audience. One of the first vaudeville headliners, Texas Guinan, opened her performance with the classic welcome, "Hello, suckers." Jack E. Leonard, a veteran of every kind of variety entertainment, later modified the line to "Good evening, opponents." The established king of today’s insult comedians, Don Rickles, worked for many years as a strip joint comic before being discovered by television.

In most routines, however, the aggression was more physical than verbal and directed against other members of the act rather than the spectators. Slapstick required only a designated stooge, one or more easily provoked conspirers against him, and assorted bladders, paddles, sledge hammers, and hatchets for weapons. The principal humor of these bits apparently stemmed from the number and variety of attacks possible within a limited time span. West’s own descriptions of two such acts, "Riley and Robbins" (CM, pp. 249-50) and "The Flying Lings" (DL, p. 283), provide a fairly accurate condensation of half a century of vaudeville comedy. Occasionally, as West’s novels force us to contemplate, the victim’s suffering went beyond theatrical make-believe. Barney Ferguson, a stooge in the Irish team of Ferguson and Mack which appeared on Tony Pastor’s first variety bill, eventually went totally deaf from his continuous beatings on stage and was forced to play small-time stands for the remainder of his life.⁸ Vaudeville as West understood it thus reinforced his contention that "in America violence is idiomatic."⁹

If the ritualized mayhem in vaudeville partly reflected the natural antipathy between performer and audience, it also became an inevitable consequence of the concision and intensity required of every act. Few turns on any variety bill lasted longer than twenty minutes, and a performer was generally made or broken by his opening.¹⁰ Moreover, vaudeville’s comic instinctively understood that the faster events are made to occur, the funnier they appear, and the closer the audience’s approach to hysteria. Faced with the necessity of provoking immediate and raucous approval, nearly all of vaudeville’s stars relied on either eccentric behavior (acrobats and energetic comedy acts like the Marx Brothers), extravagant costumes (the impersonators, tramp and blackface comics, and "The Perfect Fool," Ed Wynn), or, at least, a characteristic trademark (straw hat and cane, big cigar, Will Rogers’ lariat) to help win over the crowd. In the popular theatre then as now, any trick—including obscenity or violence—was valid if it kept the audience entertained.

With the assimilation of the freak "museums" and travelling minstrel shows, variety managed to conceal the essential repetitiveness of its "standard" acts by offering sensational sights and lavish productions. Burlesque followed a similar pattern, relying on trick costumes and "exotic" dances to offset the old argument, "if you’ve seen one [or two!]

you’ve seen them all." When variety became vaudeville around the turn of the century, the new managers, led by B. F. Keith and E. F. Albee, built huge, ornate "Palaces" (of which Kahn’s Persian in The Day of the Locust is a descendant) to house their performances. These theatres, seating several thousand and featuring opulent appointments inside and out, radically affected most vaudeville routines, especially the comedy acts. The spaciousness of the buildings necessitated the simplification of verbal humor, eliminating all but the most familiar dialect jokes and current idioms, and eliminated the more subtle aspects of the comic’s art—facial expressions, sleights of hand, double takes, muttered asides—in favor of more musical productions, smutty wisecracks, and shouted gag lines.

When action and noise failed to cover insufficient talent, vaudeville usually depended on costuming and masquerade to distract the critical eye. The ornate, artificial design of vaudeville’s new theatres, like the prefabricated environment of West’s Pinyon Canyon (DL), seemed cheaply to veneer the performers as it jaded the audiences. Simple, even transparent disguises had always been a part of variety as far back as the minstrel shows. Many of vaudeville’s early comics, including Bert Williams and Al Jolson, performed in blackface, usually without any attempt at realistic dialect or impersonation. By the twentieth century, however, more convincing and "refined" impersonators like Gilbert Sarony and Julian Eltinge adorned the various Palace stages. Alice Lloyd became the best of the many male impersonators, while the other performers developed quick-change and "protean" acts in which they would play several different characters in a single sketch. Invariably, these routines sought to cover up bad acting with quick changes.

In their dependence upon costume, their disregard for acting as an art, and their adaptation to the necessities of novelty, concision, and simple trickery, the impersonators expressed the attitudes and techniques fundamental to vaudeville and, indeed, to all of popular culture, which is perhaps why the crooner in the Cinderella Bar becomes such a compelling symbolic figure in The Day of the Locust. By concentrating attention on the process through which reality is transformed, rather than the aesthetic duality of the product, the protean acts ultimately burlesqued art itself. The archetypal protean actor was probably Leopold Fregoli, who, around 1895, gave an entire performance of Faust (an ironic, if probably unconscious choice) in an hour and a half. Even burlesque produced its own travesty of art in an early feature called "Living Pictures," girls dressed in union suits dusted with chalk posing as familiar nude figures from sculpture and painting. The popularity of these stock turns emphatically confirmed the first law of vaudeville and later, Hollywood: "Highbrow Stuff Never Pays."

Despite several abortive attempts to "legitimize" itself ("give the racket a front," as Claude Estee’s colleagues in The Day of the Locust would say) by occasionally presenting Broadway actors and concert hall musicians, vaudeville remained steadfastly "lowbrow." Many of the specialty acts, in fact, deliberately mocked artistic or intellectual pretensions: witness the proliferation of novelty turns in which classical melodies were performed on the musical saw, pushcart peddlers spun rags into beautiful pictures, and tramp comics delivered readings from Shakespeare. Although a few of burlesque’s more talented hits managed to move up successfully to vaudeville, none of vaudeville’s stars ever graduated into serious theatre. Some, like the headlining monologist George Fuller Golden, may have wished secretly to leave variety, but the public to whom he had become so familiar as the raconteur of the popular "Casey" stories would never permit him to assume a more self-fulfilling role. Golden himself was a lover of poetry and an avid reader of the classics. Like so many of West’s thwarted artist figures, he always regretted that to make a living he had to play the buffoon, or as he expressed it, "don the ass’s head."¹¹

When West first became interested in them during the 1920s,¹² both vaudeville and burlesque were already in a serious decline. Burlesque continued to alternate between pure pornography and mere decadence. Most twentieth-century vaudeville acts, on the other hand, grew increasingly effete and bathetic, anticipating in their innocuous sentimentality the "puerile" quality West learned to associate with all forms of popular culture (ML, p. 115). By the early Thirties, the "goose" had become a regular feature of vaudeville as well as burlesque; indeed, except for the striptease itself, it was often difficult to distinguish between the two. The most significant single event in vaudeville’s decline, however, was Albee’s substitution of five-a-day for two-a-day performances in the mid-Twenties, a policy which exhausted both the actors and the supply of new material. The structural dishonesty of vaudeville’s tinseled architecture gradually infected the belabored performers, who stole entire routines from each other "until it seemed that everybody was doing the same act."¹³ The public finally grew tired of variety’s brand of elaborate monotony and sought fresh amusement from movies, radio, and sports.

West’s career as a writer began at almost precisely the moment variety died. The last straight vaudeville bill at New York’s Palace Theatre closed on 16 November 1932, signaling the demise of big-time variety. Only two months earlier, the City License Commissioner had declined to renew the applications of New York’s two largest burlesque houses. Although he is more often identified with the movie industry where he worked successfully on grade-B pictures, West continually evokes in his fiction the sense of fatigue and impotence that accompanied variety’s final dreary

years; indeed, his novels may serve as early examples of what John Barth has called "the literature of exhaustion."¹⁴ Like the characters of Samuel Beckett, one of Barth’s primary models, West’s vagabond stooges belong as much to vaudeville as to any established literary tradition. Tottering at the brink of hysteria, they instinctively reel through old routines and mouth meaningless dialogue, enduring what Beckett calls "the useless predicament of existence" and what West called "the joke of suffering."

The kind of joking that motivates Beagle Darwin’s wisecracks and underlies Miss Lonelyhearts’ final pratfall precludes authentic laughter, and there is none to speak of in West’s novels. When Joan Schwartzen laughs at the sight of the dead horse in Claude’s swimming pool or when Homer laughs at Harry’s clowning, they do so mechanically, knowing that the intention was to amuse (DL, pp. 299, 274). In West’s theatre of over-rehearsed behavior and speech, the emotional responses of the audience, like Betty’s reaction to Miss Lonelyhearts’ fondling (ML, p. 80), are likewise rhetorical. For most of West’s performers—John Gilson, Beagle Darwin, Shagpoke Whipple, Abe Kusich, Willie Shrike—exaggerated poses and stage oratory substitute for directed, self-expressive action. Like Miss Lonelyhearts, they seek to redeem their stereotypic roles with "shouts [and] gestures that were too appropriate, like those of an old-fashioned actor" (ML, p. 81). At its furthest symbolic extreme, as in the opera singer’s uncontrollable laughter in The Dream Life of Balso Snell (p. 18) or in Homer’s monotonous sobbing (DL, p 398), the release of deeply repressed emotions in West’s fiction ultimately signifies only the onset of hysteria, and thus (to borrow Gilson’s phrase), burlesques the mystery of feeling at its source.

If the actors in his novels play the standard vaudeville roles—dead pan monologist (Shrike), stooge (Lem), freak (Abe), impersonator (Gilson), and so on—West’s female characters are straight out of burlesque. All of them are nothing more than sexual objects, and three of the most prominent—Mary Shrike and Betty in Miss Lonelyhearts, Faye Greener in The Day of the Locust—are definitive stripteasers. The source of their appeal is never love, nor even admiration, but perversity (Janey Davenport, the seven-foot hunchback), fetishism (Mary Shrike’s tantalizing medal), or simply lust. What little identity they possess, as in Wu Fong’s international brothel in A Cool Million, derives entirely from costumes and sets. With her platinum hair and green silk pajamas, Faye Greener remains the epitome of the burlesque queen, as intrinsically insubstantial as she is seductive.

The element of burlesque and vaudeville described here, the minimal characterizations reducing persons to objects, the endlessly repetitive routines, exaggerated gestures, unmotivated, frequently violent behavior,

the latent hostility between the performer and the audience, and the cumulative degradation of the actor, as well as our comparison of West and Beckett, all suggest an affinity between burlesque and the modern theatre of the absurd. Some differences, nevertheless, can be defined, although to do so need not invalidate the common qualities we have already examined. One such distinction is found in the audience’s reaction to the performance. Burlesque, like other forms of popular culture, depends upon the maintenance of its accepted patterns and deliberately plays to the expectations or the "cherished illusions," as Joan Schwartzen calls them (DL, p. 275), of the audience. Theatre of the absurd, particularly the plays of Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, just as deliberately destroys those expectations. Burlesque involves a ritualization of emotional experience; theatre of the absurd depends upon a disjunction of that experience. The characteristic rhetorical device of burlesque is therefore cliché; in theatre of the absurd it is non sequitur. In the novels of Nathanael West, the cliché is not simply a familiar point of identification for the reader or a part of the topical humor, but rather, a pervasive metaphor for the human condition.

The phenomenon of popular culture in America really begins with the consolidation of vaudeville and burlesque into national "wheels" during the late nineteenth century. For the first time, all levels of American society were offered a common form of entertainment at an acceptable price. By the Roaring Twenties, the public’s addiction to make-believe was complete, a fact which the Crash decisively demonstrated and yet substantially failed to alter. Confronted with vaudeville’s manifest failure to relieve the daily boredom of the masses and burlesque’s implicit betrayal of the dreams it promised to gratify, West saw reflected in "the business of dreams" (ML, p.93) a travesty of human experience which the movies, radio, and television later emphatically confirmed. Like his alter ego, John Gilson, West discovered in burlesque a perspective which could express his indignation as it simultaneously concealed his despair.

ALLEGHENY COLLEGE

NOTES

opposed to the direct imitation of an individual work. Burlesque implies a broader vision of life than parody and thus is the more appropriate term to describe West’s satire, which is rarely limited to specific hooks, but includes instead the mode of perception inspiring their creation.
⁵My use of the term "meta-burlesque" is derived from Lionel Abel’s book, Metatheatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), in which characters are seen as being "themselves dramatists, capable of making other situations dramatic besides the ones they originally appeared in" (p. 62).
⁶Constance Rourke, American Humor (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), p. 121.
⁷Irving Zeidman, The American Burlesque Show (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967), p. 21.
⁸Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville: Its Life and Times (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1940), p. 115.
⁹Nathanael West, "Some Notes on Violence," Contact 1 (October 1932), 132.
¹⁰Gilbert, p. 117.
¹¹Gilbert, p. 231.
¹²Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1970), p. 58.
¹³Joe Laurie, Jr., Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace (New York: Holt, 1953), p. 231.
¹⁴John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," in Marcus Klein, ed., The American Novel Since World War Two (Greenwich, Coon.: Fawcett Publications, 1969), pp. 267–79.