We discussed how Vaudeville lost its popularity as broadcasting became central to American culture. Which genres of television seem most influenced by Vaudeville and how? How do you relate this week's screenings to the types of performances exhibited here? Feel free to share a clip of a contemporary show that exhibits some of these influences and compare the two types of entertainment.
Though radio broadcasting diminished vaudeville’s popularity, television sketch comedy shows, award shows, late night talk shows, and variety shows exhibit many similarities to vaudeville-style shows. Even in early television shows like Texaco Star Theatre, the vaudevillian combination of theatrical and musical performances woven together by a host and placed in front of a live audience characterized the broadcast—the only difference being that they had a stricter time-allotment.
As history moved forward, many variety shows lost the host and fourth-wall breaking. Take Saturday Night Live for example: the host still opens with a monologue but doesn’t address the audience as his/herself again until he/she thanks everyone at the end. The host is a celebrity guest, not a reoccurring face of the show (like Milton Berle in Texaco). The flow is chopped up by unrelated commercials, similar to but longer than the sponsor shout-outs from The Martha Raye Show. Also, unlike the Texaco Theatre, the skits are much more fast-paced and polished (“rarely” breaking character- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPb2-Idq39w).
However, award shows and talk shows still retained the skit-weaving host (in the case of award shows, often with help of additional celebrity guests) very similar to that of Texaco. Award shows and talk shows also offer a variety of entertainment in addition to the actually awarding and interviews- including musical performances and comedy routines. They took the idea of acts from vaudeville and put them in a sort of goal-oriented setting.
The screenings on a whole this week, especially Texaco and The Burns and Allen Show, greatly reminded me of Maya Rudolph’s one-episode variety show that aired this summer, The Maya Rudolph Show (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAKZGXXM4Mg). In it, she sings, dances, and acts in skits while hosting the show with her celebrity guest friends all the way through. Her show embodies the atmosphere of older variety shows, and consequently vaudeville.
In addition to the examples that Abby offers, which include live sketch, variety, and awards shows, vaudeville has lived on through another surprising genre of television -- children's television. When the vaudevillian format is defined as one that features musical and theatrical performances headlined by a host who addresses a live audience, one of the first things that came to my mind was Sesame Street.
Sesame Street began in 1969, long enough after the decline of vaudeville-style television programs to suggest a certain level of nostalgia for the format on the creators’ part. The show is surprisingly vaudeville, with a cast of Muppets addressing the audience directly as they host a show of musical and comic character bits, often much like a talent show. The fourth wall is broken constantly, a light sense of humor is played up with low budget props, the performances are intentially over-the-top, and much of the humor of the show is self-referential of its theatrical trappings.
In two extremely self-referential bits, Fuzzy and Blue and Big Bird and Snuffy perform in traditional vaudeville spinoffs, utilizing the clichéd boater hats and canes, dance numbers, and live audience that the genre was known for: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auqyJ1FisSY and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJGU1wI70Ng. While perhaps unexpected, Sesame Street is surely an example of modern television that is directly influenced by vaudeville theater.
Congruent to the points above, I too believe that Vaudeville's essence is most greatly permeated through the scope of variety/late night/sketch shows. Adding to that point, I would like to throw in web-clip based shows like Tosh.0 and Ridiculousness into the mix of modern media under the Vaudevillian umbrella. Seeing as Vaudeville was a medium driven by the compilation of attractions strung together by a host addressing a live audience, the internet-clip variety show fits right in.
The uprise of the internet into our media content intake has allowed an opening for the Vaudevillian model to find new form in the mainstream yet again. As we have become accustomed to the hyperimmediacy of videos on Youtube (and whatnot), we have become attracted to said videos just as audiences were to vaudeville acts in the pre-tv era, except now, we can access them at the touch of a keyboard. Internet shows like Ridiculousness and Tosh.0 play to this idea: They each use a celebrity host to shows entertaining attractions from the internet in front of a live and aware audience. Both hosts, Daniel Tosh and Rob Dyrdek, will often speak into the camera as if addressing their live audience, or will speak to their live audience in a self-reflexive way to invite the viewers on air to join in on the action. In addition, the internet content plays as the skits that a vaudeville host would present.
From :56 through the end of the first set of clips - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqWJr6qF5V0 Rob Dyrdek breaks the 4th wall by bringing attention to the talent's outfit as it relates to his presence on the show, and then goes into a monologue about the web content he will show.
It was interesting to see Milton's Berle's Texaco Star Theater show, because it was so close to the era of Vaudeville. The comedic routines that were originally shown on stages (traveling salesman is the example that comes to mind) could now be broadcast to millions of people. I think that while comedy has evolved from the physical humor and wordplay of the early 50s, the same sort of show is now broadcast in a modern fashion.
One example would be Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. He still uses a lot of different bits that demonstrate some sort of niche talent or comedic ability. From throwing footballs at plate glass windows to performing musical numbers, his pieces could probably work on Texaco Star Theater.
Even shows like SNL have drawn from Vaudeville. A series of short sketches were the basis for Vaudeville shows, and now sketch shows have taken these bits and retooled them for a modern age.
I thought William's point about children's television drawing from Vaudeville was really interesting. I never thought about Sesame Street formula of breaking the fourth wall to talk to the watching audience. I also thought of Mr. Rodger's Neighborhood, which features some singing and the same sort of direct addresses.
The fourth wall was something heavily played with in Burns and Allen, a tradition drawn from Vaudeville. I think it is interesting to see how shows grew "sophisticated" and went away from that type of address, only for humor shows like Family Guy to constantly utilize the technique for comedy.
As mentioned in previous comments, there are still many shows that offer similar types of entertainment to vaudeville. Shows like SNL, Chappelle’s Show, and Key & Peele as well as other comedy sketch shows offer quite a bit of variety in content along these lines.
These examples also bring up the subject of stand up comedy which is also quite close to vaudeville in that the comedians will often tell stories and act out small skits on their own for a live audience and the TV broadcast is simply expanding the audience. As with the Texaco Star Theater, these acts are “live” and feel more organic than recorded clips. Stand up comedians act like story tellers tend to represent this better than other comedy shows where acts like Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias and Jeff Dunham (he’s a ventriloquist) are forced to directly address the audience continuously. While not as recent, this also reminds me of the acts put on by Victor Borge since many of his acts were full of “mistakes” as he went though his routine.
Another modern form of programming similar to vaudeville are kids shows. Once again referencing the preceding posts, Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers did clearly represent the variety show style with different little stories popping up as they went along. One that I seem to remember a bit more strongly than others is Between the Lions which, looking back, is basically a rip off of Sesame Street set in a Library but it does show that these types of shows continue to be developed as a time tested format. I can’t claim this observation on children’s programming as original but I find it interesting as well.
As everyone has quite clearly stated, late-night and comedy sketch shows are always the thing that comes to mind when I examine influences of vaudeville in modern television. An example that has yet to be examined is HBO's Mr. Show with Bob and David, which utilized pre-recorded footage of themselves and live on stage performances in the same routine. This is much different than most comedy-sketch shows today because they usually do live and prerecorded performances in separate skits, not the same. In this manner, it merges both live vaudeville-style entertainment with recorded footage in a very unique and complementing manner. Please see the link at the end for a clip to better explain this method.
A new style of television influenced by vaudeville would be the talent search show America's Got Talent. This show brings in unique skits from all over the USA, ranging from 5-year old singers with the voice of Aretha Franklin to gymnasts with out-of-this world dance routines. Although each season is a contest with one winner, the performances are selected to display a wide variety of talent each week. In this sense, it attracts the viewer with the same techniques used to attract audiences to vaudeville performances.
The Texaco Star Theater best resembles the variety style performance as seen in America's Got Talent. Milton Berle was the center of attention in Texaco and often was integrated into each skit. His comedic background allowed the show to be more than just musical performances and special guests; he expanded it by bringing in the comedy. In this same sense, America’s Got Talent uses Nick Cannon to entice viewers with funny on-the-spot jokes based on each performance or judge’s remarks. This mimics Berle's improvisation during performances in order to react to the audience. Even further, the judge panel uses David Hasselhoff to balance out any seriousness with a more balanced comedic element. Overall, the shows have very different purposes, but still grasp viewers with vaudeville style variety and the utilization of hosts for comedic relief.
Mr Show Change for a Dollar Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGuT97v4pv0
It is very obvious that early variety shows on early television took over where vaudevill left off in the 1930s. In fact, many early television stars including Berle were former vaudeville performers. It was a natural progression for television to adopt vaudeville performers and acts because that is what people were used to at the time. While vaudeville started to descrease in popularity in the 1920s, radio picked up where it left off, playing vaudeville-esque acts, at least as much as radio could do, on its programming. It was only a hop, skip, and a jump for television to take over radio's brief reign as content king because it was able to incorporate visuals back into its programming, bringing the vaudevillian acts that once predominated theaters, saloons, and beer gardens back to center stage, but with a twist. Early television was broadcast live, just as vaudeville acts were performed, but the addition audience, those viewers at home, gave the performances a new direction. The former vaudeville performers such as Berle were able to interact with the studio audience as they usually did but also with those at home, making self-referential jokes and using the physical disconnect to the viewers to their advantage when the live audience doesn't react as expected. Television also allowed for more intimate performances by the stars who would interact with guest stars and advertise the product sponsering their show, giving a feeling of genuity and trustworthiness because of their experience on stage and the nature of the show which highlights the performer's ability to think on the fly and say something as they would outside of the act. Even those television stars who had no prior vaudeville experience stayed fairly true to the acts followed by acts construction that other shows employed because of the familiarity with which viewers watched them with. That would all change as the sitcom started to absorb the aspects which made variety shows like Berle's obsolete.
Unfortunately, I am unable to view the linked video in the blog post for some reason, but I can assume that it is a video of a vaudeville performance. Berle had a segment directly from vaudeville with his trampolinists. He also adds to the act by performing, poorly yet hilariously, himself in it. There also a lot of physical comedy in vaudeville which definitely comes through in Texaco Star Theater and the last show we viewed. Shows these days that exhibit vaudeville-esque tendancies are SNL and many latenight shows such as Jimmy Fallon. There are many segments that are either sketches or interviews or bands playing that really harken back to the early television shows and vaudeville acts, especially when there are larger coreographed segments invloving dancing and more tradition performing.
Like my peers, I agree and think that modern comedy shows like "Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!", "SNL", and "Who's Line Is It Anyway?" best use the vaudeville style of television that Milton Berle and Martha Raye used in their programs.
Vaudeville normally offered a mixture of acts; these acts commonly offered the viewer a variety of acts, which gave the viewers a higher likelihood of enjoying the show (there was something for everyone). Milton Berle completely copied this formula and, with the help of Texaco and the Texaco Star Theater, created his own variety show. It offered multiple acts for a wide audience, thereby ensuring that people would enjoy at least one aspect of the show (this formula isn't too far off from what Late Night talk show hosts do over the course of their episodes). Martha Raye employed the vaudeville aspect through her dance sketches and others (think Charlie Chaplin). While I didn't necessarily enjoy the dance segments, I do appreciate the variety that the show offered.
I'll end with a clip from "Who's Line Is It Anyway?" which can be corny at times (like the shows we watched and their advertisements) but can also be fun to watch (again, like the shows we watched). "Who's Line" offers a live audience that is involved in the show through ideas for the cast, and numerous broken character parts which reinforces the fact that the show is live. They also employ musical aspects for the show to help bring the vaudeville style even closer.
Though radio broadcasting diminished vaudeville’s popularity, television sketch comedy shows, award shows, late night talk shows, and variety shows exhibit many similarities to vaudeville-style shows. Even in early television shows like Texaco Star Theatre, the vaudevillian combination of theatrical and musical performances woven together by a host and placed in front of a live audience characterized the broadcast—the only difference being that they had a stricter time-allotment.
ReplyDeleteAs history moved forward, many variety shows lost the host and fourth-wall breaking. Take Saturday Night Live for example: the host still opens with a monologue but doesn’t address the audience as his/herself again until he/she thanks everyone at the end. The host is a celebrity guest, not a reoccurring face of the show (like Milton Berle in Texaco). The flow is chopped up by unrelated commercials, similar to but longer than the sponsor shout-outs from The Martha Raye Show. Also, unlike the Texaco Theatre, the skits are much more fast-paced and polished (“rarely” breaking character- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPb2-Idq39w).
However, award shows and talk shows still retained the skit-weaving host (in the case of award shows, often with help of additional celebrity guests) very similar to that of Texaco. Award shows and talk shows also offer a variety of entertainment in addition to the actually awarding and interviews- including musical performances and comedy routines. They took the idea of acts from vaudeville and put them in a sort of goal-oriented setting.
The screenings on a whole this week, especially Texaco and The Burns and Allen Show, greatly reminded me of Maya Rudolph’s one-episode variety show that aired this summer, The Maya Rudolph Show (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAKZGXXM4Mg). In it, she sings, dances, and acts in skits while hosting the show with her celebrity guest friends all the way through. Her show embodies the atmosphere of older variety shows, and consequently vaudeville.
In addition to the examples that Abby offers, which include live sketch, variety, and awards shows, vaudeville has lived on through another surprising genre of television -- children's television. When the vaudevillian format is defined as one that features musical and theatrical performances headlined by a host who addresses a live audience, one of the first things that came to my mind was Sesame Street.
ReplyDeleteSesame Street began in 1969, long enough after the decline of vaudeville-style television programs to suggest a certain level of nostalgia for the format on the creators’ part. The show is surprisingly vaudeville, with a cast of Muppets addressing the audience directly as they host a show of musical and comic character bits, often much like a talent show. The fourth wall is broken constantly, a light sense of humor is played up with low budget props, the performances are intentially over-the-top, and much of the humor of the show is self-referential of its theatrical trappings.
In two extremely self-referential bits, Fuzzy and Blue and Big Bird and Snuffy perform in traditional vaudeville spinoffs, utilizing the clichéd boater hats and canes, dance numbers, and live audience that the genre was known for: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auqyJ1FisSY and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJGU1wI70Ng. While perhaps unexpected, Sesame Street is surely an example of modern television that is directly influenced by vaudeville theater.
Congruent to the points above, I too believe that Vaudeville's essence is most greatly permeated through the scope of variety/late night/sketch shows. Adding to that point, I would like to throw in web-clip based shows like Tosh.0 and Ridiculousness into the mix of modern media under the Vaudevillian umbrella. Seeing as Vaudeville was a medium driven by the compilation of attractions strung together by a host addressing a live audience, the internet-clip variety show fits right in.
ReplyDeleteThe uprise of the internet into our media content intake has allowed an opening for the Vaudevillian model to find new form in the mainstream yet again. As we have become accustomed to the hyperimmediacy of videos on Youtube (and whatnot), we have become attracted to said videos just as audiences were to vaudeville acts in the pre-tv era, except now, we can access them at the touch of a keyboard. Internet shows like Ridiculousness and Tosh.0 play to this idea: They each use a celebrity host to shows entertaining attractions from the internet in front of a live and aware audience. Both hosts, Daniel Tosh and Rob Dyrdek, will often speak into the camera as if addressing their live audience, or will speak to their live audience in a self-reflexive way to invite the viewers on air to join in on the action. In addition, the internet content plays as the skits that a vaudeville host would present.
From :56 through the end of the first set of clips - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqWJr6qF5V0
Rob Dyrdek breaks the 4th wall by bringing attention to the talent's outfit as it relates to his presence on the show, and then goes into a monologue about the web content he will show.
It was interesting to see Milton's Berle's Texaco Star Theater show, because it was so close to the era of Vaudeville. The comedic routines that were originally shown on stages (traveling salesman is the example that comes to mind) could now be broadcast to millions of people. I think that while comedy has evolved from the physical humor and wordplay of the early 50s, the same sort of show is now broadcast in a modern fashion.
ReplyDeleteOne example would be Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. He still uses a lot of different bits that demonstrate some sort of niche talent or comedic ability. From throwing footballs at plate glass windows to performing musical numbers, his pieces could probably work on Texaco Star Theater.
Even shows like SNL have drawn from Vaudeville. A series of short sketches were the basis for Vaudeville shows, and now sketch shows have taken these bits and retooled them for a modern age.
I thought William's point about children's television drawing from Vaudeville was really interesting. I never thought about Sesame Street formula of breaking the fourth wall to talk to the watching audience. I also thought of Mr. Rodger's Neighborhood, which features some singing and the same sort of direct addresses.
The fourth wall was something heavily played with in Burns and Allen, a tradition drawn from Vaudeville. I think it is interesting to see how shows grew "sophisticated" and went away from that type of address, only for humor shows like Family Guy to constantly utilize the technique for comedy.
As mentioned in previous comments, there are still many shows that offer similar types of entertainment to vaudeville. Shows like SNL, Chappelle’s Show, and Key & Peele as well as other comedy sketch shows offer quite a bit of variety in content along these lines.
ReplyDeleteThese examples also bring up the subject of stand up comedy which is also quite close to vaudeville in that the comedians will often tell stories and act out small skits on their own for a live audience and the TV broadcast is simply expanding the audience. As with the Texaco Star Theater, these acts are “live” and feel more organic than recorded clips. Stand up comedians act like story tellers tend to represent this better than other comedy shows where acts like Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias and Jeff Dunham (he’s a ventriloquist) are forced to directly address the audience continuously. While not as recent, this also reminds me of the acts put on by Victor Borge since many of his acts were full of “mistakes” as he went though his routine.
Another modern form of programming similar to vaudeville are kids shows. Once again referencing the preceding posts, Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers did clearly represent the variety show style with different little stories popping up as they went along. One that I seem to remember a bit more strongly than others is Between the Lions which, looking back, is basically a rip off of Sesame Street set in a Library but it does show that these types of shows continue to be developed as a time tested format. I can’t claim this observation on children’s programming as original but I find it interesting as well.
As everyone has quite clearly stated, late-night and comedy sketch shows are always the thing that comes to mind when I examine influences of vaudeville in modern television. An example that has yet to be examined is HBO's Mr. Show with Bob and David, which utilized pre-recorded footage of themselves and live on stage performances in the same routine. This is much different than most comedy-sketch shows today because they usually do live and prerecorded performances in separate skits, not the same. In this manner, it merges both live vaudeville-style entertainment with recorded footage in a very unique and complementing manner. Please see the link at the end for a clip to better explain this method.
ReplyDeleteA new style of television influenced by vaudeville would be the talent search show America's Got Talent. This show brings in unique skits from all over the USA, ranging from 5-year old singers with the voice of Aretha Franklin to gymnasts with out-of-this world dance routines. Although each season is a contest with one winner, the performances are selected to display a wide variety of talent each week. In this sense, it attracts the viewer with the same techniques used to attract audiences to vaudeville performances.
The Texaco Star Theater best resembles the variety style performance as seen in America's Got Talent. Milton Berle was the center of attention in Texaco and often was integrated into each skit. His comedic background allowed the show to be more than just musical performances and special guests; he expanded it by bringing in the comedy. In this same sense, America’s Got Talent uses Nick Cannon to entice viewers with funny on-the-spot jokes based on each performance or judge’s remarks. This mimics Berle's improvisation during performances in order to react to the audience. Even further, the judge panel uses David Hasselhoff to balance out any seriousness with a more balanced comedic element. Overall, the shows have very different purposes, but still grasp viewers with vaudeville style variety and the utilization of hosts for comedic relief.
Mr Show Change for a Dollar Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGuT97v4pv0
It is very obvious that early variety shows on early television took over where vaudevill left off in the 1930s. In fact, many early television stars including Berle were former vaudeville performers. It was a natural progression for television to adopt vaudeville performers and acts because that is what people were used to at the time. While vaudeville started to descrease in popularity in the 1920s, radio picked up where it left off, playing vaudeville-esque acts, at least as much as radio could do, on its programming. It was only a hop, skip, and a jump for television to take over radio's brief reign as content king because it was able to incorporate visuals back into its programming, bringing the vaudevillian acts that once predominated theaters, saloons, and beer gardens back to center stage, but with a twist. Early television was broadcast live, just as vaudeville acts were performed, but the addition audience, those viewers at home, gave the performances a new direction. The former vaudeville performers such as Berle were able to interact with the studio audience as they usually did but also with those at home, making self-referential jokes and using the physical disconnect to the viewers to their advantage when the live audience doesn't react as expected. Television also allowed for more intimate performances by the stars who would interact with guest stars and advertise the product sponsering their show, giving a feeling of genuity and trustworthiness because of their experience on stage and the nature of the show which highlights the performer's ability to think on the fly and say something as they would outside of the act. Even those television stars who had no prior vaudeville experience stayed fairly true to the acts followed by acts construction that other shows employed because of the familiarity with which viewers watched them with. That would all change as the sitcom started to absorb the aspects which made variety shows like Berle's obsolete.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I am unable to view the linked video in the blog post for some reason, but I can assume that it is a video of a vaudeville performance. Berle had a segment directly from vaudeville with his trampolinists. He also adds to the act by performing, poorly yet hilariously, himself in it. There also a lot of physical comedy in vaudeville which definitely comes through in Texaco Star Theater and the last show we viewed. Shows these days that exhibit vaudeville-esque tendancies are SNL and many latenight shows such as Jimmy Fallon. There are many segments that are either sketches or interviews or bands playing that really harken back to the early television shows and vaudeville acts, especially when there are larger coreographed segments invloving dancing and more tradition performing.
Like my peers, I agree and think that modern comedy shows like "Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!", "SNL", and "Who's Line Is It Anyway?" best use the vaudeville style of television that Milton Berle and Martha Raye used in their programs.
ReplyDeleteVaudeville normally offered a mixture of acts; these acts commonly offered the viewer a variety of acts, which gave the viewers a higher likelihood of enjoying the show (there was something for everyone). Milton Berle completely copied this formula and, with the help of Texaco and the Texaco Star Theater, created his own variety show. It offered multiple acts for a wide audience, thereby ensuring that people would enjoy at least one aspect of the show (this formula isn't too far off from what Late Night talk show hosts do over the course of their episodes). Martha Raye employed the vaudeville aspect through her dance sketches and others (think Charlie Chaplin). While I didn't necessarily enjoy the dance segments, I do appreciate the variety that the show offered.
I'll end with a clip from "Who's Line Is It Anyway?" which can be corny at times (like the shows we watched and their advertisements) but can also be fun to watch (again, like the shows we watched). "Who's Line" offers a live audience that is involved in the show through ideas for the cast, and numerous broken character parts which reinforces the fact that the show is live. They also employ musical aspects for the show to help bring the vaudeville style even closer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOHGdt0UgrU