Lost on the Lunatic Fringe

We were watching a program last night, which of course would indicate that we watch too much tv. Anyway, it was called The Pioneers of Primetime. It was pretty interesting. I had already become interested in the vaudeville roots of American entertainment, and this reinforced it.

People like Milton Berle and Bob Hope didn’t come to tv from nowhere. They had cut their chops in Vaudeville. In the late part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, they’d run the circuit with troupes of entertainers from town to town, catching trains at five in the morning to hit the next town and the next house. They polished their acts in little towns like the one I live in now. They used them to test their material, and if they flopped, they’d try something different in the next town. Ultimately, they would either grow stale on the circuit or they’d make the big time in New York at places like the Palace.

Some of these acts stayed the same for decades. They didn’t need to change it. The next town hadn’t seen it yet, and by the time they came back to this one, it would be new again. It was really a variety show. There would be singers, dancers, comics and acrobats. Whole families would put together acts and go on the road together. It was the best thing going when they came to town, since there weren’t movies or television or anything else. It was a different world.

Then the movies came along, and in the 1930’s people stopped going to vaudeville shows. They tore the houses down where they used to play, or converted them to movie houses. Some of the better vaudeville acts went to radio. It was a different game, because they couldn’t do the physical humor or anything visual. They had to describe what was going on, or use sound-effects. They couldn’t do the same act week in and week out. They had to come up with new material, and writers were suddenly a new industry standard. A lot of acts died, because what do you do with a dancer or an acrobat on the radio? Still, RKO had live acts and dancing. Some of them went to film work, mostly for MGM, it would seem.

Then came television. The ones who’d gone to the radio were lucky, because not only had they gotten used to coming up with new material, but they got to dust off their old acts from the stage. Twenty minutes into the birth of television, it was playing vaudeville. What knocked me out was the fact that Milton Berle was so good that people bought televisions just to be able to watch him. He gave jobs to his friends, and they had their own shows too. There was no room for an act to flop in television, because if it didn’t play to applause the first night, you didn’t do it again.

Writers like Mel Brooks and Woody Allen got their start on the ground floor of television. Lucille Ball and Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers were either alumni of vaudeville or inspired by it in their acts. Ditto on Dick Van Dyke.

I might be barking up the wrong tree, but if burlesque can make a comeback, why not vaudeville? I watch old footage of the acts, and I’d pay to see them now. I know a lot of people who would. It would give people something to make a night of, instead of staying in to watch tv or going out to see a movie. We’d get some talented entertainers again. I asked Mehdi if he could name even one dancer now who could compete with some of the old hoofers, and there wasn’t a name that came to mind.

I thought about what entertainment was for our grandparents, and it was completely different. They used to dance. They used to meet their spouse that way, after holding a stranger close for a dance or a few dances. Not to be crude, but you knew that if someone was a good dancer, they could do other things well too. You got exercise, because there was a dance somewhere every weekend. You got to know the people in town, because there was somewhere to meet them. You got to dress up, because there was a reason to look good. I look around me at the bar scene, and I think how dismal it is. Everyone is depressed, and all they do is drink and feel lonely. Maybe we need to find a way to bring it all back, and encourage our musicians and our dancers and our human relationships.

Mehdi was reading a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin asks Hobbes what Marx meant when he said that religion was the opiate of the masses. The television silently pipes up to say that it meant Marx hadn’t seen anything yet. I have to say, I agree. I’m going to have to get my hands on a copy of Harlan Ellison’s The Glass Teat.