Baggy Pants Comedy Burlesque and the Oral Tradition

by Davis, Andrew

• ISBN13: 9781137378729
• ISBN10: 1137378727
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-01-09
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Taking readers inside the burlesque houses of Depression-era America, Baggy Pants Comedy explores the role of comedy in a show remembered mostly for strip-tease. It examines how burlesque comics, straight men, and talking women approached the craft of comedy, working in a genre that relied not on scripts but on a remembered tradition of comedy bits that circulated orally. The book opens a long-neglected area of American folklore, presenting transcripts of dozens of fondly-remembered routines like "Who's On First" and "Niagara Falls (Slowly I Turned)," as well as long-forgotten classics in print for the first time.

Author Biography

Andrew Davis is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Otis College of Art and Design, USA, and is one of the few people for whom the label "straight man" is a job description. He is the taller, more sophisticated half of the comedy team of Doc and Stumpy and has performed classic burlesque comedy in Los Angeles and at burlesque and vaudeville festivals around the United States. He received his PhD in Performance Studies from New York University, USA. He is the author of America's Longest Run: A History of the Walnut Street Theatre and he operates the website BaggyPantsComedy.com.

Table of Contents

1. "Who's On First" and the Tradition of Burlesque Comedy
2. The Oral Tradition and the Popular Stage
3. The Pressures of Stock Burlesque
4. The Cast and Characters
5. Learning the Business
6. Bits and Blackouts
7. Scenarios, Scripts, and Schemas
8. Double Entendre Humor
9. Flirtations
10. Trickery
11. Brutality
12. Burlesques13. Body Scenes
14. The Appeal of Burlesque Comedy