December 23, 2021 • 29 mins
From the local small-town stage to New York’s Palace Theater, vaudeville was an essential part of every community. In this episode, Helen and Matt learn about the Vaudevillians, the ones who kept Americans entertained when there wasn’t much to do for fun.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is job selete, where we talk about jobs that
you just don't see anymore. This week, we're looking at
a time before the Internet, before broadcast TV and radio,
and even before motion pictures, a time when entertainment was
all in person Vaudeville. In this episode, stage Fright, the
(00:26):
American Melting Pot, bad food smashing, Victorian values, Harpo marks,
getting hooked off stage Nickelback, Yes, Nickelback, How Joe Kennedy
killed Vaudeville, Helen, I'm making the assumption you already know
a lot about Vaudeville. Is that right? To assume that
(00:48):
you are wrong? That is an incorrect assumption. I know
that there is a connection between Vaudeville and stand up comedy.
I do know that in that Vaudeville was probably the
precursor of stand up comedy, was like the first version
of stand up comedy. That's really all I know. I
(01:09):
don't really know if I had to guess, like maybe
there were no I actually know very little about what
actually Vaudeville was. Later in the show, we're going to
learn that there's a reason probably you don't know a
whole lot about Vaudevillians. That's the name of the occupation
a performer who works in vaudeville. Do you have any
idea in your head right now what they did? I
(01:30):
imagine they It wasn't exactly stand up comedy. There was
like singing maybe and some dancing and even like maybe ventriloquism.
But I actually I really don't know. I mean, vaudeville
was originally just this lighthearted, situational comedy, family friendly. It
usually had some kind of dramatic composition, but sometimes a
(01:51):
little bit of light poetry that But I always think
of just a variety show in general, because, like you
were saying, it wasn't just comedians. There was music. There
would be dancing, sometimes animals, magicians and personators, acrobats, clowns, jugglers.
That sounds like a circus, so there are it is
(02:13):
related to the circus, but it's not the same thing.
This sounds like what you could get in Vegas, like
all the entertainment you could get in Vegas on the
Vegas Strip, like all in one show. Yeah, except even
even broader. I would say, we're just talking about a
series of separate, unrelated acts, all randomly grouped together on
a common bill, and that was the thing to do
(02:34):
for a while, like on the weekends. Well, I mean,
if this was in the eight hundreds, this was before movies,
before TV, Like if the only thing to do on
your time off was read a book or go see
literally anybody doing anything on a stage. Yeah, you're going
to do that, definitely. Step right up. Let's hop into
(02:55):
the job. Sell a time machine and back to the
eight hundreds, the Heyday of Vaudeville. Show. We've got a
guest expert on Vaudeville. We've got Trav sd as our guest.
He's an author, journalist, playwright, and stage performer. In fact,
(03:17):
he is known as a leading figure in the New
Vaudeville movement and wrote a book about Baudeville called No Applause,
Just Throw Money, which is pretty much, Yeah, you can relate.
I could totally relate. Okay, So here is Trav talking
about how you can get into the vaudeville industry. Somebody
(03:39):
might be a waiter or a waitress, or they work
in a shop or something while at night they go
and sing in cafes or go to comedy clubs or whatever.
Back then, you couldn't really do that. You had to
it was all or nothing. It's scary, so you would
start out. Generally, you would start out at what was
called small time or small time even and you'd make
whatever investment you had to make in your act. You
(04:03):
might take classes, some you had to rehearse someplace, whether
it was in Europe and your apartment, or if you
had to rent a dance studio, and then you had
to try and get a booking. One way to get
your foot in the door at the earliest stages was
a lot of the theaters had amateur nights, and if
you want to contest at an amateur night, you might
(04:24):
get a proper booking. The other thing they would do
is make the rounds of the agent's offices. I'm talking
about New York, in Chicago and the big cities. The
booking offices for these circuits were in the major cities. Otherwise,
you could also start out at your local theater in
say Peoria or Syracuse or someplace. You start out small
(04:47):
at your local place, because your neighbors and friends will
come to see you, and then you try and get
bookings farther and farther away, and if you're lucky, somebody important,
either a booker for the circuits or an agent would
see you, and then you would get better booking. It
was very merrit ocratic as well as democratic. This was
(05:08):
an industry where if you were terrible, you couldn't make
a go of it. Really, wow, there are so many
parallels to stand up comedy today of what he was saying.
You start out like today as a stand up comic.
You would start out at open mics, local open mics
near you, and then get better and better, and then
play bigger venues and then hopefully someone you know of
(05:29):
notes sees you. You get past at a major comedy club,
you start working regularly. But the thing that he said
about not being able to have a day job, that's
terrifying because every stand up comic I know had to
keep their day job for years before they started making
enough money to go full time. I knew that you'd
be like shaking your head throughout this whole clip because
(05:53):
it's so similar. Now. The other part he said that
kind of stands out is the fact that if you're terrible,
I'm sorry, you're there's just no way this is gonna work.
You can't really b as your way through this. You
have to be good and command an audience's attention. Entertain them.
That is so true. And that's actually one of the
things I've always said I love the most about stand
(06:14):
up comedy is it is very democratic and merit marrigecratic
in a lot of ways. I know stand up comics
who have advanced degrees from Harvard and Chris Rock dropped
out of high school. So it's got nothing to do
with your education level. It's got nothing to do with
like your background, like where you came from. A lot
of times who like you just have to be funny.
(06:35):
If you're funny, if you're really funny, you will rise
to the top. Yeah, I think that was similar to
the vaudevillians. We're going to look now at the type
of people who often entered this industry. You know, the
more you explore it, you'll find that there are all
sorts of people. Most of them came from the working classes, obviously, because,
(06:55):
as we say, during the Victorian era, a lot there
was just a lot of judgment about people who would
choose this line of work. But you had to be driven.
In other words, a lot of people had financial ambition.
They wanted to escape their class, so they worked really
hard to do that, and show business seemed like a
fast track for some folks. That said, there are exceptions,
(07:16):
and there were some people who came from money who
chose to ignore the disapproval of their families and go
into vaudeville. You definitely had to be a hard worker.
You couldn't be lazy, self directed. It helps if you're
an original person, or if you if you're able to
take whatever their trend is and then put your own
(07:37):
spin on it, that would help to get you to
the highest levels. But there were certainly lots of people
at the mediocre levels who would just follow the TRENDI
that it was like word for word accurate to describe
what stand up comedy is like today. Absolutely is exactly
the same, like a lot of people from the working
(07:59):
classes the entertainment industry. And this is the same for actors.
I think too, you see the show business as a
way to you know, elevate your financial status. But there
again are still people who come from money who are like, no,
this is just like a creative thing that I want
to do. Yeah, And back in the eighteen eighties, the
(08:21):
opportunities were not in Los Angeles but New York City,
your hometown, but also Chicago. That was another huge place
where all the bookers were and the auditions were. But
once they got the audition, once they got the job,
to start out, a lot of times it was a hierarchy.
You had to work your way up, grind it out
for years sometimes And so we're not going to look
(08:43):
at the skills once you were actually a vaudevillian, Helen,
what would you predict would be the skills needed to
be a great fought villion. I guess the one unifying
thing was you couldn't have stage fright. You had to
be able to stand in front of a out of
people and not be terrified to death. And yeah, you
(09:03):
just had showmanship in whatever version of showmanship you were
trying to pursue. Definitely, I would add the ability to
think quickly and improvise like yeah to your audience. Yeah,
because if you're in front of a live audience, anything
could happen and you could be getting heckled. You could
things happen in a live setting. I think this is
(09:25):
a weird one because also I think the strength of
a lot of these vaudevillians rooted in the their diversity,
because you you had a true melting pot of people
coming together that typically would not be together. I'll like,
with the common goal of putting on a good show,
so travel elaborate what I'm talking about here. It became
(09:45):
what the shows were about, the content of the songs
and material for the humor and the monologues and the
dialogues of comedians, and certainly it was an expression of
the imigrant experience, and especially because of the diversity of
what you might encounter in a vaudeville bill. In other words,
(10:07):
generally speaking, it would be some Irish, some Italians, some
African Americans. If you're not in the American South, we
might have Native Americans and Jews from Eastern Europe. You
get this wonderful salad of them in a vaudeville show,
which is something I think we really miss and need
(10:28):
right now. I love that. I love that it was
ethnically diverse and culturally diverse, and that continues to this
day in stand up comedy anyway, there's so much like
Black comedy and Asian comedy and Middle Eastern comedy. Like
because of being a stand up comedian for so long
(10:48):
in in the two biggest cities for stand up comedy
in New York and l A, I have friends of
so many different backgrounds, and I love that. I think
Vaudeville's perfect example of that. We're now going to look
(11:11):
at the typical day of the vaudevillion, and so far
it seemed somewhat glamorous, but it really wasn't that glamorous
for most of them. The life for vaudevillions was arduous.
They've spent most of their time really in travel, in
very uncomfortable travel on trains back in the day when
(11:31):
the seats were wooden benches, and lots of waiting around
in train stations, and staying in inexpensive boarding houses that
might have bedbugs and awful food, and lots of time
in dressing rooms. And somehow they managed to be very
cheery and happy faced entertainers for the American public despite
(11:57):
the arduousness up there. Ordeal the bosses could control every
aspect of your life, really, whether it's your salary and
your living conditions, and they had all kinds of rules
of things you couldn't do. If you took a radio booking,
you might get fired from vaudeville because radio was competition.
(12:18):
One thing that is probably self explanatory. Their schedule, of course,
would be very different from the ordinary nine to five
working person. So if you get off work at ten
or midnight or whatever it is, and then you're you
have the adrenaline rush of having just performed. Normally, performers
might go out afterwards and celebrate, as it were. So
(12:44):
it's not early to bed, early to rise in show business.
This is so so it's close to home, doesn't it's
it's so close to home, Oh my goodness, absolutely everything
he said. When I in the early days of stand
up when I was in New York City, Man, I
don't know if you know that the average New Yorker
doesn't own a car. So I would take three trains
(13:09):
and a bus out to Long Island or New Jersey
or Connecticut to perform in the early days when I
was young stand up comic. And then when I started
going on the on tour nationally, I was a very
unknown name and green and just the bottom of the
rung of touring comics. And I would have to take
a bus like five six hours, or I would have
(13:31):
to take a train, or I would have to take
like the cheapest flight I could find, and then stay
in the nastiest hotel and then I would only eat
like comedy club food like chicken wings and French fries
and stuff like that. So all of that totally hits
close to home. And also the late night hours that
he was talking about absolutely, Like comics hours are late
(13:54):
night hours because we work starting at eight p m. Often,
and so you work starting eight pm, you do two
shows and eight and a ten, and then you get
off work at midnight and you're like adrenalized because you've
just been on stage and you don't want to go
to sleep, so you hang out with each other till
three o'clock in the morning. And Yeah, all of that
totally rings about, Like I think the fact that they
(14:17):
would be in front of the theaters hustling out there,
like trying to get their name out there totally. That
was a very common thing in New York City where
I started stand up. It's called barking. It's like where
you stand in Times Square with like little postcards are
little like business cards with the name of the comedy
club that you're performing at that night, and you're like, hey, hey,
(14:39):
there's tons of tourists walking around. You go, hey, do
you want to see some stand up comedy? Hey? You
want to see some stand up comedy and you, you know,
give them one of these cards and they show up
at the comedy club and if you have your name,
oftentimes your name will be on the card. And if
the enough people show up with your name on the card,
you'll get an extra bump in your pay or you'll
get a little bit extra stage time. Okay, yeah, at
(15:00):
that was a whole thing. Yeah, even to this day,
I think the Vaudevillians didn't have the, I guess, the
added advantage of social media. So you better hope that
whoever you're custling to in the streets remembers who you are,
and you can't just follow them on Twitter to keep
up with with what they're doing. A lot of the Vaudevillians,
of course, we're constantly on the road. I think it's
(15:20):
time to probably look at some more context here, because
do you know where the term Vaudevillian comes from? I
have no idea. The term Vaudeville comes from the French
expression vois de ville, which translates to voice of the city.
But the interesting thing about Vaudeville is it's it's a
(15:41):
mix of so many things that came before it, so
it was influenced by the concert saloon. Dime museums essentially,
they were museums for the lower and middle class where
it was cheaper to get in and it was like
more grassroots type art, like just every day stuff instead
of this oh yeah, sophisticated thoughts. Yes, you wouldn't see
(16:05):
any Leonardo da Vinci pieces. You'd see like Scott from
down the Street. Scott from Main Street has painted this collage.
So yeah, dime museums, freak shows, minstrel shows which were
very racist, but also burlesque because well, okay, so burlesque
(16:27):
you probably know it was pretty provocative stuff back in
the eighteen hundreds, like they showed some skin, and so
Vaudeville was meant to be an alternative that was more
family friendly, So you could go see the naughty show,
or you could come see the Vaudeville show, which was
less naughty. Yeah yeah yeah. Now in Victorian Britain there
(16:48):
was also music halls that came before Vaudeville, which Vodeville
borrowed from. So music halls essentially, like you think of
a music hall today, it's just like a place where
there's a concert. Travis is now going to tell us
how Vaudeville actually became a much bigger thing in North
America compared to Europe. America has a long cure tanical
(17:11):
attitude towards theater. But long about the mid nineteenth century,
different things happened. One is, we started to embrace immigrants
as a workforce. Folks from Europe came among other parts
of the world with different attitudes, so lots of dancers
and comedians and so forth. But the initial culture that
(17:34):
grew up in New York Anyway and some other cities
happened in saloons. And this is the Victorian era, when
middle class mainstream life was restrictive beyond our wildest nightmares.
Lots of exciting developments were happening in this new show
business that was happening in the mid nineteenth century, but
(17:57):
largely in saloons, which were placed is with raucous drinking
and gambling and prostitution and all sorts of day class
a things. And at the same time, fashions were being
imported from France, and that's where the term vaudeville comes from.
Several entrepreneurs realized that they could attract audiences of people
(18:21):
who might not be willing to be seen in those saloons.
In other words, middle classmen and women of all classes
and children of all classes, compared with burlesque vaudeville, was
clean entertainment. Wow, that's so interesting. I didn't think about
the kind of American societal context that this was coming
(18:42):
out in that it was Victorian women wore course, it's
so tight that they were fainting. Everybody had to wear
a hat and be completely covered up and very prim
and proper. And then here come these Europeans who have
a little bit more lax attitude about everything, and they're
telling slightly a nauti joke oaks and showing a little
bit more skin and just being a little bit looser.
(19:05):
And Americans were like, oh, we like it. This was
when you started to have steam, and this is now
railroads or have matured into this big thing. And communication
(19:27):
is now connecting the world. So you have all these
new jobs where people are given the opportunity to enter
the middle class for the first time and actually earn
an income where they can spend money on entertainment. That's
a new thing. And but at the same time, mom
and dad, they don't want to take the kids to
the saloon with them. Or the roulesque. They find this
(19:49):
kind of toned down alternative, which was Vaudeville. I was
just thinking that when you were saying that taking the
kids to something, it's like going taknic kids to a
matinee movie, but they were no movies. The movie technology
you hadn't come around yet, So this is like taking
the kids to a matinee movie, but in person, they're
trying to escape the reality of the time, which was
(20:10):
a lot of hard jobs back then. In general. That's
another reason why I think Vaudeville was this sort of escapism,
why it was more based on fantasy than reality. I
love that Vaudevillians face the same kind of thing that
stand up comics face now, which is you have to
be funny or you're bombing. What happened if you were
bombing in vaudeville then you were forced off the stage.
(20:32):
And there's an old trope that actually is it has
origins and something that actually used to happen, which was
and I remember seeing this an old Bugs Bunny cartoons.
But were you if you were doing bad, the audiences
is booing you, you get there's a hook that comes
out and forces you off stage. Do you know, yeah,
like the can, like a cane with a hook at
(20:52):
the end, and it would grab your body and physically
drag you up stage. Apparently there was an African American
tap answer in animed Howard Sims, his nickname was Howard
Sandman Sims, who actually did that, and that's how that
all got started. He would that he'd beat off stage
and he would just be like if they if acts
(21:13):
were failing, you would get a hook or a broom
or some other kind of prop and and then forced
them off the stage. That's so funny. That's so funny,
then so mortifying if you're the performer that happened to agreed? So,
who were some famous Vaudevillians well, other than Howard Sandman Sims,
I think maybe the most famous of all the Vaudevillians.
(21:38):
This is just my opinion, but were the Marx Brothers
all together. They're all of Vaudeville all at once because
they are amongst them. They did all of the different
kinds of vaudeville comedy, and they were also musicians, and
that was another Vaudeville thing. You might have acts. It's
(21:58):
well known that Hardball Marks play the harp and would
just play straight music on the harp. Well, you might
have a vaudle act that was just that, just a
harp player coming out and playing the harp. But the
Marx Brothers would have an act that combined all of
those things. And when they're brother Gummo, who movie fans
don't know so well because he dropped out of the
(22:18):
act before the main movies, but he could dance as
well as dancers. And they could sing and dance and
do dialect comedy. So they're they're another major act I
would want younger people to know about for sure. There
were five brothers at least that were the regulars there
for a while, Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Zeppo, and Gummo, and
they really could do it all. They danced, they sang,
(22:39):
they knew how to make a crowd laugh, and then
later on, of course became even bigger when they made
motion pictures and into the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties.
I was first introduced to the Marx Brothers when I
learned that Queen the band Queen actually had a couple
of albums that were aimed after movies that they did,
(23:02):
and Night at the Opera and a day at the races,
and so that was my introduction to them. But yeah,
that you can still find clips of the Marks Brothers
online and I think they hold up fairly well. But
this is clearly a different type of comedy. Yeah, I've
seen clips of the Marks Brothers and it's very old timey, sticky,
(23:24):
kind of big broad sillyiness, which I think a lot
of like modern comedy fans will might look there, look
down their nose on. But definitely at the time, this
is what the people wanted, this is what was making
the people laugh. Very influential to future comedians to like,
even if their comedy was so different, they kind of
like really just opened up so many doors for later
(23:47):
genres of comedy. I think I'm assuming that maybe movies
had something to do with the end of vaudeville or
the decline of vaudeville. Yeah, that was a big part
of it. The nineteen thirties marks the beginning of the end.
And one big event, of course that happens the Great Depression,
which not only caused vaudeville to decline, but a lot
(24:11):
of things to decline. And it was just it made
more sense for performers to try to make more money
in radio, which by the nineties had become much more lucrative.
There was one thing that I was very surprised to
hear about that trav goes into here about why vaudeville
(24:31):
actually it maybe shouldn't have declined as quickly as it did.
But there were there was a series of events led
by one guy who you may have heard of, among
other things, the major stars of vaudeville could make a
lot more money in movies and radio, and so they
started to get priced out, which hurt Vaudeville, and people
(24:54):
wondered if the live theater would continue to exist anymore
for real. But between nine and say the mid thirties,
people probably wondered if theater would die entirely and there
would just be movies and radio. And then one very
major thing happened, and I think ultimately Vaudeville might have
continued to exist in some form if not for this.
(25:18):
John F. Kennedy's father, Joe Kennedy, owned a movie business.
He acquired a controlling interest in the main vaudeville circuit
that was still going in the early thirties, and he
emerged it with some of his other holdings and formed R.
Ko and R c A and basically converted the Big
(25:41):
Time circuit, the standard bearer for the vaudeville industry, into
cinema chain for his movie circuit. I think more than anything,
if there's one person to blame for the extinguishing of vaudeville,
it might be him. We can blame Joe Kennedy, John F.
Kennedy's dad, Joe Kennedy. That was a left turn I
(26:04):
did not see coming right. Yeah, that's a random They
didn't think they can make as much money with vaudeville,
and they focus more on converting all these theaters to
just showing movies. And then we're seeing, like Travis himself,
as we introduced him at the beginning, he still does vaudeville.
He's a leading figure in the new vaudeville movements that
(26:25):
exists out there. Even I know the town where I
live in has about a hundred thousand people. Were like
a medium sized college town basically, and there's local folks
that put on small vaudeville shows before the pandemic. But yeah,
so this it is crazy how Joe Kennedy really Joe
(26:47):
Kennedy connection was definitely did not see that one coming
out was so random, Helen, what would you say, like,
as far as today, where do we see the legacy
of the Audevillian I the entire stand up comedy industry,
I would say as a legacy of of Vaudeville, right,
(27:08):
because it was that was the first time that you
saw live performers joking on stage, and maybe not maybe
back then it wasn't necessarily stand up comedy in its
current form, but the fact that these were live performers
on a stage trying to make an audience laugh in
real time, that's absolutely the legacy of stand up comedy,
(27:28):
or that's absolutely a legacy that it gave to stand
up comedy and any sort of variety act. I would
say that we still have variety acts now where you
can go see a marionette show or you can see
a banjo show or anything like that is probably a
legacy of Vaudeville. Yeah, like you're saying, so influential on
(27:50):
comedy today, even if it does seem foreign, maybe it's
harder for audiences today to connect it. There are some
musicians today that maybe would be Vodvillion, and then any
musical I think gives us a glimpse into Vaudeville today
in the movies. Yeah, I will say wrapping up that
(28:10):
as a professional stand up comedian, thank you vod Billions
for being the precursor to what is now my current occupation.
That they paved the way for sure. Job Slete is
produced for I Heart Radio by Zealots manufacturing hand Forge
Podcast for You. It's hosted by us Helen Hong That's
(28:32):
Me and Matt That's Me. The show was conceived and
produced by Steve Za Markey, Anthony Savini, and Jason Elliott.
Our editor is Tommy Nichol, Our researcher is Amelia Paulka,
Our production coordinator is Angie Hymis, and theme music is
by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. A special thanks to our
(28:52):
I Heart Radio team, Katrina Norvell, Micky Tour, Ali Cantor,
Carrie Lieberman, Will Pearson, Connell, Byrne and Bob Pittman.
This is job selete, where we talk about jobs that
you just don't see anymore. This week, we're looking at
a time before the Internet, before broadcast TV and radio,
and even before motion pictures, a time when entertainment was
all in person Vaudeville. In this episode, stage Fright, the
(00:26):
American Melting Pot, bad food smashing, Victorian values, Harpo marks,
getting hooked off stage Nickelback, Yes, Nickelback, How Joe Kennedy
killed Vaudeville, Helen, I'm making the assumption you already know
a lot about Vaudeville. Is that right? To assume that
(00:48):
you are wrong? That is an incorrect assumption. I know
that there is a connection between Vaudeville and stand up comedy.
I do know that in that Vaudeville was probably the
precursor of stand up comedy, was like the first version
of stand up comedy. That's really all I know. I
(01:09):
don't really know if I had to guess, like maybe
there were no I actually know very little about what
actually Vaudeville was. Later in the show, we're going to
learn that there's a reason probably you don't know a
whole lot about Vaudevillians. That's the name of the occupation
a performer who works in vaudeville. Do you have any
idea in your head right now what they did? I
(01:30):
imagine they It wasn't exactly stand up comedy. There was
like singing maybe and some dancing and even like maybe ventriloquism.
But I actually I really don't know. I mean, vaudeville
was originally just this lighthearted, situational comedy, family friendly. It
usually had some kind of dramatic composition, but sometimes a
(01:51):
little bit of light poetry that But I always think
of just a variety show in general, because, like you
were saying, it wasn't just comedians. There was music. There
would be dancing, sometimes animals, magicians and personators, acrobats, clowns, jugglers.
That sounds like a circus, so there are it is
(02:13):
related to the circus, but it's not the same thing.
This sounds like what you could get in Vegas, like
all the entertainment you could get in Vegas on the
Vegas Strip, like all in one show. Yeah, except even
even broader. I would say, we're just talking about a
series of separate, unrelated acts, all randomly grouped together on
a common bill, and that was the thing to do
(02:34):
for a while, like on the weekends. Well, I mean,
if this was in the eight hundreds, this was before movies,
before TV, Like if the only thing to do on
your time off was read a book or go see
literally anybody doing anything on a stage. Yeah, you're going
to do that, definitely. Step right up. Let's hop into
(02:55):
the job. Sell a time machine and back to the
eight hundreds, the Heyday of Vaudeville. Show. We've got a
guest expert on Vaudeville. We've got Trav sd as our guest.
He's an author, journalist, playwright, and stage performer. In fact,
(03:17):
he is known as a leading figure in the New
Vaudeville movement and wrote a book about Baudeville called No Applause,
Just Throw Money, which is pretty much, Yeah, you can relate.
I could totally relate. Okay, So here is Trav talking
about how you can get into the vaudeville industry. Somebody
(03:39):
might be a waiter or a waitress, or they work
in a shop or something while at night they go
and sing in cafes or go to comedy clubs or whatever.
Back then, you couldn't really do that. You had to
it was all or nothing. It's scary, so you would
start out. Generally, you would start out at what was
called small time or small time even and you'd make
whatever investment you had to make in your act. You
(04:03):
might take classes, some you had to rehearse someplace, whether
it was in Europe and your apartment, or if you
had to rent a dance studio, and then you had
to try and get a booking. One way to get
your foot in the door at the earliest stages was
a lot of the theaters had amateur nights, and if
you want to contest at an amateur night, you might
(04:24):
get a proper booking. The other thing they would do
is make the rounds of the agent's offices. I'm talking
about New York, in Chicago and the big cities. The
booking offices for these circuits were in the major cities. Otherwise,
you could also start out at your local theater in
say Peoria or Syracuse or someplace. You start out small
(04:47):
at your local place, because your neighbors and friends will
come to see you, and then you try and get
bookings farther and farther away, and if you're lucky, somebody important,
either a booker for the circuits or an agent would
see you, and then you would get better booking. It
was very merrit ocratic as well as democratic. This was
(05:08):
an industry where if you were terrible, you couldn't make
a go of it. Really, wow, there are so many
parallels to stand up comedy today of what he was saying.
You start out like today as a stand up comic.
You would start out at open mics, local open mics
near you, and then get better and better, and then
play bigger venues and then hopefully someone you know of
(05:29):
notes sees you. You get past at a major comedy club,
you start working regularly. But the thing that he said
about not being able to have a day job, that's
terrifying because every stand up comic I know had to
keep their day job for years before they started making
enough money to go full time. I knew that you'd
be like shaking your head throughout this whole clip because
(05:53):
it's so similar. Now. The other part he said that
kind of stands out is the fact that if you're terrible,
I'm sorry, you're there's just no way this is gonna work.
You can't really b as your way through this. You
have to be good and command an audience's attention. Entertain them.
That is so true. And that's actually one of the
things I've always said I love the most about stand
(06:14):
up comedy is it is very democratic and merit marrigecratic
in a lot of ways. I know stand up comics
who have advanced degrees from Harvard and Chris Rock dropped
out of high school. So it's got nothing to do
with your education level. It's got nothing to do with
like your background, like where you came from. A lot
of times who like you just have to be funny.
(06:35):
If you're funny, if you're really funny, you will rise
to the top. Yeah, I think that was similar to
the vaudevillians. We're going to look now at the type
of people who often entered this industry. You know, the
more you explore it, you'll find that there are all
sorts of people. Most of them came from the working classes, obviously, because,
(06:55):
as we say, during the Victorian era, a lot there
was just a lot of judgment about people who would
choose this line of work. But you had to be driven.
In other words, a lot of people had financial ambition.
They wanted to escape their class, so they worked really
hard to do that, and show business seemed like a
fast track for some folks. That said, there are exceptions,
(07:16):
and there were some people who came from money who
chose to ignore the disapproval of their families and go
into vaudeville. You definitely had to be a hard worker.
You couldn't be lazy, self directed. It helps if you're
an original person, or if you if you're able to
take whatever their trend is and then put your own
(07:37):
spin on it, that would help to get you to
the highest levels. But there were certainly lots of people
at the mediocre levels who would just follow the TRENDI
that it was like word for word accurate to describe
what stand up comedy is like today. Absolutely is exactly
the same, like a lot of people from the working
(07:59):
classes the entertainment industry. And this is the same for actors.
I think too, you see the show business as a
way to you know, elevate your financial status. But there
again are still people who come from money who are like, no,
this is just like a creative thing that I want
to do. Yeah, And back in the eighteen eighties, the
(08:21):
opportunities were not in Los Angeles but New York City,
your hometown, but also Chicago. That was another huge place
where all the bookers were and the auditions were. But
once they got the audition, once they got the job,
to start out, a lot of times it was a hierarchy.
You had to work your way up, grind it out
for years sometimes And so we're not going to look
(08:43):
at the skills once you were actually a vaudevillian, Helen,
what would you predict would be the skills needed to
be a great fought villion. I guess the one unifying
thing was you couldn't have stage fright. You had to
be able to stand in front of a out of
people and not be terrified to death. And yeah, you
(09:03):
just had showmanship in whatever version of showmanship you were
trying to pursue. Definitely, I would add the ability to
think quickly and improvise like yeah to your audience. Yeah,
because if you're in front of a live audience, anything
could happen and you could be getting heckled. You could
things happen in a live setting. I think this is
(09:25):
a weird one because also I think the strength of
a lot of these vaudevillians rooted in the their diversity,
because you you had a true melting pot of people
coming together that typically would not be together. I'll like,
with the common goal of putting on a good show,
so travel elaborate what I'm talking about here. It became
(09:45):
what the shows were about, the content of the songs
and material for the humor and the monologues and the
dialogues of comedians, and certainly it was an expression of
the imigrant experience, and especially because of the diversity of
what you might encounter in a vaudeville bill. In other words,
(10:07):
generally speaking, it would be some Irish, some Italians, some
African Americans. If you're not in the American South, we
might have Native Americans and Jews from Eastern Europe. You
get this wonderful salad of them in a vaudeville show,
which is something I think we really miss and need
(10:28):
right now. I love that. I love that it was
ethnically diverse and culturally diverse, and that continues to this
day in stand up comedy anyway, there's so much like
Black comedy and Asian comedy and Middle Eastern comedy. Like
because of being a stand up comedian for so long
(10:48):
in in the two biggest cities for stand up comedy
in New York and l A, I have friends of
so many different backgrounds, and I love that. I think
Vaudeville's perfect example of that. We're now going to look
(11:11):
at the typical day of the vaudevillion, and so far
it seemed somewhat glamorous, but it really wasn't that glamorous
for most of them. The life for vaudevillions was arduous.
They've spent most of their time really in travel, in
very uncomfortable travel on trains back in the day when
(11:31):
the seats were wooden benches, and lots of waiting around
in train stations, and staying in inexpensive boarding houses that
might have bedbugs and awful food, and lots of time
in dressing rooms. And somehow they managed to be very
cheery and happy faced entertainers for the American public despite
(11:57):
the arduousness up there. Ordeal the bosses could control every
aspect of your life, really, whether it's your salary and
your living conditions, and they had all kinds of rules
of things you couldn't do. If you took a radio booking,
you might get fired from vaudeville because radio was competition.
(12:18):
One thing that is probably self explanatory. Their schedule, of course,
would be very different from the ordinary nine to five
working person. So if you get off work at ten
or midnight or whatever it is, and then you're you
have the adrenaline rush of having just performed. Normally, performers
might go out afterwards and celebrate, as it were. So
(12:44):
it's not early to bed, early to rise in show business.
This is so so it's close to home, doesn't it's
it's so close to home, Oh my goodness, absolutely everything
he said. When I in the early days of stand
up when I was in New York City, Man, I
don't know if you know that the average New Yorker
doesn't own a car. So I would take three trains
(13:09):
and a bus out to Long Island or New Jersey
or Connecticut to perform in the early days when I
was young stand up comic. And then when I started
going on the on tour nationally, I was a very
unknown name and green and just the bottom of the
rung of touring comics. And I would have to take
a bus like five six hours, or I would have
(13:31):
to take a train, or I would have to take
like the cheapest flight I could find, and then stay
in the nastiest hotel and then I would only eat
like comedy club food like chicken wings and French fries
and stuff like that. So all of that totally hits
close to home. And also the late night hours that
he was talking about absolutely, Like comics hours are late
(13:54):
night hours because we work starting at eight p m. Often,
and so you work starting eight pm, you do two
shows and eight and a ten, and then you get
off work at midnight and you're like adrenalized because you've
just been on stage and you don't want to go
to sleep, so you hang out with each other till
three o'clock in the morning. And Yeah, all of that
totally rings about, Like I think the fact that they
(14:17):
would be in front of the theaters hustling out there,
like trying to get their name out there totally. That
was a very common thing in New York City where
I started stand up. It's called barking. It's like where
you stand in Times Square with like little postcards are
little like business cards with the name of the comedy
club that you're performing at that night, and you're like, hey, hey,
(14:39):
there's tons of tourists walking around. You go, hey, do
you want to see some stand up comedy? Hey? You
want to see some stand up comedy and you, you know,
give them one of these cards and they show up
at the comedy club and if you have your name,
oftentimes your name will be on the card. And if
the enough people show up with your name on the card,
you'll get an extra bump in your pay or you'll
get a little bit extra stage time. Okay, yeah, at
(15:00):
that was a whole thing. Yeah, even to this day,
I think the Vaudevillians didn't have the, I guess, the
added advantage of social media. So you better hope that
whoever you're custling to in the streets remembers who you are,
and you can't just follow them on Twitter to keep
up with with what they're doing. A lot of the Vaudevillians,
of course, we're constantly on the road. I think it's
(15:20):
time to probably look at some more context here, because
do you know where the term Vaudevillian comes from? I
have no idea. The term Vaudeville comes from the French
expression vois de ville, which translates to voice of the city.
But the interesting thing about Vaudeville is it's it's a
(15:41):
mix of so many things that came before it, so
it was influenced by the concert saloon. Dime museums essentially,
they were museums for the lower and middle class where
it was cheaper to get in and it was like
more grassroots type art, like just every day stuff instead
of this oh yeah, sophisticated thoughts. Yes, you wouldn't see
(16:05):
any Leonardo da Vinci pieces. You'd see like Scott from
down the Street. Scott from Main Street has painted this collage.
So yeah, dime museums, freak shows, minstrel shows which were
very racist, but also burlesque because well, okay, so burlesque
(16:27):
you probably know it was pretty provocative stuff back in
the eighteen hundreds, like they showed some skin, and so
Vaudeville was meant to be an alternative that was more
family friendly, So you could go see the naughty show,
or you could come see the Vaudeville show, which was
less naughty. Yeah yeah yeah. Now in Victorian Britain there
(16:48):
was also music halls that came before Vaudeville, which Vodeville
borrowed from. So music halls essentially, like you think of
a music hall today, it's just like a place where
there's a concert. Travis is now going to tell us
how Vaudeville actually became a much bigger thing in North
America compared to Europe. America has a long cure tanical
(17:11):
attitude towards theater. But long about the mid nineteenth century,
different things happened. One is, we started to embrace immigrants
as a workforce. Folks from Europe came among other parts
of the world with different attitudes, so lots of dancers
and comedians and so forth. But the initial culture that
(17:34):
grew up in New York Anyway and some other cities
happened in saloons. And this is the Victorian era, when
middle class mainstream life was restrictive beyond our wildest nightmares.
Lots of exciting developments were happening in this new show
business that was happening in the mid nineteenth century, but
(17:57):
largely in saloons, which were placed is with raucous drinking
and gambling and prostitution and all sorts of day class
a things. And at the same time, fashions were being
imported from France, and that's where the term vaudeville comes from.
Several entrepreneurs realized that they could attract audiences of people
(18:21):
who might not be willing to be seen in those saloons.
In other words, middle classmen and women of all classes
and children of all classes, compared with burlesque vaudeville, was
clean entertainment. Wow, that's so interesting. I didn't think about
the kind of American societal context that this was coming
(18:42):
out in that it was Victorian women wore course, it's
so tight that they were fainting. Everybody had to wear
a hat and be completely covered up and very prim
and proper. And then here come these Europeans who have
a little bit more lax attitude about everything, and they're
telling slightly a nauti joke oaks and showing a little
bit more skin and just being a little bit looser.
(19:05):
And Americans were like, oh, we like it. This was
when you started to have steam, and this is now
railroads or have matured into this big thing. And communication
(19:27):
is now connecting the world. So you have all these
new jobs where people are given the opportunity to enter
the middle class for the first time and actually earn
an income where they can spend money on entertainment. That's
a new thing. And but at the same time, mom
and dad, they don't want to take the kids to
the saloon with them. Or the roulesque. They find this
(19:49):
kind of toned down alternative, which was Vaudeville. I was
just thinking that when you were saying that taking the
kids to something, it's like going taknic kids to a
matinee movie, but they were no movies. The movie technology
you hadn't come around yet, So this is like taking
the kids to a matinee movie, but in person, they're
trying to escape the reality of the time, which was
(20:10):
a lot of hard jobs back then. In general. That's
another reason why I think Vaudeville was this sort of escapism,
why it was more based on fantasy than reality. I
love that Vaudevillians face the same kind of thing that
stand up comics face now, which is you have to
be funny or you're bombing. What happened if you were
bombing in vaudeville then you were forced off the stage.
(20:32):
And there's an old trope that actually is it has
origins and something that actually used to happen, which was
and I remember seeing this an old Bugs Bunny cartoons.
But were you if you were doing bad, the audiences
is booing you, you get there's a hook that comes
out and forces you off stage. Do you know, yeah,
like the can, like a cane with a hook at
(20:52):
the end, and it would grab your body and physically
drag you up stage. Apparently there was an African American
tap answer in animed Howard Sims, his nickname was Howard
Sandman Sims, who actually did that, and that's how that
all got started. He would that he'd beat off stage
and he would just be like if they if acts
(21:13):
were failing, you would get a hook or a broom
or some other kind of prop and and then forced
them off the stage. That's so funny. That's so funny,
then so mortifying if you're the performer that happened to agreed? So,
who were some famous Vaudevillians well, other than Howard Sandman Sims,
I think maybe the most famous of all the Vaudevillians.
(21:38):
This is just my opinion, but were the Marx Brothers
all together. They're all of Vaudeville all at once because
they are amongst them. They did all of the different
kinds of vaudeville comedy, and they were also musicians, and
that was another Vaudeville thing. You might have acts. It's
(21:58):
well known that Hardball Marks play the harp and would
just play straight music on the harp. Well, you might
have a vaudle act that was just that, just a
harp player coming out and playing the harp. But the
Marx Brothers would have an act that combined all of
those things. And when they're brother Gummo, who movie fans
don't know so well because he dropped out of the
(22:18):
act before the main movies, but he could dance as
well as dancers. And they could sing and dance and
do dialect comedy. So they're they're another major act I
would want younger people to know about for sure. There
were five brothers at least that were the regulars there
for a while, Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Zeppo, and Gummo, and
they really could do it all. They danced, they sang,
(22:39):
they knew how to make a crowd laugh, and then
later on, of course became even bigger when they made
motion pictures and into the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties.
I was first introduced to the Marx Brothers when I
learned that Queen the band Queen actually had a couple
of albums that were aimed after movies that they did,
(23:02):
and Night at the Opera and a day at the races,
and so that was my introduction to them. But yeah,
that you can still find clips of the Marks Brothers
online and I think they hold up fairly well. But
this is clearly a different type of comedy. Yeah, I've
seen clips of the Marks Brothers and it's very old timey, sticky,
(23:24):
kind of big broad sillyiness, which I think a lot
of like modern comedy fans will might look there, look
down their nose on. But definitely at the time, this
is what the people wanted, this is what was making
the people laugh. Very influential to future comedians to like,
even if their comedy was so different, they kind of
like really just opened up so many doors for later
(23:47):
genres of comedy. I think I'm assuming that maybe movies
had something to do with the end of vaudeville or
the decline of vaudeville. Yeah, that was a big part
of it. The nineteen thirties marks the beginning of the end.
And one big event, of course that happens the Great Depression,
which not only caused vaudeville to decline, but a lot
(24:11):
of things to decline. And it was just it made
more sense for performers to try to make more money
in radio, which by the nineties had become much more lucrative.
There was one thing that I was very surprised to
hear about that trav goes into here about why vaudeville
(24:31):
actually it maybe shouldn't have declined as quickly as it did.
But there were there was a series of events led
by one guy who you may have heard of, among
other things, the major stars of vaudeville could make a
lot more money in movies and radio, and so they
started to get priced out, which hurt Vaudeville, and people
(24:54):
wondered if the live theater would continue to exist anymore
for real. But between nine and say the mid thirties,
people probably wondered if theater would die entirely and there
would just be movies and radio. And then one very
major thing happened, and I think ultimately Vaudeville might have
continued to exist in some form if not for this.
(25:18):
John F. Kennedy's father, Joe Kennedy, owned a movie business.
He acquired a controlling interest in the main vaudeville circuit
that was still going in the early thirties, and he
emerged it with some of his other holdings and formed R.
Ko and R c A and basically converted the Big
(25:41):
Time circuit, the standard bearer for the vaudeville industry, into
cinema chain for his movie circuit. I think more than anything,
if there's one person to blame for the extinguishing of vaudeville,
it might be him. We can blame Joe Kennedy, John F.
Kennedy's dad, Joe Kennedy. That was a left turn I
(26:04):
did not see coming right. Yeah, that's a random They
didn't think they can make as much money with vaudeville,
and they focus more on converting all these theaters to
just showing movies. And then we're seeing, like Travis himself,
as we introduced him at the beginning, he still does vaudeville.
He's a leading figure in the new vaudeville movements that
(26:25):
exists out there. Even I know the town where I
live in has about a hundred thousand people. Were like
a medium sized college town basically, and there's local folks
that put on small vaudeville shows before the pandemic. But yeah,
so this it is crazy how Joe Kennedy really Joe
(26:47):
Kennedy connection was definitely did not see that one coming
out was so random, Helen, what would you say, like,
as far as today, where do we see the legacy
of the Audevillian I the entire stand up comedy industry,
I would say as a legacy of of Vaudeville, right,
(27:08):
because it was that was the first time that you
saw live performers joking on stage, and maybe not maybe
back then it wasn't necessarily stand up comedy in its
current form, but the fact that these were live performers
on a stage trying to make an audience laugh in
real time, that's absolutely the legacy of stand up comedy,
(27:28):
or that's absolutely a legacy that it gave to stand
up comedy and any sort of variety act. I would
say that we still have variety acts now where you
can go see a marionette show or you can see
a banjo show or anything like that is probably a
legacy of Vaudeville. Yeah, like you're saying, so influential on
(27:50):
comedy today, even if it does seem foreign, maybe it's
harder for audiences today to connect it. There are some
musicians today that maybe would be Vodvillion, and then any
musical I think gives us a glimpse into Vaudeville today
in the movies. Yeah, I will say wrapping up that
(28:10):
as a professional stand up comedian, thank you vod Billions
for being the precursor to what is now my current occupation.
That they paved the way for sure. Job Slete is
produced for I Heart Radio by Zealots manufacturing hand Forge
Podcast for You. It's hosted by us Helen Hong That's
(28:32):
Me and Matt That's Me. The show was conceived and
produced by Steve Za Markey, Anthony Savini, and Jason Elliott.
Our editor is Tommy Nichol, Our researcher is Amelia Paulka,
Our production coordinator is Angie Hymis, and theme music is
by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. A special thanks to our
(28:52):
I Heart Radio team, Katrina Norvell, Micky Tour, Ali Cantor,
Carrie Lieberman, Will Pearson, Connell, Byrne and Bob Pittman.
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