A PARTICULAR KIND OF JOKING:
BURLESQUE, VAUDEVILLE, AND NATHANAEL WEST

The disturbing perception in Nathanael West’s little comedies of despair, the nihilistic vision West himself called "my particular way of joking,"¹ begins with a conception of being as a form of role-playing that mocks the integrity of human emotions and belies the significance of human behavior. In West’s first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, John Gilson defines a theory of burlesque that persistently applies for the rest of West’s fiction. After describing his life as "a sequence of theatrical poses" and his reaction to the death of his friend Saniette as "a series of literary associations which remove me still further from genuine feeling," Gilson concludes his Pamphlet with a statement of the ontological predicament for nearly all of West’s major characters:

An intelligent man finds it easy to laugh at himself, but his laughter is not sincere if it is thorough. If I could be Hamlet, or even a clown with breaking heart ’neath his jester’s motley, the role would be tolerable. But I always find it necessary to burlesque the mystery of feeling at its source; I must laugh at myself, and if the laugh is "bitter," I must laugh at the laugh. The ritual of feeling demands burlesque and, whether the burlesque is successful or not, a laugh.²

Burlesque for Gilson and West thus signifies both a theatrical pose and a literary device—strip-tease and satire—in which the performer becomes progressively detached from the "fantastic entertainment" he compulsively provides. As strip-tease, the necessity of exhibiting his "innermost organs" simultaneously denies his role its potential dignity by converting expression into obsession and guarantees the ultimate failure of his performance by revealing in his self-caricature the vulnerability and fundamental inadequacy of the grotesque. As satire, "the ritual of feeling" involves an endless rehearsal of the same emotions until what once seemed sacred—Love, Death, Art—becomes stripped and profaned. The laughter produced by a burlesque of this sort, as we discover in the first chapter of The Day of the Locust, is actually much closer to a sigh.

"The people in West’s novels," his good friend Josephine Herbst has said, "are all bit players in a violent modern drama of impersonal collective forces."³ Gilson is merely the, first in a series of thwarted performers whose need to attract a perpetually bored and morbid audience drives him to ever more desperate excesses. Miss Lonelyhearts, for example, while trying to play Christ, succeeds only in imitating the elaborate gestures of an old-fashioned actor and the petty "miracles" of a theatre magician (ML, pp. 81, 76). Even his hysteria takes the form of a "stage scream" lacking

both authenticity and effect (ML, p. 129). Despite his billing as "the all American boy" in A Cool Million, Lem Pitkin remains convincing only in the less heroic roles of traveling show freak ("the sole survivor of the Yuba River massacre") and vaudeville stooge (in the team of Riley and Robbins). The Day of the Locust, of course, depicts the final resting place for West’s troupe of second bananas, extras, and has-beens, as well as for the insatiable audience they have courted and seduced.

The term burlesque can be applied to West’s fiction in either of the senses Gilson implies, that is, to indicate both a stylistic device calculated to defeat the expression of spontaneous feelings and a way of seeing life as

particular kind of theatrical performance. West frequently employs burlesque in both ways at once, as a medium and a metaphor. Its "literary associations," expressed in Gilson’s impulse to travesty apparently significant events, preclude tragedy and catharsis. Radically altered by the burlesque mode, Saniette’s death, like Peter Doyle’s sudden transformation into a mad dog (ML, p. 128), or the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, can arouse only a minimal response (in Gilson’s case, postponing having) from its desensitized audience. Since this technique has been widely discussed in studies of West as a satirist, the literary definition of burlesque will be of secondary importance here, except to illustrate its affinity to the form of popular culture which borrowed its name.⁴

West extends the traditional burlesque technique of taking a serious subject and giving it a frivolous treatment by satirizing "the mystery of feeling at its source," thus creating what might be called meta-burlesque."⁵ A Cool Million provides an excellent model. By further emphasizing the melodramatic twists of fate and naive optimism of the Horatio Alger books, West’s novel consciously burlesques what is already unconscious burlesque, namely, Alger’s simplification of the American Dream. Meta-burlesque introduces a second dimension of burlesque to illustrate the operation and fundamental inadequacy of the first. The recurrent impersonation motif in West’s novels (particularly in The Day of the Locust) exemplifies the basic function of meta-burlesque. Ls role-playing in West initially burlesques being, so impersonating burlesques acting. The impersonator, like the characters in Lionel Abel’s Metatheatre, begins with a vision of "life seen as already theatricalized" p. 60) and seeks to redeem for himself merely a moment of token recognition (however inaccurate) by substituting a bizarre and hopeless pose of his own choosing for the degrading, anonymous role assigned to him. Similarly, West’s frequent depiction of man as a malfunctioning machine projects a meta-burlesque of America’s technological culture in which machines are designed to imitate men. Charles Chaplin employs this technique with much the same intention in Modern Times, creating in his

neurotic, spastic victim of the assembly line an archetypal figure of meta-burlesque, the caricature of a robot. Chaplin’s hero thus endures a fate common to West’s own defective and rejected automatons like Lem Pitkin and Homer Simpson, but one which the Tramp alone proves capable of transcending.

Of greater significance than literary burlesque in understanding the pervasive joke of suffering in West is the recurrent emphasis on thwarted sexuality, ritualized emotions, extravagant role-playing, and the "natural antipathy felt by the performer for his audience" outlined in The Pamphlet and delineated in each of the subsequent novels. Stage burlesque and its purified offspring, vaudeville, incorporated all of these features in response to the American public’s demand for "fantastic entertainment." The structure of West’s novels shares much of its basic pattern of scene and sudden, violent climax with the typical vaudeville sketch. His awareness of the ambiguous value of the popular arts, however, forces us to contemplate not merely the perversity and decadence of the performance itself, but the equally significant meaning of the final blackout, what literary critics usually call the "apocalyptic vision" in West. To see life as a burlesque show, we shall discover, is to divide its people into the teasers and the teased and to animate its daily relations with gestures of impotence.

The impulse to burlesque human experience ultimately alters West’s treatment of character, language, American culture, and art in each of his novels. Gilson’s need "to substitute strange conceits, wise and witty sayings, peculiar conduct, Art, for the muscles, teeth, hair, of my rivals" reveals the special stresses and limitations imposed by burlesque upon character development. Each of West’s later exhibitionists—Janey Davenport (BS), Miss Lonelyhearts, and Harry Greener, for example—suffers from Gilson’s unfulfilled wish to be, at least, a tragic clown, while he or she remains, after all, merely an anonymous buffoon, or, as Lem Pitkin identifies himself, "only a stooge" (CM, p. 252). The extension of this sensibility projected upon language is to see everything in quotation marks, to render all speech as cliche, all thought as platitude, and all philosophy as proverb. The trite expressions, homely proverbs, and idiomatic phrases of The Pamphlet suggest a linguistic equivalent to burlesque, speech without communication in which every nuance of personal attitude (such as the final "bitter" laughter) is abstracted and obscured. West’s depiction of American culture incorporates two basic elements common to both mass technology and comedy as a whole, namely, mechanical repetition, the process by which industrialized society lives, and disguise, the principal quality of its products. The national portrait that emerges in West is invariably a burlesqued one, since the

relationship between the individual and mass society can be only impersonal (the "casualness" Gilson finds so disturbing in Saniette), or else deliberately deceptive (creating his obsession with the extraordinary). Gilson remains one of the earliest and most complex of West’s numerous artist figures. He is the first to acknowledge the failure of his art either to express his authentic feelings or to satisfy his audience’s appetite for immediate, physical experience. Moreover, his recognition of the "natural antipathy" between the neurotic performer and his jaded audience defines as the deepest motive behind the pervasive violence in West’s fiction the lust for revenge of the mutually betrayed.

As befits a cultural phenomenon which has been repeatedly forced underground by moral reformers, the origins of stage burlesque in America

remain imprecise. In its earliest theatrical form, burlesque clearly involved the adaptation of literary travesties to the stage. William Mitchell became the first successful producer of burlesque at New York’s Olympic Theatre during the late 1830s. In the tradition of literary burlesque, Mitchell’s elaborate satires of the current favorites, Byron and Dickens, mocked with equal delight the audience’s taste for novelty and sentimentality, "burlesquing the American public as well as its preoccupations."⁶ Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the burlesques of Mitchell’s imitators continued to poke fun at the romantic emotions of the day, much as West was later to expose (less humorously) the banal sentiments of Hollywood and the lovelorn columns. Burlesque at mid-century was neither bawdy nor erotic, although attractive, fully costumed women were used to dress up the tedious plots. With the presentation of The Black Crook (1866) at Niblo’s Garden in New York, however, stage burlesque permanently shifted its emphasis from variety to sex. Here for the first time on the American stage, "female nudity was exhibited not as an integral part of he plot, but frankly and with bravado for its own crass and pleasant appeal."⁷ The shows of the 1870s generally retained the racial comedy and musical numbers of the older minstrel shows but substituted a chorus of blonde and beefy girls dressed only in tights or union suits for the usual men in blackface. The success of Lydia Thompson and Her Imported English Blondes in 1868 simultaneously heralded a series of similar productions and the first cries of outrage from the public reformers. Even before the striptease became an established part of the performance, burlesque's long history of legal difficulties and moral disrepute had begun.

The bane of variety (the general category including the earlier circus and minstrel shows as well as both vaudeville and burlesque) has always been monotony. After The Black Crook, burlesque had regularly featured soubrettes and chorines in various stages of undress to divert attention

from the old gags and stock routines filling the rest of the performance. Before very long, however, the sight of Lydia Thompson and her English Blondes parading in tights became sufficiently familiar to have lost its prurient appeal. With burlesque threatening to become respectable (that is, boring) again, the evolution of the striptease was both necessary and inevitable, and by the Gay Nineties high-class "artists" like Truly Shattuck could be found in most major cities. Even nudity proved insufficient to keep the patrons stimulated. Burlesque audiences demanded more titillating pleasures than merely the sight of a woman undressing. Thus, the striptease, frequently reputed to be the only entertainment form indigenous to America, was born.

Capitalizing on the increasingly tawdry reputation of burlesque, vaudeville emerged in the 1880s as the legitimate form of variety entertainment and enjoyed a vital, if relatively brief existence until the early Thirties, when first the movies and finally radio forced its extinction. The origins of modern vaudeville can be traced to 24 October 1881, when Tony Pastor introduced the first all-variety bill at the Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York. Pastor advertised in boldfaced type on his programs that the acts would be entirely free of scabrous material and suitable for respectable women in the audience. Although many of its greatest stars, like Eva Tanguay, projected unmistakable, unabashed sex appeal, vaudeville generally lived up to Pastor’s original promise of providing clean family entertainment.

While burlesque turned to "Salome" dancers, "exotics," tassel twirlers, and countless other variants of the basic stripteaser, vaudeville introduced an incredible assortment of novelty acts to appease its audience’s craving for new sensations. The opening bill at Tony Pastor’s suggests the extent to which, even at the outset, vaudeville was prepared to go in offering something for everyone. The program opened with a comic acrobat doing stunts in a kitchen setting while being accompanied by a medley of popular tunes. This was followed by a knockabout Irish act (of which we’ll learn a bit more later) ending with one Irishman skulling the other with a hatchet, a blackface song and dance team wearing ridiculous outfits, a female singer in boy’s costume playing "Wedding Bells" on English concertina, xylophone, and banjo, a male impersonator imitating a drunken dandy in a barber shop, twin sisters from France dressed in several lavish costumes and singing in two-part harmony, and Tony Pastor himself, leading the audience in a final chorus of "The Band Played On."

Another of vaudeville’s great impresarios, Willie Hammerstein, specialized in freak acts, specialties, and famous public figures. "Sober Sue—You Can’t Make Her Laugh," an act which appeared in 1908, was typical of Hammerstein and unintentionally analogous to West’s own

treatment of the dead pan in his novels. Hammerstein offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could make Sober Sue laugh. The best comedians of the day tried and failed, leaving the reward uncollected. After the engagement closed, it was discovered that Sue’s facial muscles were paralyzed, making it physically impossible for her to laugh. Sober Sue may be compared with many of West’s grotesque creations like the idiot dishwasher in The Dream Life of Balso Snell, the "Desperate" young girl who writes Miss Lonelyhearts, and Harry Greener, characters who can express their identity only in a single, permanent grimace. With his instinct for crass showmanship and bad taste, Willie Hammerstein would have made an equally smashing success in West’s Hollywood.

Inevitably, the public’s demand for novelty forced the strippers, comics, singers, and specialty acts to ever greater extremes to elicit the required boisterous applause. Almost all of the elements of the typical variety performance—the extreme compression, lavish sets, elaborate makeup and costumes, endlessly rehearsed routines, and, finally, the new giant "Palaces"—served to deny an authentic, intimate interaction between actor and spectator. The striptease itself, with its burlesque of the sexual act, remains the very antithesis of intimacy, leaving its customers fundamentally, though unconsciously (if the performance has been successful) betrayed. Like the worshipping voyeurs at the movie premiere in The Day of the Locust, a burlesque crowd is deliberately aroused and invited to participate, only to have their impulses mocked and negated. No less than the stripper, the typical vaudeville artist, like Balso Snell entering the Trojan horse through the anus, had to begin his act by "forgetting his dignity" (BS p. 3), either by distorting his personality, disguising his appearance, or exaggerating his behavior. In contrast with the legitimate stage, burlesque and vaudeville could offer neither artistic self-respect to its actors nor genuine catharsis to its patrons. The most conspicuous similarity between West’s fiction and the tradition of the variety theatre rests in this mutually degrading and compulsive relationship between the performer and the audience.

Perhaps to sublimate this hostility, variety gradually incorporated violent behavior as a standard element of every performance, both in the slapstick comedy routines and the unrestrained, sometimes threatening reactions of the audience. Burlesque crowds, always less predictable than those of vaudeville, were particularly abusive; by West’s day, huge bouncers patrolling the aisles became as vital as the girls parading the runways. Many of the great performers acknowledged the existing antagonism and built their acts around baiting the audience. The highly successful stage magician Herbert Albini, for example, performed his conjuring feats while simultaneously insulting the intelligence of his