what is vaudeville

Vaudeville is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment that originated in France at the end of the 19th century. It was a fusion of centuries-old cultural traditions, including the English Music Hall, minstrel shows of antebellum America, and Yiddish. Vaudeville was a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation, and it developed from many sources, including the concert saloon, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, and literary American burlesque. Vaudeville was one of the most popular types of entertainment in North America for several decades and was home to more than 25,000 performers. The key features of vaudeville as a mass entertainment were a culture of celebrity, an easily understood product, relative affordability, self-promotional marketing, networks of distribution or technologies designed to bring the entertainment close to the home, and a vision of its audience as seeking not just escape but stimulation. Vaudeville shows consisted of various acts that ran for two to four hours, and each act came on at a designated time and was announced on a placard placed at the side of the stage. Spectators could choose to sit through the whole show or take in only those acts or “turns” that interested them. The real focus of vaudeville was comedy, and great comic acts such as Witt and Berg and Burns and Allen brought in the biggest crowds. Vaudeville was also symbolic of the cultural diversity of early twentieth-century America.