Burlesque

• 1. Introduction

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  Burlesque began as a joke. Literally: the word traces back through French and Italian to a root meaning ridicule or mockery. For centuries it described a very specific artistic weapon, one designed to make serious things look absurd by imitating them badly on purpose. The word had been in English use in this literary and theatrical sense since the late 17th century, and scholars eventually applied it backward in time to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and even the Graeco-Roman classics. Then, in the United States, something shifted. By the 1860s, the same word was being attached to a very different kind of night out: variety shows in cabarets and clubs featuring bawdy comedy and female striptease. How did one term come to cover both Alexander Pope's witty literary parody and a stripclub on Broadway? And how did burlesque, declared dead by the 1970s, manage to come roaring back?

• 2. The Mocking Tradition

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  Francesco Berni's Opere burlesche, circulating in manuscript in early 16th century Italy before anyone printed them, gave the tradition its first named home. For a time, the style of verse he practiced was known as poesie bernesca in his honor. By the 17th century the term had spread through Italy and France into England, where it settled on a specific meaning: a grotesque imitation of whatever was dignified or serious. Shakespeare himself supplied early examples without knowing the label. The Pyramus and Thisbe scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream sends up tragic romance, and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Knight of the Burning Pestle mocked the conventions of romantic narrative just as pointedly. In Spain, Miguel de Cervantes spent a career ridiculing medieval romance across many satirical works, including Eight Comedies and Eight New Interludes, published in 1615.

  Schoolars of the period drew a clear dividing line inside the form. High burlesque took an elevated, literary manner and applied it to something comically unworthy of that treatment. Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock was the standard example, described by contemporaries as "sly, knowing and courtly." Low burlesque ran in the opposite direction: it took a genuinely serious subject and dragged it through an irreverent, mocking style. Samuel Butler's Hudibras did exactly that, describing a Puritan knight's misadventures in satiric doggerel verse and a colloquial idiom that no serious epic would ever permit. Butler also wove an ethical subtext through his comic poem, which pushed his caricatures into the territory of outright satire. Tom Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties later showed that the literary tradition was still capable of producing full-length work drawing on exactly these roots.

• 3. Burlesque in Music

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  Richard Strauss composed his Burleske for piano and orchestra in 1890, and it became one of the most frequently performed examples of the form in the classical repertoire. The word had been travelling through European music since the early 18th century, used to indicate a bright or high-spirited mood, sometimes deployed in deliberate contrast to surrounding seriousness. Telemann's Ouverture-Suite Burlesque de Quixotte and Leopold Mozart's Sinfonia Burlesca from 1760 are among the earliest orchestral examples.

  The German-language stage embraced burlesque most enthusiastically between the mid-19th century and the 1920s. Johann Strauss II wrote a burlesque operetta, Die lustigen Weiber von Wien, in 1868. The prolific Ziehrer contributed several, including Mahomed's Paradies in 1866 and Cleopatra, oder Durch drei Jahrtausende in 1875. Into the 20th century, Ernst Krenek wrote Schwergewicht in 1927, and Stravinsky called both his 1911 ballet Petrushka a "burlesque in four scenes" and his 1916 chamber opera-ballet Renard a "Histoire burlesque chantée et jouée."

  Bartók alone produced two significant piano contributions: a Scherzo Burlesque for piano and orchestra in 1904 and Three Burlesques for piano in 1911. Olivier Messiaen's Fantaisie burlesque for piano followed in 1932. The form even appears inside larger works: Bach placed a Burlesca inside Partita No. 3 for keyboard (BWV 827), Mahler titled the third movement of his Symphony No. 9 "Rondo-Burleske," and Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1 closes its fourth movement with a "Burlesque." In ragtime, George L. Cobb's Russian Rag drew directly on Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor, and Harry Alford's Lucy's Sextette parodied the famous sextet from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.

• 4. Victorian Stages

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  Madame Vestris launched London's Victorian burlesque era at the Olympic Theatre in 1831 with Olympic Revels, a piece written by J. R. Planché. What followed over the next six decades was a distinctive genre of musical theatre parody: well-known operas, plays, and ballets were adapted into broad comic plays, often risqué in style, that mocked the theatrical conventions of their source material while quoting or pastiching its music. The comedy frequently came from a deliberate collision between classical historical settings and very modern behavior from the actors playing them. Authors drawn to the form included H. J. Byron, G. R. Sims, F. C. Burnand, W. S. Gilbert, and Fred Leslie.

  A famous exchange from a burlesque of Macbeth captures the tone precisely. Macbeth and Banquo enter under an umbrella and the witches greet them with "Hail! hail! hail!" When Macbeth asks what the salutations mean, Banquo replies that "these showers of 'Hail' anticipate your 'reign'." Dialogue like this was typically written in rhyming couplets loaded with bad puns. A staple was the display of women in travesty roles, wearing tights, though the plays themselves were seldom more than modestly risqué by later standards.

  By the 1860s, burlesque had become the specialty of specific theatres, most notably the Gaiety and the Royal Strand Theatre. House stars at these venues included Nellie Farren, John D'Auban, Edward Terry, and Fred Leslie. Before the 1870s, most burlesques were short one-act pieces running under an hour; from around 1880 they grew into full evening entertainments. By the early 1890s the fashion had passed in London, and the Gaiety and its counterparts pivoted toward the new Edwardian musical comedy, a genre considered more wholesome but considerably less literary. The English style had already been introduced successfully to New York in the 1840s, where it would take a very different turn.

• 5. American Reinvention

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  Lydia Thompson and her company the "British Blondes" arrived in New York beginning in 1868 and made the English style of burlesque a popular sensation. American producers absorbed that influence and then reshaped the form by grafting on the structure of the popular minstrel show. The result was a three-part format: first, ribald comic sketches and songs; second, assorted solo acts including acrobats, magicians, and singers; and third, chorus numbers, sometimes ending with a piece of burlesque in the English style on a political topic or current play. An exotic dancer or a boxing or wrestling match often closed the evening.

  By the early 20th century, two national touring circuits competed with the vaudeville circuit for audiences. In New York, resident companies such as Minsky's at the Winter Garden drew regular crowds. The striptease entered the form gradually. Soubrettes began by simply showing off their figures while singing and dancing; the strippers slowly displaced them. By 1932 there were at least 150 strip principals working in the United States. Star performers included Sally Rand, Gypsy Rose Lee, Tempest Storm, Lili St. Cyr, Blaze Starr, Ann Corio, and Margie Hart, whose fame was large enough that Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter both mentioned her in song lyrics.

  The early careers of a striking number of later-famous comedians passed through burlesque stages: Fanny Brice, Mae West, Eddie Cantor, Abbott and Costello, W. C. Fields, Jackie Gleason, Danny Thomas, Al Jolson, Bert Lahr, Phil Silvers, Sid Caesar, Danny Kaye, Red Skelton, and Sophie Tucker all appeared in burlesque before achieving wider fame. The uninhibited atmosphere depended heavily on alcohol, so Prohibition hit the business hard. In New York, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia's crackdown effectively shut down the city's burlesque operations by the early 1940s. Films including Lady of Burlesque in 1943, Striporama in 1953, and The Night They Raided Minsky's in 1968 preserved some image of what the form had been.

• 6. The Neo-Burlesque Revival

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  Billie Madley's "Cinema" venue in New York City was among the first places, in the early 1990s, where a new generation developed a cult following for the art of burlesque. The Dutch Weismann's Follies revues in New York, The Velvet Hammer troupe in Los Angeles, and The Shim-Shamettes in New Orleans all contributed to the revival that took root across the United States and spread on both sides of the Atlantic. By 2012, Ivan Kane's Royal Jelly Burlesque Nightclub had opened at Revel Atlantic City, signaling the form's commercial foothold. Dita Von Teese and Julie Atlas Muz became notable names in Neo-burlesque, while groups like Cabaret Red Light pushed the form into political satire and performance art. Annual events including the Vancouver International Burlesque Festival and the Miss Exotic World Pageant gave the community an institutional structure. Hollywood continued its own parallel conversation with the form: the 1972 film Cabaret and 1979's All That Jazz both drew on burlesque's theatrical DNA, extending a cinematic engagement with the genre that had begun in the 1930s.