Bawdy Women: Female Comics in Burlesque
Female vaudevillians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries such as May Irwin and Eva Tanguay, both of whom reached considerable fame, discovered that the combination of a sexualized body and a comic voice was an enormous crowd pleaser. Burlesquers of the time adopted these techniques as well. Unfortunately, progressive reformers and social censors “were determined to remove the comic voice from female performers, and, by the 1920s, burlesque turned into nothing more than elaborate striptease acts, and comic vaudevillians were considered female “grotesques”—aberrations of femininity” (DesRochers 129).
Ann Corio, a burlesque performer in the 1940s-1970s, was known for engaging with her audiences directly by telling jokes. A New York Times Article from 1999 quotes her saying of her famous show This Was Burlesque, '''We emphasize comedy,' she said one day in 1976 as she discussed her show." In this clip, Corio appears onstage at the beginning of show to warm the audience up with some jokes. While in McCagy Collection here at tOSU, I got to read some of the scripts from This Was Burlesque. Here is a classic comedy scene that demonstrates the type of humor present on the burlesque stage of the 1970s:
This particular skit is entitled "Violin Lessons"
“Hel: Now you stroke your bow…did you ever stroke your bow?
Har: not since I was a little boy
Hel: Now Ill show you how to play it..you take hold of it by its neck and lay it on its back
Har: Well that’s usually the position
Hel: Then you finger the G string
Har: any certain finger
Hel: Sometime you finger it with all fingers”
With the return of neo-burlesque a lot of that humor is being reclaimed by burlesque artists. Many performers use musical humor in their acts. One performer who does this is Miss Jane Neo who was Miss Burlesque Australia in 2013. In this particular video, she acts surprised at loud bursts in the music and responds by stumbling out of her clothes. This triggers laughter from her audience.
Works Cited:
DesRochers, Rick. The New Humor in the Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Web. 24 Oct 2015.
Mizejewski, Linda. Pretty/funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. Print.
Van Gelder, Lawrence. "Ann Corio, a Burlesque Queen on Broadway, Is Dead." The New York Times 9 March 1999. Web. 3 Dec 2015.
