Stuff You Should Know - Vaudeville: Step Right Up!

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

In today's episode, you will learn everything you ever wanted to know about vaudeville, whether you like it or not. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Chuckles-Clark. There's Chuck. Josh? Well, Chuckles Bryant. Yeah, that would have been way better.

And there's Jerry, just Jerry Rowland hanging out too. And that makes this Stuff You Should Know about Vaudeville. My favorite day of the year is today. Vaudeville Day? No, I mean, you can never tell when it's gonna happen and it will get hot again, but it's that first whiff of fall. Oh, I love that so much. It's so nice, isn't it? It's one o'clock in Atlanta and it's 73 degrees, 40% humidity, which is for Atlanta, that means zero humidity. Yeah, exactly. A little cool breeze blowing. Yeah, it's beautiful out. Those leaves are gonna start turning any second. No, we'll get hot as Hades again before October. It just does.

Yeah, it does that. It makes sure it's nice and balmy and muggy on Thanksgiving for some reason. And then in the winter, it'll start to get nice. Like, you're like, okay, spring is here and then, bam, they dump you with the only snowfall of the year in like mid-February. But then it's an odd place. At least for this one day. We get a little whiff of fall, a whiff of football in the air. Yeah, the stank of football is in the air, Chuck. So we're not talking about football, although I'm sure somebody did a jokie football routine at some point in the history of vaudeville, which is what we're talking about. Oh, sure. We're talking about vaudeville, like I just said.

Yeah, and this was an idea by the very guy who wrote it for us, Oral Pal Dave Ruz. He said, he got very aggressive and said, hey, Chuck, since it's your turn to pick one, you know, I did this thing on vaudeville or saw something on vaudeville. It sounded interesting. And I said, all right, smarty pants, go do it. He said, oh, you want me to do it? Huh? I'm surprised we hadn't done this before, though, because it's really cool and kind of, I think it's appropriate that it's sort of nearby our sitcoms, too, for... Right. Because this was like, this was it. This was TV, baby, before there was TV.

Yeah. And before we get started, I'm hoping you can help me figure this out, but we have definitely talked about the vaudeville circuit at length in another episode, and it's been driving me bananas because I cannot think of what the episode was. Was it freak shows? No. I think it was more recent than that within the last year or two. It was... I don't think it was freak shows, man. I really don't. But I looked, I was like, wait a minute, have we done vaudeville before? And we definitely have not. Because we talked about the Chitlin circuit on another episode.

Exactly. Yeah, that was on that episode. So we talked about like the Poconos, the Borscht Belt and all that. Yeah. I don't remember what we would have been talking about. I don't think it had anything to do with desert survival. Luckily, we have a thousand people that listen to our show every week. At the very least, 800. Yeah, it's very familiar to me. I don't know, unless we did vaudeville and just spaced both of us. Forgot and didn't title it appropriately. Yeah. We titled it a podcast to remember when it was about vaudeville.

So we are talking vaudeville. I think it's one of those things where even if you're Gen Z, even if you're a boomer, it doesn't matter. Everybody's at least somewhat familiar, cognizant, that vaudeville existed at some time in the past and had to do with jokes. There were yucks involved. It happened on stage. It was deeply racist in a lot of places. And for a lot of people, that's like the sum total of what they understand about vaudeville. But it is not an overstatement to say that vaudeville basically gave birth to every form of entertainment that we know and love today. It was a strange midwife between the theater and mass commercial media. Yeah. Did you write that down? That was good.

I didn't. I'm like furiously rubbing it off of my forearm. You know, for sure deeply racist in some ways at times, which we'll talk about, but also deeply inclusive in that all kinds of people perform vaudeville. Everybody loved vaudeville. I mean, it spanned every sort of demographic you could imagine from old to young and ethnicity to wealthy people, to poor people, because it didn't cost a whole lot. People would literally save their pennies to get into these cheap dime, I was about to say dime store, but whatever, dime a ticket entry shows. Right. Right. And it was family friendly too, as we'll see, which was kind of revolutionary. And that actually established vaudeville as like a

like a genuine American phenomenon. Yeah. I mean, that was the deal. And you know, we were sort of the vaudeville of podcasts 15 years ago in some ways, because everyone else came out of the gate saying, you know what, FCC doesn't care what we say. Phil Florin, Phil Fowle. And looking back now, we were lucky enough to have a, I guess, fortunate enough to have a company at the time that was like, you're not allowed to cuss and stuff. Don't even try it. So we didn't. And we had to park our notoriously foul tongues at the door. And I think that's what helped our show out in a lot of ways is that people listen to it in classrooms and in the car with their families and stuff like that. Right. Absolutely. And like

to think today, like of just randomly cursing casually and stuff you should know, it's, it seems weird. Yeah, we could now if we wanted to. I mean, I don't want to. Chuck, don't make me. Cuss, cuss. Nay, instead, let's talk about vaudeville and we're going to keep it clean and family friendly, just like vaudeville. And we're going to start Chuck with actually the word vaudeville, which it sounds French, vaguely French, and correctly so, because it actually originates in the French language. That's right. Apparently. And this is, I think Dave was right on point. He says it has a pretty interesting etymology. As far as

etymologies go, this one seems to be kind of ironclad and interesting. Yeah, it's rare. But yeah, it's very rare. So in the 15th century in France, it was a poet. His name was, I guess you would say Olivier Baseline. But the ironic thing is he didn't know it. Took me a half a beat to get that one. It did. I was like, is there a latency here? And he was a poet who wrote satire. He was, I guess, sort of like the

race Stevens of his time. And that's something that Gen Z will not get, for sure. And God bless you for that, Gen Z. And so what was the deal, though? Where was he from? He was from the vaudeville, which is the Veer Valley in French. And so these kind of silly, folksy country songs often satirical that found their origination in the 1400s in France came to be known as chanson de vaudeville. So songs from the Veer Valley. Like disco. Basically, yeah, that would have absolutely been a chanson de vaudeville.

So over time, I guess in France, everybody's got sick of putting the Veer Valley on the map, and they just changed Veer to Veal, which means town. So technically, vaudeville means valley town, which makes zero sense, if you stop and think about it. But it doesn't matter, because it gets the point across, because it's evolved to take on a different meaning over time. Yeah. And these in France, they had the theater du vaudeville, which were these parody plays. And then when America, you know, vaudeville is a uniquely American thing. Well, not uniquely American, because there were precedents in other countries, but vaudeville itself became very American, and you'll see why. But they basically just said,

hey, that sounds kind of fancy in French, and it was at a time in America when they liked to name things fancy French things. Well, yes. Also, so one of the things about vaudeville that it's important to realize is that it was created for this burgeoning middle class, where there were like a lot more, there was people had a little more spending money than they did before. There were conditions stunk, as we'll see, but there was a middle class developing, and this was designed specifically to target those people. And they wanted to differentiate themselves from some of the predecessors, which were much bodyer, much racier, much more drunken.

And vaudeville was like, no, we're different, even though it's a lot the same stuff. Yeah. England, Italy, they all had these sort of body plays where people would get hammered in the audience and or on stage. In America, even pre-Civil War, the shows were, you know, they were very risque. They were kind of burlesque in nature. Or you might have like, you know, sort of scantily clad at the time, of course, was nothing like you would see today, but like a scantily clad ladies dancing, and then like two guys bare knuckle boxing right afterward, and everyone's getting drunk. And I bet those were a lot of fun. But you know,

It sounds a lot like a Chelsea Handler show today. But a few gentlemen came along in particular in the United States that said, hey, why don't we, like you said, open this up to the middle class, make it for everyone, make it where families could come, because they they wanted to make money. I don't think they're on a crusade to clean up America's act is they wanted to get rich. No, but they were the kind of strict, like, I guess, taskmasters that like, they had some really strange requirements, as we'll see. We'll get to that in a second. But in addition to the variety shows, circuses were a thing. I think they,

we've never done an actual circus episode, have we? We've done a lot of the circus arts, but I don't know that we've done a full like circus app, have we? It's hilarious. So circuses were kind of coming of age at this time. There were also side shows, something called Die Museums, which is basically like a storefront where people would pay and just come look at some exhibits. And I saw, I found this amazing contemporary, yes, reporting from the Saturday evening post from June 5th, 1909. And it was basically an article written by one of the big vaudeville producers at the time, Percy G Williams. And it was called Vaudeville and the Vaudevillians. And he's talking about some of the origins of

vaudeville. And he says that one of the, the three biggest people to establish vaudeville was Benjamin Franklin Keith. And his first role as a manager was of a store show that featured a fat baby as the main attraction. Who did that baby grow up to be? Is there a great ending there? Then that baby grew up to be WC Fields. Oh, let's see. You should just say that. Everybody would believe you. Sure. I know. That's, it wasn't as funny because it was so believable. We will edit that out. No, no, no, I love it. So BF Keith was one of the guys. A guy named EF Albee was another guy. They teamed up as cohorts in Boston and opened up the Bijou Theater and basically developed a, and as you'll see, kind of with

vaudeville, it wasn't just like, Hey, let's, you know, we'll just do a show every now and then they developed these circuits and these systems and these tours and these basically management companies where they would just send people out all over the country. And it really kind of quickly became like a big, big business. Chuck, ask me again who the fat baby grew up to be. Is there a great ending? Like, who'd that fat baby grow up to be? Yeah, that fate. Take three. Take four. Hey, does that have a great ending? Who'd that fat baby grow up to be? Tony Danza. Even better. Okay. Tony Danza is a better punchline in almost every joke. Agreed, man. And apparently who's the boss is having some sort of reboot in the works.

Yeah, I saw it on entertainment tonight. So it's true. So Tony Pastor was the guy who supposedly coined the term vaudeville or adopted the term vaudeville to describe this thing that was basically like those variety shows, except no, not body. There was no liquor on the premises, which was a big one at the time. The skits and the performers were all family friendly. The language was family friendly. It was like the kind of thing that like the whole family from the little kids to the grandma and the parents could all go sit down and enjoy this, this show together, right? And like I said, they had some really like strict requirements. I saw BF Keith, Benjamin Franklin Keith, particularly did not like certain kinds of language.

He didn't like it if you said slob. Son of a gun. Holy G, which I think is maybe golly G. Yeah, I don't get that one. That one's weird. In the coup de gras, Chuck, pants. Do not say pants around BF Keith. You better say trousers or else you're going to get what was referred to as a blue envelope, right? Yeah. And here's where it gets the whole notion of blue comedy, which is comedy that is got like foul language or whatever. If like if you're doing blue work or blue comedy, there are a lot of different because, you know, Dave said in here and Dave didn't make this up, but he saw that that may have been one of the origins of some people think is the origin of the term working blue or doing blue comedy. And I looked into it and there were there are a lot

of different explanations. I mean, I saw like eight or 10 and they all sounded pretty realistic. Right. Everything from this one comedian named Max Miller, who kept all his adult jokes in a blue notebook. That's kind of roundly been dismissed to in England after the theater act of 1843, they had to submit plays to the examiner of plays like capital P to audit the scripts and then send them back and say you can't get a permit with the script. And apparently they would do that in blue pencil. That sounded really realistic, but there were a bunch of different stories. But at any rate, perhaps if you got a blue envelope from Benjamin Franklin, Keith, that that could have been the origin as well. Who knows? Yeah, because it meant like he was sending you a note

to say like you better tone your act down or you're going to get the boot basically. That's right. And in addition to blue, a lot of the terms we use today came out of vaudeville. I saw like killing, killing them. Not that word. I just made up killing. I just killed on stage. Yes, exactly. Headliner, surefire, lemon for like a bad thing, like a failure, a bunch of different stuff that I had no idea. This is just completely part of the common vernacular just came out of the vaudeville world. I love that. Me too. It's the origins of a, or engines of popular entertainment. We're having a hard time today. I don't know what's going on. I got marbles in my mouth. I'm all excited about fall. Maybe we should take a break.

Okay. Oh yeah, let's do that. All right. I'm going to get these marbles out and we'll be right back. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide

you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in

the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. So this is something we've talked a lot about in various episodes over the years, but

pre-civil war and post-civil war America were very different in how people lived. Pre-civil war, about 90% of Americans lived in the country by the mid-1880s or so. The second industrial revolution comes around. All of a sudden, it is almost flip-flopped. It's about half and half of people living in cities and people still hanging out in the country. And in those cities, there are obviously a lot of immigrants coming in really, really quickly, especially in places like New York, obviously. And they were, you know, didn't make a lot of money, but they worked really, really long hours and had very little free time. And all of a sudden, there was this thing that you could do with your very little free time that costs like a nickel or a dime.

And you could go in there for a few hours and kind of forget the drudgery of living in a tenement building and working in a factory. Yeah. And so like, not only did it bring like the people from the neighborhood around, because like one vaudeville theater owner might own ten theaters in one city like New York, so that they were, they catered to the neighborhood. So you don't have to go very far. Dave also points out that through some of like the most cringy and outright racist ethnic jokes and slurs that were part of the acts of some of these, not all the acts, but enough of them that it was definitely a thing, that it wasn't meant to be mean-spirited, at least not in the vaudeville world. That it definitely been mean-spirited before.

But say like, if you were poking fun at Chinese immigrants and how they talked or Irish immigrants and how they talked, it was a form of assimilation in a weird way, because those very people were out there in the audience laughing along with everybody else, or sometimes, as we'll see, people of that ethnicity may have been playing those, you know, over-the-top stereotype versions of their ethnicity. And in a weird way, it does, it is kind of how people came together and initially melted together when America was just beginning to be a melting pot. Yeah, it was the initial melt. Right. So let's talk a little bit about how these things went down, because there's a very kind of great motto for vaudeville, which was, if you don't like this,

wait a few minutes. And that's how it went down. They were variety shows in every essence of that word. We've done a few variety shows over the years, and I definitely enjoy our stuff you should know live, which, by the way, look for some announcements soon for early next year. Yeah. West Coast, hand-to-hand. Yeah. I definitely prefer those, but early on, we did a few variety shows where we would have like some music and a comedian and someone do a reading and, you know, someone... Interpretive dance. That's the one thing we liked. But those were always a lot of fun, because I think we both enjoyed that spirit of the variety show. When you're a kid of the 70s and 80s, those were still very much a part of television growing up.

And you can draw a direct line from what you saw on, you know, the mandrel sister show or he-haw, right back to vaudeville. And the whole idea was, if you don't like it, wait a few minutes. They would have, you know, maybe 10, 15 minute, 20 minute at the longest, the 30 minute act, and then somebody completely different would come out next. Yeah. And Percy Williams kind of put it pretty plainly in that Saturday evening post article that like a vaudeville theater manager is entirely different from what he calls the legitimate theater manager in that every week you were coming up with a new like show of a 10, 12 acts that you had to arrange just the right way to keep the audience entertained. You'd lull them into complacency with a beautiful ballet act.

And then after that, like two acrobats who may or may not have been brothers came bounding on to the stage. And then after that, there was a comedian who would just slay everybody. It was very much laid out in the way that it was supposed to be. And it was all vaudeville shows were laid out in the exact same way. But the different kinds of acts, Dave dug up a handbook from 1914 called How to Intervaudeville. Did you mark your favorites? Yes. You can proceed though. I marked down 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. All right. Well, my first favorite was the first one on the list, a shadowist. Because those are just fun. Those are people who I guess do like the hand shadows and things, right? That would be my take on it too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. What do you got?

My first one was a hobo act and the reason why I was on my list. The reason why I chose hobo act is because I saw that at Benjamin Franklin Keith's shows at his theaters, even if you're doing a hobo act, you still had to wear a clean shirt. That's pretty funny. You're like, no, but this is my outfit. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. The next on my list was the human calculator act. Okay. Always fun. Yeah, I'd like that too. Yeah. I've got one electrical act, which I mean, we're talking like the beginning of the 20th century. So electricity was really strange and exotic. And there were people who would have different acts. So I found this site called Vaudeville America. And every single Vaudeville act that ever performed would have a little

note card with like a little summation about their show, how it was received by the audience, how long it ran. And Vaudeville America has all of these things. And I found them for electrical acts. It was all over the place. Like it could be electricity used to trigger special effects, or it could be like a scientist demonstrating different things with electricity, or sometimes people took massive electrical shocks to the body to perform. Like that was what they did as part of their electrical show. So that was definitely one of my favorites too. Yeah. I mean, there were definitely some sort of Jim Rose circus adjacent things. Oh, yeah. Like sword swallowing and stuff like that. But my favorite, my last two are

statuary posing and paper tearing. Yeah, paper tearing. I was like, I don't know about that one. I mean, it must be, well, I don't know. I was going to say it must be like ripping phone books in F, but it might not have been. Maybe it was tearing paper like a reverse origami or something. Yeah. That's what I would take it as for sure. It's basically a Vaudeville show was a compilation of stuff that you would see today at halftime at NBA games. You know, there'd be a dude like balancing a chair on his chin and on top of that are eight other chairs. And at the very top of that is his wife. Like that's the kind of stuff that you would see at Vaudeville. And then you'd also see serious stuff too. Like there were tabloid plays where

they would distill like a three, four act play down into 15 minutes. And it wasn't necessarily a comedy. It could be a tragedy. And these people just figured out how to do the reader's digest version. So it was all over the place. And they, they were laid out in just the right way by the Vaudeville theater managers. Yeah, that was a great quote from this. Did you watch any of that PBS documentary? Yeah, it was very good. It was good. The quote from there was there was everything from a guy playing a piano to a guy eating a piano. Did you see that agent who described the guy who would eat a baby shark and then throw it up back into like a jar and the shark would just swim around afterward? Yeah. I mean, that was Vaudeville. And you know, like you said, they had to lay it

out in such a way. It wasn't just willy nilly, you know, it was very intentional. And apparently the first act to be the first act or the last act wasn't a great sign for you. That probably, what it probably meant is that you were either brand new or just not very good. And you didn't really have a great act, but they needed somebody because the opening act would be kind of the seating act. Like people are still sort of getting in their seats and doing their thing, but they wanted to have something up there. I was about to say on the screen on the stage. And then the last one, which is hysterical and goes counter to every showbiz rule now, which was like leave them with something great. They wanted to purposely leave them with something

not so great. So they could just turn the house over and get people the heck out of there. And they wouldn't be like more, more encore. So they would, it was like it in Mexicali Grill in Athens when we would, we would crank like, you know, public enemy or, you know, some really heavy metal or something at the end of the night just to get people out of there. For sure. They called the last act on the bill, the haircut act, because that performer would just see the back of everybody's heads on their way out. To be clear, we love to public enemy, the people that dined at Mexicali hated it. Sure. I understand. Just want people to be like, why is Chuck playing public enemy to get people out of there? Like if you knew the clientele at Mexicali Grill in Athens in the

mid nineties, you'd know. Yeah. Some emailer just was like, oh, yeah, save draft. No. So what that meant was that second to the last act was, is what you would look at as sort of the best act of the night. And sometimes yeah, that could be like a really big name. I mean, it could be Harry Houdini on any given night. It could be, you know, Al Jolson for better or for worse on any given night. Like a huge massive star. Like these, the people who were, who were the second to last act on a bill at a big vaudeville theater in a big city were probably the most famous people in the United States and Europe in a lot of cases. Like they were as famous as you can possibly get legendary in their fields, beloved by all. Like, and you could go spend 10 or 25 cents depending

on how good the show was and see those people like in your neighborhood, you know, depending on what city it was. Because like you said, the whole thing that kind of spread vaudeville far and wide was the fact that they created these circuits. And so you didn't even necessarily have to live in a big city to see these people live. Because if you had a theater in your town that was part of a circuit that originated in New York, they might end up there performing as the second to last act on the bill. And we'll, I mean, we'll talk more about circuits in a minute, but I just got very excited about that. Yeah, let's go back to racism. Yeah, okay, smart. So, you know, we made the point that, or I don't know if we made this

original point. When someone was doing what you would call like an ethnic dialogue act or a dialect act, they would go up there and do this racial ethnic stereotype. And it could be anything. It was like, nobody was safe. It could be a big Italian guy doing this, the biggest spicy meatball thing. That's the only one I'm allowed to do. So that's all I'm going to do. No, it could be like German, Irish, in any sort of European immigrant, they could be making fun of Jewish people, Chinese people, Native Americans who also had, as we'll see, their own circuit, and they would also make fun of themselves. So it was interesting in that it was sort of a, it was sort of the great leveling ground in that no one was really spared, right?

Right. And in a lot of ways, it was because a lot of the members of those same ethnic groups, like I was saying, performed those dialect acts. They were really hamming it up and really going over the top with these stereotypes of their own ethnicity. And even blackface, depending on the context, was, depending on who was doing it, was anti-racist. Because one of the overlooked things about blackfaces, as far as vaudeville is concerned, there were a number of African American vaudeville performers who did blackface and actually preferred to do blackface because it changed everything. It said we're in an alternate universe here and the rules are kind of out the window. Right. And then they could all of a sudden do a take on a satire, let's say, about the

white guy who's running the vaudeville show and get away with it. Yeah. Or make fun of the idea of blackface done by white people, like make fun of blackface acts acts as a blackface act performed by an African American. So yeah, it gave them a lot more leeway to just kind of set things straight a little more. But the history of blackface is terribly, horribly racist. But everything leading up to vaudeville and some vaudeville acts were still terribly racist, but the stuff leading up to it was indisputably vilely racist. Yeah, absolutely. One of the biggest stars in the early 20th century was a black man named Bert Williams, very handsome, smooth, cool looking dude. If you look at pictures of this guy,

he's like the Billy Dee Williams of his time. Billy Dee Williams? Did I get that right? Yeah. Okay. I don't know why that sounded wrong all of a sudden. You ever do that? Yeah. You'll say a name and you're like, what? What? It's called semantic satiation, where you do or say or speak something so much that it just loses its meaning and like doesn't look right spelled and all that stuff. You know why I thought I got it wrong? I actually just figured out because in my head, I had D as D period, like an initial. No. And not DEE. Like D Wallace, Billy Dee Wallace Williams. Anyway, he kind of looked like Billy Dee a little bit, very smooth looking guy. And he was

the first black performer to star in the Zickfield Follies, which was one of the biggest vaudeville reviews in New York City at the time. And also all white too. Well, yeah, exactly. That's why it was important that he was the first black performer. Sure. But he was, he did blackface, of course, and he was on record as saying, like he said, quote, it was not until I was able to see myself as another person, and I think he's meaning blackface, that my sense of humor developed. So for him, I think he said it allowed it to come out of his shell sort of comedically fully. Yeah. They covered him really well in that PBS documentary. And there was a quote from W.C. Fields. No word what Tony Danza had to say,

but W.C. Fields said that Bert Williams was the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever met. Oh, interesting. And what he was referring to is that Bert Williams is called the Jackie Robinson of vaudeville because he broke that color barrier. He was the first one. But he also seemed to feel like the weight of history on his shoulders. And he just worked tirelessly to prove that he was at least as good, if not better than any white vaudeville performer. And supposedly, according to this PBS documentary, he essentially worked himself to death at age 46. Oh, wow. Yeah. But he was a great talent. And even in his time, he was considered just a legendary star and comedian, like beloved by all. Yeah. I'm going to take issue with PBS though, because I know someone

else will write in saying the same thing. I don't think you can say that someone is the Jackie Robinson of something before Jackie Robinson. That's true. I know that's what people like to say, but like Jackie Robinson was the Bert Williams of baseball, if anything. Very nice. Very nice. I think that's a great, great correction, Chuck. Well, I think a lot of people just use that term now, you know, like some I could say someone so is the Jackie Robinson of cave people. Like Tuk Tuk was the Jackie Robinson of cave people. All right. I mean, it still gets the point across turning into a prescriptivist. No, no, no, no. I'm moving on. To Al Jolson, who we mentioned earlier, he was one of the biggest stars in the world as well. He very famously

Don Blackface. And he is someone who went on to have a huge career once movies came around. And we'll, you know, we'll get to the effect movies out on all this. But he starred, he was Jewish, and he starred in The Jazz Singer, which was the big sort of first huge feature length talkie in 1927. Yeah. And it's interesting that this vaudeville star became the first talkie star for movies, because that was, that was a transition that quickly took over actually, as we'll see. And I say we take a break, Chuck, and come back to more vaudeville stuff. How about that? Let's do it. Boy bands give me in this situation. If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because

I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India.

It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the

iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So now finally, we're on to that part that I was so excited about, circuits. Yeah. The circuit was the business model, basically, that allowed everybody to make a lot of money. Certainly the owners of these theaters and the people who had lots and lots of these performers signed up to exclusive contracts. Yeah. And just as an aside about that big money, I put together Percy Williams, 1909 Saturday evening post information with our friends at West Egg, the inflation calculator. Yeah, I did that too. Some of the amounts that he was throwing out, like $300 a week was not out of the question for a good performer on vaudeville. And that meant you automatically made half a million

dollars a year. But it just kept going up from there. I think the highest paid that he mentioned was a performer who pulled in $3,000 a week. A week? Yes, which is $47 grand a week today, which is like over $5 million in today's money for a year. It's like mid-level podcast or money. The average American was making about $25 a week at the time. So if you're making $350 a week, and it's the same today that the big entertainers sort of have always made lots and lots and lots of money because they could charge a lot or not a lot of money, but they could charge a lot of people money to buy to sell tickets. Yeah. And Percy Williams also said one of the other distinctions between a legitimate theater house and a vaudeville theater house is that that legitimate

theater might be happy to have 5,000 patrons in a week. Whereas on a really good week with a really good bill, a vaudeville house might pull in 35,000 people in that week. So that kind of gives you an idea of just how popular it was because it wasn't highbrow. It wasn't highfalutin. It was understandable. It was funny. It was moving. And just about anybody could tap into it and get it and be moved by it. So the thing is, though, is if they're charging 10 cents a piece, that's still only $3,500. So one of the ways these theaters made money is to have really good performers that they just squeezed because 300 bucks a week was not the average. And apparently, there were plenty of performers who all they wanted to do was perform. And if you could give

them just enough money to get to the next show and maybe eat along the way, they would just keep doing it year after year. And that's how they really made their money was with those acts. Yeah. I mean, these people were performing 14 to 20 times a week. Definitely two shows a day, sometimes on the weekend, they would do three or more. And they were, I'm not sure how much, I guess, the bigger star you get, you know, leverage has always worked the same way. You might have had a little more say, but unless you got to that tippy top point, like you were kind of doing what you were told and you were getting paid handsomely for it, but these people were working themselves to the bone on stage every day. Yeah. And I also have the impression that

if you're a vaudeville performer, even the top of the pile to act like a normal star, like a theater star would be antithetical to the whole spirit of vaudeville. I think even like the biggest stars were still like, you know, work people, like they just got to work and they didn't put on airs, I guess you could say is they would put it in Scotland. Right. There was a black vaudeville circuit that was fully its own thing, generally black owned theaters. And there was a booking circuit, a vaudeville circuit called the Theater Owners Booking Association, or TOBA, TOBA. And they were, again, they were, you know, grinding these people through the entertainment grinder, still paying them pretty well, though, although it was less than people on the white

vaudeville circuit were getting paid. And I think the theaters probably were cheaper as well. But the performers used to joke apparently that TOBA stood for tough on black asses. Yeah, because they really like put them through the grinder and like, you need to be here. And the gigs were guaranteed and there was, you know, good money, like you said, but it was, I get the impression too that it was more grueling. They're also a little bit looser. So you could get away with a little less family friendly content, a little more sexual innuendo and body humor. There was one example they found called, it was a husband and wife duo called Butter Beans and Susie. And their big hit song was that Susie sang was, I want a hot dog for my role. So, you know,

there you have it. One of the other stars of the black vaudeville circuit was Mom's Mably. Is it Mably or Mably? I think it's Mably. Okay, that's what I thought too. So Mom's Mably was a star into the 60s on, I think maybe even the 70s on television with this one vaudeville character that she came up with way back in the 20s. And I saw that she was a trailblazer in that she came out as a lesbian in 1921. Wow. Yeah. And they called her moms. Her real name was Jackie, but they called her moms because she

was such like a maternal figure to all of the other performers on the vaudeville circuit, whoever she was on the bill with, you know, backstage, she just had kind of a maternal presence. So everybody nicknamed her moms and that led to that character that just carried her for decades on. Yeah. I mean, she, if you look up a picture of her, like I for sure saw her on television in the 70s. Right. Yeah. She definitely looks familiar. So did you see that there is still a theater, a black owned theater from the black vaudeville circuit in Athens, still in operation today, the Morton Theater. Did you know that? Yeah. I've been to a play there.

Yeah. So it started in 1910 and it's still going. It's awesome. There's another one in Macon, Georgia called the Douglas Theater. So it's, it's cool that these are still around. I love it. Yeah. And then in addition to the black vaudeville circuit, there was also a Yiddish vaudeville circuit, which Fanny Bryce, the inspiration for Funny Girl came out of. Yeah. There was that Native American vaudeville circuit that you talked about. I don't remember what episode we talked about it in, maybe Geronimo. Yeah. Or the Apache Wars episode. We talked about how Geronimo joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.

Right. That would be an excellent example of Native American vaudeville from what I understand. Yeah. And they would do, you know, they would sort of play up their ethnic stereotype as well for yucks, but then also do stuff like, you know, show off some of their, their skills, like whether it's roping or dancing or, you know, shooting arrows and stuff like that. So, you know, it had something for everyone. And I think their audiences were pretty much exclusively, although that's not true. They would perform for all kinds of audiences, right? Yeah. I think basically everybody, it wasn't a segregated performance from what I understand, unless of course the theater was strictly segregated. Okay. Good point.

So, I should also, I think we should point out, Chuck, that when we're saying yucks in this episode, we're saying it without a C, like not yuck, but like a laugh, right? Sure. Yeah. I just want to make sure everybody knows that. Because we're always talking about yuck and somebody's yum. And they might be confused at this point. Oh, yeah, yeah. A yuck, like a comedic yuck. Yeah. Why UK? Exactly. I guess we can go over here toward the end, some of the bigger stars who came out of vaudeville. I mean, it's sort of a hit list of some of the most famous people of early televised entertainment when that came along. Everyone from Jack Benny to Fred Astaire

and Will Rogers and Bob Hope. You know, they, you think like, were they old enough? They were generally child performers in vaudeville. Yeah. So, I also, I saw George Burns was one of them. And he apparently had been in vaudeville since he was seven. And he finally met his wife, Gracie Allen. And they became this amazing comic duo that went on to the radio and went on to the TV. Like they followed the trajectory that that most, like the absolute cream of the crop, most successful vaudeville performers followed. And for our younger listeners, George Burns played God in the John Denver vehicle, Oh God. And John Denver was a folk singer who you should listen to because he was the best. Would you call him a folk singer? Yeah. Singer, songwriter,

folk singer. What would you call him? I don't know. I just call him John Denver. I mean, he was kind of his own thing. It was, yeah. Yeah. I mean, he was definitely not like Yacht Rock or anything like that because he was a mountain man. Sure. Who liked flying his plane, high on cocaine. Was he high on cocaine? Yes, but that's not why he crashed. I think he ran out of gas, but he did have cocaine in the system when they did the autopsy. That's sad. Quickly, I do want to mention Jack Benny's story because it's kind of cool. He was born Benjamin Kubelski and he was a violin prodigy. So his act at first as a vaudevillian, as a child, was a very serious sort of, let me play my violin. But as the story goes, he bombed really bad one night and like

cracked a really great one liner, which made everyone laugh really hard and then started sort of working jokes into his act. And before he knew it, he was a comedian. Yeah. Yeah. I guess Will Rogers had the same thing happen to him. He was a rope trick roper. Sure. Sure. And he failed at some trick and made a joke and everybody laughed and he's like, maybe I should try adding jokes to my act. And that kind of went from there. He became America's most beloved humorist after a while. That's right. But you teased earlier about movies and I think I teased it too. I think everybody sees where this is headed is movies came along and movies throwing a movie on a TV on a movie screen in a theater is a heck of a lot easier than booking eight or 10 human animal acts every

single day of the week. Yeah. And apparently movies kind of started out as a vaudeville act. Like you might see a 10 or 20 minute short film as part of the show. And Keith, Benjamin Franklin Keith and his partner, Mr. Albee. I don't remember his first name. They are ably. They were the first ones to actually start showing movies at vaudeville shows. And then it started to transition Chuck, because they would need time to cool down the projector in between shows. And they would have vaudeville acts in between movies. So it went from a movie is just one part of a vaudeville bill to vaudeville just getting narrower and narrower and smushed down into these lesser roles. And then movies just kind of took off from there and vaudeville got left in the dust.

Got left in the dust. But again, if you look at early TV and even again into the 50s, 60s and 70s, that those were vaudeville shows. He-Haw and the Mandrel sisters and solid gold. Maybe not solid gold. Kind of. It was a little dance focused. But yeah. What about Ed Sullivan? Yeah, probably. So supposedly when he was canceled in 1971, he said, vaudeville has died at second death. Wow. Yeah, he dropped his mic after that. I love it. This is good stuff. You got anything else about vaudeville? I got nothing else. Go out and support your local vaudeville theater. That's right. And then maybe see a roller derby after that. And since I said roller derby, everybody, of course, that means it's time for listener mail.

All right. What we're going to do today instead of listener mail is do a way overdue plug for a couple of things. But certainly our Kiva team many years ago. What year was this? I'm trying to see it. 2008, I want to say. 2009, October 2009. So this is close to the anniversary, actually, of when we started this team and the very early days of stuff you should know. Kiva is a microlending organization who does great work. Microlending organizations aren't perfect, but Kiva is a good one. And they do a pretty good job of getting very small amounts of money sourced from around the world into the hands of entrepreneurs and sometimes in America, but usually in developing countries who really need it. Right. Yeah. Like you said,

it's a great organization. Our team has been going gangbusters for years. So let me just update everyone with a couple of stats. If you want to join Kiva, it doesn't cost anything to join, but to make a donation, I think you can donate as little as like 25 bucks. Yeah. If you want to just get the ball rolling. And the idea is that these people pay this stuff back almost all the time. And then you can re-lend that money. And I've been re-lending the same, you know, from the same kitty of money I started with years ago. But we have now raised as a collective stuff you should know team, over $12 million. Awesome.

Which is staggering. 455,000 loans plus, you know, and change. And then for an average of almost 40 loans per member. And a little over 11,506. Wow. That's fantastic. It's really great. Congratulations to everybody on the Kiva team. Keep it up. And what else are we going? Well, hold on. One other thing about the Kiva team, I always want to make sure to say like it's extremely inclusive and they're always happy to let any new member join. So don't feel shy about it at all. And then the other thing we just found out about recently, we didn't know is we have not one, but two Red Cross blood donation teams, stuff you should know teams. I didn't know that was a thing. I didn't know there were

blood donation teams at all. Now you do. So if you donate blood to the Red Cross, you can do it as the part of the stuff you should know team if you want. We'll be happy to support you. Anyway, we can't with t-shirts, maybe small grants or just, you know, our thanks in advance for being a good person. Yeah. So go get a, go donate some blood. Donate blood. Eat your nutter butters. In our name. Get your sweet cookies. God, I love nutter butters. Yeah, they're great, but they're particularly great when you're down a pine of blood and your head's swimming a little bit. That's the only time I have. I might can't buy nutter butters and keep them at the house.

You know, it's one of the weird things of America is that there's two types of nutter butters and they're totally different. Have you noticed there's like the wafer? Like there's a wafery kind. Really? Yes. Is it shaped like a peanut? No, it's square. It's very basic. Hashtag basic. But then there's the peanut shaped one that's a cookie. That's the one. It's got, you know, it's a cookie sandwich. This is like a filled wafer. Yeah, and they're both nutter butters, same logo, same packaging, just two different types of peanut butter cookies. Man, you know how disappointed I would be if I bought the wrong package? I'll bet this happened to more than one person for sure. All right, so pay attention

at the cookie aisle, everyone. So if you want to join our Kiva team, go ahead. It's at kiva.org slash team slash stuff you should know if I'm not mistaken, or just go to kiva.org and search stuff you should know. I'm quite sure you can do the same thing on the Red Cross blood donation site. And you can also get in touch with us at Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.