Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 5:56 PM by Gene

Stefan Kanfer has written a fine article about vaudeville for City Journal, which sums up, on this tenth consecutive down weekend for the B.O., why today's entertainment stinks: there is simply no place for it to practice and get better. A very pungent insight comes early on:

The word “vaudeville” derives from the French vau-de-vire, referring to the Valley of the Vire in Normandy, where itinerant singers amused the crowds with double entendre–packed songs. The tradition soon crossed the pond and by the mid-nineteenth century had become even trashier. Coarse buffoons and loose women formed the customary fare. In Huckleberry Finn, those two wandering frauds, the King and the Duke, offer a typical act, the Royal Nonesuch. In big type, the handbill warns customers: women and children not admitted. “There,” says the Duke, admiring his handiwork. “If that line don’t fetch them, I don’t know Arkansaw!” The routine, Huck reports, features the King “a-prancing out on all fours, naked; and he was painted all over, ring-streaked-and-striped, all sorts of colors, as splendid as a rainbow. . . . Well, it would have made a cow laugh to see the shines that old idiot cut.”

Such travesties placed vaudeville performers at the bottom tier of show business, at a time when even legitimate theater folk drew suspicion. “Respectable” hotels and restaurants barred vaudevillians. The rooming houses and cafeterias that did admit them were always on the wrong side of the tracks. Even in more relaxed New York City, reformers began closing in during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

And then came an unexpected moral turnaround, as profound as the change in Victorian society from loose to upright. The King-and-Duke sort of vaudeville received the thorough laundering it needed in 1881, when Tony Pastor, owner of a 14th Street New York music hall, made the calculation that Walt Disney repeated some 50 years later: a theater that excluded women and children curtailed its income by at least 67 percent.

But could the old vaudevillians have EVER foreseen that IDIOTS like DR. EVIL and MOVIE AD-BLURB COPYWRITERS could make losing two-thirds of your audience into a VIRTUE?

You MUST read this article. It will make you even more angry at living in this age.

(And a thank you to Arts and Letters Daily for the link; I must go back there regularly, something I haven't done lately.)