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Variety into Vaudeville, The Process Observed in Two Manuscript Gagbooks
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
Extract
“As a jester among jesters,” Jack Point commends himself to a would-be mountebank in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeoman of the Guard, “I will teach thee all my original songs, my self-constructed riddles, my own ingenious paradoxes; nay more, I will reveal to thee the source whence I get them.” The “source” in this case is a tome entitled The Merry Jestes of Hugh Ambrose, a compendium of asthmatic wheezes, Gilbert's thrust at not only Elizabethan jestbooks but their Victorian counterparts. At times it must have seemed as if printing had been invented only to enable aspiring comedians to plunder the wit of the past from cheap chapbooks, like the one that gave Joe Miller to the vernacular. In the United States, dissemination of these storehouses of “gags” began as early as 1789, and by the 1860s they were a staple of the bookstalls; the intended market for them was either the laugh-loving churchgoer who wouldn't be caught dead in a theatre, or the parlor entertainer, the “clown of private life,” ready to make unwilling interlocutors of his nearest and dearest. In the 1870s, however, publishers aimed at the professional; Henry J. Wehman's 25¢ paperback Budget of Jokes was meant to fill a need of the evergrowing number of variety performers.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1978
References
1 Allen, Fred, Much Ado about Me (Boston, 1956) p. 246Google Scholar; and Gilbert, Douglas, American Vaudeville, its Life and Times (New York, 1940) pp. 274–275Google Scholar.
2 Allen, p. 247.
3 They are catalogued there as fMS Thr 163 Vaudeville Gag Book c. 1870, and MS Thr 226 J. J. Cohan, Cohan Family Repertoire-Book. My quotations retain the idiosyncratic spelling of the originals.
4 McClean, Albert Jr., American Vaudeville as Ritual ([Louisville,] 1965) p. 25Google Scholar. For a general account of the transitional period, see Zellers, Parker R., “The Cradle of Variety. The Concert Saloon,” Educational Theatre Journal (December, 1968) 578–585Google Scholar.
5 Murphy was able to tell a joke against himself on that score. “I met a man 70 years old yesterday on the street, he says, I don't know you by name. aint you the feller tells them stories at the—theatre. I said yes. he shook me by the hand & said I had the best memery of anyone he ever saw. I said Why. Well I heard them when I was a boy 6 years old.”
6 Cooke, Alistair, One Man's America (New York, 1952) p. 52–53Google Scholar.
7 McClean, pp. 118–119.
8 Allen, p. 246.
9 Laurie, Joe Jr., Vaudeville: from the Honky Tonks to the Palace (New York, 1953) p. 50Google Scholar.
10 “A little talk with Jerry J. Cohan,” The Spot Light (1 January 1905) p. 6Google Scholar.
11 “Jerry Cohan, loved stage veteran, dies,” New York Sun (2 August 1917)Google Scholar.
12 Cohan, George M., Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There (New York, 1924) p. 15Google Scholar.
13 Nathan, G. J., The Popular Theatre (New York, 1918) pp. 198–199Google Scholar.