everybody. Um Like.
(21:22):
It was very much laid out in the way that
um that it was supposed to be, and it was
all all vaudeville shows were laid out in the exact
same way, but they're the different kinds of acts. Dave
dug up a handbook from nineteen fourteen called how to
Enter Vaudeville Your Favorites, Yes, proceed though I'm marked down
(21:43):
five six seven. All right, Uh, well, my first favorite
was the first one on the list, a shadow list,
because those are just fun those are people who I
guess do like the hand shadows and things, right, that
would be my take on it too, Yeah for sure. Yeah. Um.
My first him was a hobo act. And the reason
why the reason why I chose hobo acts because I
(22:05):
saw that, Um, Benjamin Franklin Keith's shows at his theaters.
Even if you're doing a hobo act, you still had
to wear a clean shirt. That's pretty funny. Yeah, You're like, no,
but this is my outfit and said sorry sorry. The
next on my list was the human Calculator act. Okay,
I'd like that too. Yeah. Um, I've got one electrical act,
(22:30):
which I mean we're talking like the beginning of the
twentieth century, so electricity was really strange and exotic, and
there were people who would have different acts. So, um,
I found this site called uh Vaudeville America, and every
single Vaudeville act that ever performed would have a little
note card with like a little summation about their show,
(22:51):
how it was received by the audience, how long it ran, um,
and Vaudeville America has all of these things, and I
found him for electrical act. It was all over the place,
like it could be electricity used to trigger special effects
or um it could be like a scientist demonstrating different
things with electricity, or sometimes people took massive electrical shocks
(23:14):
to the body to perform, like that was what they
did as part of their electrical show. So that was
definitely one of my favorites too. Yeah, I mean there
were definitely some sort of Jim Rose Circus adjacent things
like sword swallowing and stuff like that. Um, but my
favorite my last two our statuary posing and uh paper tearing. Yeah,
(23:39):
paper tearing. It was like I don't know about that one.
I mean it must be well, I don't know. I
was gonna say it must be like ripping phone books
in f but it might not have been. Maybe it
was tearing paper like a reverse or a gami or something. Yeah,
that's what I would take it as for sure. It's
basically a vaudeville show. Was uh comp elation of stuff
(24:00):
that you would see today at halftime at NBA games.
You know, like there'd be a dude like balancing a
chair on his chin and on top of that or
eight other chairs and at the very top of that
is his wife. Like like that's the kind of stuff
that you would see at vaudeville, and then you'd also
see serious stuff too, Like there were tabloid plays where
they would distill like a three four act play down
(24:25):
into fifteen minutes, and it wasn't necessarily a comedy. It
could be a tragedy. And these people just figured out
how to do the reader's diegt version. So it was
all over the place, and they they were laid out
in just the right way by the vaudeville theater managers. Yeah,
that was a great quote from this. Did you watch
any of that PDS documentary? Yeah, it was very good.
It was good. Uh. The quote from there was there
(24:47):
was everything from a guy playing a piano to a
guy eating a piano. Did you see that agent who
described the guy who would eat a baby shark and
then throw it up back into like a are and
the shark would just swim around afterwards. It's I mean,
that was vaudeville, um, And you know, like you said,
they had to lay it out in such a way
(25:08):
it was. It wasn't just willy nilly, you know, it
was very intentional. And apparently the first act to be
the first act of the last act wasn't a great sign. Uh,
for you that well, probably what it probably meant is
that you were either brand new or just not very good,
and you didn't really have a great act. But they
needed somebody because the opening act would be kind of
(25:29):
the seating act, like people are still sort of getting
in their seats and doing their thing, but they wanted
to have something up there. I was about to say
on the screen on the stage. Um. And then the
last one, which is hysterical and goes counter to every
show biz rule now, which was like leave them with
something great. They wanted to purposely leave them with something
not so great so they could just turn the house
(25:51):
over and get people the heck out of there and
they wouldn't be like more and more so they would
It was like in Mexicali Grill in Athens when we
would uh, we would crank like you know Public Enemy
or you know, some really heavy metal or something at
the end of the night, just to get people out
of there. For sure, they called the last act on
the bill of the haircut act because that performer would
(26:14):
just see the back of everybody's heads on their way out.
To be clear, we loved Public Enemy. The people that
dined at Mexicali hated it. Sure, just wat chocolate and
public Enemy to get people out of there if you need.
The clientele at Mexicality, Rill and Athens in the mid nighties,
you know, yeah, some email are just just like yeah,
(26:34):
same draft. Um. So what that meant was that second
to the last act was is what you would look
at as sort of the the best act of the night.
And sometimes yeah, that could be like a really big name.
I mean it could be Harry Hudini on any given night.
It could be um, you know, Al Jolson for better
or for worse on any given night, like a huge,
(26:57):
massive star. Like these the people who were um, who
were the second to last act on a bill at
a big vaudeville theater in a big city were probably
the most famous people in the United States and Europe
in a lot of cases. Like they were as famous
as you can possibly get, legendary in their fields, beloved
(27:19):
by all, like and you could go spend ten or
twenty five cents, depending on how good the show was,
and see those people like in your neighborhood, you know,
depending on what city it was. Because like you said,
the um, the whole thing that kind of spread Vaudeville
far and wide was the fact that they created these
circuits and so you didn't even necessarily have to live
(27:41):
in a big city to see these people alive. Um,
because if you had a theater in your town that
was part of a circuit that originated in New York,
they might end up there performing as the second to
last act on the bill. And we'll, I mean, we'll
talk more about circuits in a minute, but I just
got very excited about that. Yeah, let's go back to racism. Yeah, okay,
(28:03):
So you know we made the point that um or
I don't know if we made this original point. Um,
when the someone was doing what you would call like
an ethnic dialogue act or a dialect act um, they
would go up there and do this racial ethnic stereotype
and it could be anything. It was like nobody was safe.
(28:25):
It could be a big Italitian guy doing this is
big spicy meatball thing. That's the only one I'm allowed
to do, so that's all I'm gonna do. No, it
could be like German, Irish, uh in any sort of
European immigrant. They could be making fun of Jewish people,
Chinese people, Native Americans who also had as we'll see,
their own circuit, and they would also make fun of themselves.
(28:47):
So it was interesting in that it was sort of
a uh, it was sort of the great leveling ground,
and that no one was really spared right right, And
in a lot of ways, it was because a lot
of the members of those same ethnic groups, like I
was saying, performed those dialect acts where they were really
(29:10):
hamming it up and really going over the top with
these stereotypes of their own ethnicity. Um. And even black face,
depending on the context was um depending on who is
doing it was anti racist because one of the overlooked
things about black faces as far as vaudeville is concerned,
there were a number of African American vaudeville performers who
(29:34):
did black face and actually preferred to do black face
because it changed everything. It said, we're in an alternate
universe here and the rules are kind of out the window.
And then they could all of a sudden do it
a take on a satire, let's say about the white
guy who's running the vaudeville show and get away and
get away with it, yeah, or make fun of the
(29:57):
idea of black face done by white people, like make
fun of black face acts as a black face act
performed by an African American, So yeah, it gave them
a lot more leeway to just kind of set things
straight a little more. But um, the history of black
faces terribly horribly racist. Um, but everything leading up to vaudeville,
(30:20):
and some vaudeville acts were still terribly racist. But um,
the stuff leading up to it was indisputably vilely racist. Yeah. Absolutely. Um.
One of the biggest stars in the early twentieth century
was a black man named Burt Williams. Very handsome, smooth,
cool looking dude. If you look at pictures of this guy,
(30:41):
he's like, he's like the Billy D. Williams of his time,
Billy D. Williams. Did I get that right? Yeah? Okay,
I don't know why that sounded wrong all of a sudden.
Do you ever do that? Yeah, and you're like what
it's called semantic satiation, really where you you do or say,
you're speak something so much that it just loses its
(31:04):
meaning and like doesn't look right spelled and all that stuff.
You know, I thought I got it wrong, actually just
figured out because in my head I had D as
D period like an initial and not D e E
like d Wallace, Billy D Wallace Williams anyway, Uh, he
kind of looked like Billy D a little bit, very
(31:24):
smooth looking guy. And he was the first black performer
to star to star in the Zike Field Follies, which was,
you know, one of the biggest vaudeville reviews in New
York City at the time. And he and also all
white too. Well, yeah, exactly. That's why it was important
that he was the first black performer. Sure, but he
(31:44):
was um. He did black face, of course, and he
was on record as saying, like he said, quote, it
was not until I was able to see myself as
another person, and I think he meaning black face, that
my sense of humor developed. So for him, I think
he said it a lot of to come out of
his shell sort of comedically. Fully. Yeah, there's um. They
(32:05):
covered him really well in that PBS documentary and there
was a quote from W. C. Fields. No word what
Tony Danza had to say, but W. C. Fields said that, um,
Burt Williams was the funniest man I ever saw and
the saddest man I ever met. And what he was
referring to is that Burt Williams is called the Jackie
Robinson of of vaudeville because he broke that color. Berrier
(32:27):
was the first one. But he also like seemed to
feel like the weight of history on his shoulders, and
he spent He just worked tirelessly to prove that he
was at least as good, if not better than any
white Carville performer, and supposedly, according to this PBS documentary,
essentially worked himself to death at age forty. Yeah, but
(32:47):
he was a great talent and um even even in
his time he was considered just a legendary star and
comedian but like beloved by all. Yeah, I'm gonna take
issue with PBS and if someone else right in saying
the same thing, I don't think you can say that
someone is said Jackie Robinson of something before Jackie Robinson
(33:09):
what people like to say, but like Jackie Robinson was
the Burt Williams of baseball if anything, very nice, very nice.
That's a great, great correction. Well, I think a lot
of people just use that term now, you know, like
somebody could say so and so is the Jackie Robinson
of cave People. It took took was the Jackie Robinson
of cave People. All right, I mean it still gets
(33:32):
the point across into a prescriptive no no, no, no no.
I'm moving on. Uh to al Jolson, who he mentioned earlier.
He was one of the biggest stars in the world
as well. He very famously uh don blackface. Uh. And
he is someone who went on to have a huge
career once movies came around. And won't you know, we'll
get to the effect movies had on all that. But
(33:54):
he started he was Jewish and he started the jazz singer,
which was the big sort of first huge feature length
talkie in n Yeah. And it's interesting that this vaudeville
star became the first um talkie star for movies because um,
that was that was a transition that that quickly took over. Actually,
(34:18):
as we'll see um and I say, we take a break,
chuck and come back to more vaudeville stuff about that.
Let's do it. So now finally we're onto that part
(34:43):
that I was so excited about. Circuits. Yeah, the circuit
was the business model basically, uh, that allowed everybody to
make a lot of money. Certainly the owners of these
theaters and the people who UM had lots and lots
of these performers signed up to exclusive contracts. Yeah, and
just as an aside about that big money, UM, I
(35:06):
put together Percy Williams Saturday Evening post information with our
friends at west Egg the inflation calculator. Some of the
some of the amounts that he was thrown out, like
three dollars a week was not out of the question,
um for a good like performer on vaudeville, and that
(35:29):
meant you automatically made half a million dollars a year.
But it just kept going up from there, like UM,
I think the highest paid that he mentioned, um was
a performer who pulled in three thousand dollars a week
a week, yes, which is forty seven grand a week today,
which is like over five million dollars in today's money
for a year. It's like mid level podcaster money, right. Uh,
(35:55):
the average American was making about bucks at the time.
So if you're making three fifty dollars a week, and
you know, it's the same today that the big entertainers
sort of have always made lots and lots and lots
of money because they could charge a lot or not
a lot of money, but they could charge a lot
(36:16):
of people money to buy to the cell tickets. Yeah,
and Percy Williams also said one of the other distinctions
between a legitimate theater house and a vaudeville theater house
is that that legitimate theater might be happy to have
five thousand patrons in a week, whereas on a really
good week with a really good bill of vaudeville house
might pull in thirty five thousand people in that week.
(36:37):
So that kind of gives you an idea of just
how popular it was because it wasn't high brow, it
wasn't high falutin, it was understandable, it was funny, it
was moving, um, and just about anybody could could tap
into it and get it and be moved by it.
So um. The The thing is, though, is if they're
charging ten cents apiece, that's still only thirty dollars. So
(36:58):
one of the ways these theaters made money is to
have really good performers that they just squeezed because three
hundred bucks a week was not the average, and apparently
there were plenty of performers who all they wanted to
do was perform, and if you could give them just
enough money to get to the next show and maybe
eat along the way, they would just keep doing it
year after year. And that's how they really made their
money was with those acts. Yeah, and they I mean
(37:20):
these people were performing, um, fourteen to twenty times a week,
you know, definitely two shows a day. Sometimes on the
weekend they would do three or more. And they were
you know, I'm not sure how much I guess the
bigger star you get, you know, leverage is always worked
the same way. You might have had a little more say,
but unless you got to that tippy top point, like
(37:43):
you were kind of doing what you were told and
you were getting paid handsomely for it. But these people
were working themselves to the bone on stage every day. Yeah.
And I also have the impression that if you're a
Volueville performer, even the top of the pile, uh, to
to act like a a normal star, like a theater star,
would be anathetical to the whole spirit of vaudeville. I
(38:05):
think even like the biggest stars were still like, you know,
work people, like they just got to work, and they
didn't they didn't put on airs. I guess you could
say is they would put it in Scotland, right, Uh,
there was a black vaudeville circuit that was fully its
own thing. Uh. Generally black owned theaters and there was
a booking circuit of vaudeville circuit um called the Theater
(38:28):
Owners Booking Association or TOBA t O b A. And
they were again they were, you know, grinding these people
through the entertainment grinder. Still paying them pretty well though
although it was less than people on the white vaudeville circuit.
We're getting paid and I think the theaters probably were
cheaper as well. Um, but the performers used to joke
(38:49):
apparently that t O b A uh stood for tough
on black asses. Yeah, because they really like put them
through the grinder, like you need to be here, and um,
the gigs were guaranteed and there was you know, good money,
like you said, but it was I get the impression
too that it was more grueling. They're also a little
bit looser, so you could get away with a little
(39:11):
less family friendly content, a little more sexual innuendo and
body humor. Um. There was one example they found called
It was a husband wife duo called butter Beans and
Susie and their big hit song was uh that Susie
saying was I want a hot dog for my role m.
So you know, just there you have it. One of
(39:34):
the other um stars of the Black vaudeville circuit was
Mom's Madly Isn't Madly? Or Maybely? Okay, that's what I
thought too. So Mom's maybe was a star UM into
the sixties and I think maybe even the seventies on
television with this one vaudeville character that she came up
with way back in the twenties, Um, and I saw
that she was a trailblazer in that she came out
(39:57):
as a lesbian in N one. Yeah, and they called
her Moms. Her real name was Jackie, but they called
her Moms because she was such like a maternal figure
to all of the other performers on the vaudeville circuit,
whoever she was on the bill with. You know, backstage,
she's had kind of a maternal presence, so everybody nicknamed
her Mom's and that led to that character that just
(40:18):
carried her for decades on. Yeah. I mean she if
you look up a picture of her, like I forture
saw her on television in the seventies, right, she definitely
looks familiar. So, um, did you see that there is
still a theater, a black owned theater from the black
vaudeville circuit? Um in Athens, still in operation today, the
Morton Theater. Did you know that I've been to a
(40:40):
play there. Yeah, so it started in nineteen and it's
still going. It's awesome. There's another one in make in
Georgia called the Douglas Theater. Uh. So it's it's cool
that these are still around. I love it. Yeah. Uh.
And then in addition to the Um Black Vaudeville Circuit,
there was also a Yiddih Vaudeville circuit Um which Fanny
b Ice, the inspiration for Funny Girl, came out of.
(41:03):
There was that Native American volb Will Circle that you
talked about. And I don't remember what episode we talked
about it, and maybe Geronimo, yeah, or the Apache Wars
episode we talked about how Geronimo joined Buffalo Bill's Wild
West Show. That would be an excellent example of native
Native American vaudeville from what I understand. Yeah, and they
(41:23):
would do you know, they would uh sort of play
up their ethnic stereotype as well for yucks, but then
also do stuff like, you know, show off some of
their their skills, like whether it's roping or dancing or
you know, shooting arrows and stuff like that. So you know,
it had something for everyone, and I think their audiences, um,
we're pretty much exclusively although that's not true. They would
(41:46):
perform for uh all kinds of audiences, right, yeah, I
think basically everybody that It wasn't a segregated performance from
what I understand, unless, of course, the theater was strictly segregated.
Good point, So I should also I think we should
point out, Chuck that when we're saying yuck's in this episode,
we're saying it without a seat, like not yuck, but
(42:08):
like a laugh, right, Just want to make sure everybody
knows that because we're always talking about yuck in somebody's
yum and they might be confused at this point. Oh yeah, yeah,
yuck like a comedic yuck. Yeah, uk, exactly. I guess
we can go over here towards the end some of
the bigger stars who came out of vaudeville. I mean,
(42:29):
it's sort of a a hit list of some of
the most famous people of early televised entertainment when that
came along, everyone from Jack Benny to Fred Astaire and
Will Rogers and Bob Hope. You know they you think, like,
were they old enough? They were generally child performers in vaudeville. Yeah,
(42:49):
um so uh. I Also I saw George Burns one
of them, and he apparently had been in vaudeville since
he was seven, and he finally met his wife, Gracie Allen,
and they became this amazing comic duo that went onto
the radio and went onto the TV. Like they followed
the trajectory that um that most like the the absolute
(43:11):
cream of the crop, most successful vaudeville performers followed um.
And for our younger listeners, George Burns played God in
the John Denver vehicle, Oh God and Joker more familiar
folk singer who you should listen to because he was
the best. Would you call him a folk singer? Yeah, singer, songwriter,
(43:32):
folk singer? What would you call him? Just called? I
mean he was kind of his own thing. It was yeah, yeah,
I mean he was definitely not like yacht rock or
anything like that, because he was a mountain lion sure,
who liked flying his plane high on cocaine. Was he
high on cocaine? Yes, but that's not why you crashed.
(43:54):
I think he ran out of gas. But they he
did have cocaine into the system when they did the autopsy.
That's sad. Uh. Quickly, I do want to mention Jack
Benny's story because it's kind of cool. Uh. He was
born Benjamin Kubelski and he was a violin prodigy. So
his act at first as a vaudevillian as a child
was a very serious sort of let me play my violin.
(44:16):
But as the story goes, he bombed really bad one
night and like cracked a really great one liner which
made everyone laugh really hard, and then started sort of
working jokes into his act, and before he knew it,
he was a comedian. Yeah. Yeah, I guess Will Rogers
had the same thing happened to him. He was a
rope trick roper, roper, sure, and um he failed at
(44:40):
some trick and made a joke and everybody laughed, and
he's like, maybe I should try adding jokes to my act,
and that kind of went from there. He became America's
most beloved humorous after a while. That's right. Uh, But
you teased earlier about movies, and I think I teased
it too, And I think everybody sees where this is
headed is movies came along, and movies throwing a movie
(45:02):
on a TV on a on a movie screen in
a theater as a heck of a lot easier than
booking eight or ten human animal acts every single day
of the week. Yeah, and um, apparently movies kind of
started out as a vaudeville act, like you might see
a ten or twenty minute short film as part of
the show. Um and Keith Benjamin Franklin Keith and his
(45:24):
partner Mr. Albi I don't remember his first thing. They
are aptly they were the first ones to actually start
showing movies at vaudeville shows. And then it started a transition, chuck,
because they would need time to cool down the projector
in between shows, and um, they would have vaudeville acts
in between movies. So it went from a movie is
(45:46):
just one part of a vaudeville bill to vaudeville just
getting narrower, narrower and smushed down into these lesser roles.
And then movies just kind of took off from there,
and vaudeville got left in the dust, left in the dust.
But again, if you look at early TV, uh, and
even again into the fifties, sixties and seventies, that those
(46:08):
were vaudeville shows. Heehaw and the man drell sisters and
uh solid gold maybe not solid gold, kind of still
dance focused. Yeah. What about Ed Sullivan? Yeah, probably so.
Supposedly when he was canceled in nine seventy one, he said,
Vaudeville has died at second death. Wow. Yeah, he dropped
(46:32):
his mind after that. I love it. This is good stuff.
You got anything else about Vaudeville? I got nothing else.
Go out and support your local Vaudeville theater, that's all right,
and then maybe see your roller Derby after that. Uh.
And since I said roller Derby everybody, of course, that
means it's time for listener mail. Al Right, what we're
(46:53):
gonna do today instead of listener mail is, uh, do
a way overdue plug for a couple of things. But
certainly our Kiva team, Um, many years ago, what year
was this, I'm trying to see you two two thousand
nine October two thousand nine, So this is close to
the anniversary actually of when we started this team in
(47:15):
the very early days of stuff. You should know. Kiva
is a micro lending organization who uh does great work.
Micro Lending organizations aren't perfect, but Kiva is a good
one and they do a pretty good job of getting
very small amounts of money sourced from around the world
into the hands of entrepreneurs and uh sometimes in America.
(47:37):
We usually in in developing countries who really need it. Right. Yeah,
it's like you said, it's a great organization. We've our
team has been going gangbusters for years. So let me
just update everyone with a couple of stats. If you
want to join, Kiva, doesn't cost anything to join, but
to make a donation. I think you can donate as
little as like twenty five bucks. Yeah, if you want
(47:58):
to just get the ball rolling. And the idea is
that these people pay the stuff back almost all the time,
and then you can re lend that money. And I've
been relending the same you know, from the same kitty
of money I started with years ago. But we have
now raised as a collective stuff you should know, team
over twelve million dollars, which is staggering, uh four hundred
(48:20):
and fifty five thousand loans uh plus you know and
change and then for an average of almost forty loans
per member and eleven thousand, five hundred and six team members.
That's fantastic. It's really congratulations to everybody on the Kiva team.
(48:40):
Keep it up and what else we got going, Well,
hold on one other thing about the Kiva team. I
always wanted to make sure to say, like, it's extremely
inclusive and they're always happy to let any new member joined,
so don't feel shy about it at all. And then
the other thing we just found out about recently we
didn't know is we have not one, but two Red
Cross blood donation teams Stuff you Should Know teams. I
(49:03):
didn't know. I didn't know that was a thing. I
didn't know there were blood donation teams at all. Now
you do. So if you donate blood to the Red Cross,
you can do it as a part of the stuff
you Should Know team if you want, we'll be happy
to support you anyway. We can't with T shirts, maybe UM,
small grants, UM or just you know, our thanks in
(49:25):
advance for being a good person. Let's go get a go,
donate some blood butters in our name, get your sweet cookies. God,
I love Nutter butters. Yeah they're great, but they're particularly
great when you're down a pine of blood in your
head swimming a little bit. That's the only time I
have I m I can't buy Nutter butters and keep
them in the house. You know. It's one of the
(49:46):
weird things of America is that there's two types of
Nutter butters and they're totally different. Have you noticed there's
like a wafer like there's a wafer e kindly, Yes, No,
it's square, it's very basic hashtag basic. But then there's
the peanut shaped one that's a cookie. It's got you know,
(50:07):
it's a cookie sandwich. This is like a filled wafer. Um. Yeah,
And they're both Nutter butters, same logo, same packaging, just
two different types of peanut butter cookies. Man, you know
how disappointed I would be if I bought the wrong package.
Hopefully this happening more than one person for sure, all right,
So pay attention at the cookie everyone. So if you
(50:30):
want to join our keyva team, go ahead. Uh it's
at kiva dot org slash team slash stuff you should Know.
If I'm not mistaken, or just go to kiva dot
organ search Stuff you should know. I'm quite sure you
can do the same thing on the Red Cross Blow
Good donation site. And you can also get in touch
with us at stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com.
(50:53):
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Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
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