Burlesque Is Back

Tearing off a strip

Burlesque is back, and it's in the West End.

But, warns Rhoda Koenig, today's version is not the ribald entertainment beloved of Depression-era Americans. This has extra 21st-century irony

30 March 2005

Burlesque is back, it seems. A show called Burlesque, starring Immodesty Blaize, opens next month in London. The current doyenne of the ecdysiasts, the awesomely built Dita Von Teese, is writing a book on her technique, and Oxford University Press has published a history of the striptease. Non-professionals are also having a go. Schools for stripping tout the technique as a way of subverting the power dynamic, and learning to love your body.

But burlesque is not back, because it was never here. The knowingness and irony of present-day burlesque have nothing to do with the real entertainment of that name, which was wholesome, American and proletarian. For most of its existence, stripping, now synonymous with burlesque, did not figure.

In the mid-19th century, the term meant what it still does in refined quarters: a satire of manners, music, drama or poetry. But, when Lydia Thompson's British Blondes descended on New York in 1868, the emphasis shifted from literature to legs. The beauties' calves, knees and thighs were covered only in tights. This sensational exposure led others to follow suit, including Billy Watson's Beef Trust, advertised as "two tons of women", in which each girl weighed at least 200lb.

While sex was always the big draw, original burlesque was, like English music-hall, friendly rather than filthy. It was family entertainment for poor, hearty folk, for whom crowded urban living made the half-dressed human body a fact of life. Burlesque's period of greatest popularity, from about 1890 to 1914, was also the era of mass migration. Millions of men who came to the USA on their own, too poor or too frightened to visit prostitutes, would gaze longingly at the charms of the burlesque girls.

Workers from Russia, Poland, Germany, and Italy, still struggling with English, were also delighted by the attendant comics who, like them, spoke in thick accents. Their comic skits may have been corny, but they were holy writ. All the performers drew on a few dozen that everyone knew, including the audience - who, like children hearing a bedtime story, would indignantly call out a line that had been omitted. As the titles show - Pickle Persuader, Crazy House - these were not skits for patrons sensitive to feminism or minority rights. But what gave even the sexiest comedy its good-natured solidarity was its emphasis on male sexual frustration and inadequacy. The sexual braggart was shown to be all mouth, and the average man forever at the mercy of haughty girls and nagging wives. "Why did he die! Oh, why did he die!", a tearful comic laments, then says he's referring to "my wife's first husband". A girl tells her sweetheart she loves him, urging: "Take my arms! Take my lips!" to which he, unimpressed, retorts: "Yeah, yeah, typical - you keep all the best parts for yourself."

While most comedians were mechanical and crude, burlesque did launch some major talents - Eddie Cantor, Phil Silvers, Bert Lahr and Fanny Brice. Towards the end of the 19th century, popular entertainment diverged into respectable and risky fun. The middle class, many of them newly so and eager to distinguish themselves from their crude parents and grandparents, went to vaudeville, where the singers, dancers, comedians and novelty acts were impeccably proper. In burlesque theatres, female performers and comedians drew belly laughs from predominantly male patrons lower down the social scale. Burlesque was further divided into "clean" and "dirty". The latter drew inspiration from the raw sideshows put on by circuses and travelling fairs, and the high-kicking dances and smutty songs Western saloons put on to attract patrons and keep them drinking.Clean burlesque died and striptease was born in the mid-Twenties, when theatre owners were desperate to combat the appeal of motion pictures. (Vaudeville, similarly wounded, gave up the ghost when the movies started to talk.) At about the same time, the barely-double entendres of the comedians grew franker, and hardly more so than this exchange between a straight-man and a comic who says he is starring in a film called The Millionaire's Daughter and the Butcher Boy: "What part do you play?" "I deliver the meat!"

The origins of stripping are uncertain. Most historians point to a turn-of-the-century French act, Le Coucher d'Yvette, in which the eponymous heroine disrobed, got into bed and switched off the light. But the critic George Jean Nathan remembered being taken as a boy in 1896 to see Charmion, who stripped on a trapeze: "the lights went out with the person of our heroine still concealed in enough black net underwear to dress a whole present-day musical show chorus." NEXT PAGE