In the 1860s, British immigrants brought a new style of entertainment to the young nation’s shores. They called it burlesque, a loan word from French that signified satire, comedy, and humor. The British Blondes were a troupe that performed dance routines for Civil War veterans and their families. Burlesque, in the beginning was a tame type of variety show that included not just dancers but also comedians, music, melodrama skits, acrobats, and whatever else they could fit into the program. It was family entertainment of the most inoffensive kind. As it became a more popular form of entertainment, shows grew more elaborate. Lines of dancing chorus girls became the closing act at each show and rumors began to spread that they did not wear panties; men began showing up just to see if they could get a peek but that was just a rumor, possibly spread on purpose as a publicity stunt. That rumor was a sign of things to come.
By the 1890s, the exoticism of burlesque dancers had captured the imagination and they started appearing in a wider variety of venues like circuses, carnivals, county fairs, and expositions. At the Columbia Exhibition of 1893, a dancer named Little Egypt charmed the crowds. In 1899, Watson’s Beef Trust sponsored a show with a bunch of overweight farmer’s wives, each one pushing 300 pounds or more, prancing on stage in bathing suits and cowboy hatsto thrill an audience of agriculturalists. Burlesque had taken a turn towards sexiness that the moralists of the day did not like. But these shows were still tame. For working class families in the era before movies and television, a day of burlesque offered a way to escape on a weekend day off.
By the turn of the century, burlesque began taking on a more tawdry reputation. The content of the shows had not changed much but two other things had: the locations of the theaters and the members of the audience. While high and middle-brow variety shows were being performed on Broadway and vaudeville theaters, the simpler style of burlesque was patronized more and more by blue collar and immigrant communities. Dancing and music were prioritized because much of the audience were still struggling to learn English. The less than affluent crowds brought in less cash so burlesque was done in low-rent venues, located in the less trendy parts of town. The theaters were small, undecorated halls with raised platforms for stages and wooden benches. Peanut shells and cigarette butts littered the floors. Sometimes the audience members got rowdy, especially if they had been drinking.
But burlesque was a growing business and travel circuits, called “wheels”, were set up to rotate the performers. The musicians and dancers were transients, spending two or three nights in one city then moving on to another. For most, it was a six or seven day work week with two or three performances every day. And like nomadic people all across the world, burlesque performers become objects of curiosity and suspicion. Church leaders told their flocks that this was a sinful form of entertainment. The vice squads began paying closer attention and people accused the attractive young dancers of being prostitutes. America’s prudent do-gooders told people that the girls were victims of kidnappers who got them addicted to drugs and forced them to work without pay. As usual, none of this hype was true.
Meanwhile on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a young nickelodeon owner named Abe Minsky began showing silent film loops of ladies lifting up their skirts to show a little skin. His father was not happy and commanded him to shut the operation down. But the old man owned the National Winter Garden a few blocks uptown. The sixth floor had a movie theater and he gave control of it over to Abe and his two brothers, Billy and Herbert.
Competition in New York was brutal and the big budget theaters around town drew bigger crowds. Even worse, the climb up six flights of stairs to watch low quality films, albeit at a reduced entry cost, was a turn off to the growing patrons of the fledgling film industry. They needed a gimmick and they needed it fast. Vaudeville was popular at the time and the young businessmen thought combining that with a movie would be a good idea. But vaudeville performers demanded too much money. So they turned to burlesque. The dancers had less talent but they worked for lower wages. By then the Minsky’s knew that talent did not mean much when the women were scantily clad so they encouraged them to be a little more risque.
This gimmick was a hit and soon the Minsky’s had a chain of theaters all over New York City and the surrounding areas. Not only that, but burlesque had started becoming respectable again. Their classier venues, mostly theaters and nightclubs, and the effort put into giving a flashier show, drew a more sophisticated audience. Burlesque slithered its way into the middle class.
Audiences at the Winter Garden were growing bigger but it still wasn’t enough. After vacationing in Paris, Abe Minsky came back with an idea he picked up when visiting the Moulin Rouge in the Pigalle red light district. Upon his return, each Minsky theater had a runway built from the stage halfway through the theater so that audience members were more up close and personal with the dancers.
Then in 1917, serendipity created a watershed event in the history of American culture. After an ordinary routine, an absent-minded young dancer named Mae Dix began removing her costume while walking off the stage. The men in the audience began cheering and demanding she return. The quick-thinking manager, Billy Minsky, redirected her back onto the stage and told her to keep taking it off. That is what she did. On that auspicious night, Mae Dix performed the first striptease in American history.
The Minsky brothers put their heads together and had stripping incorporated into the act. The band was usually a trio with piano, drums, and either a horn, a sax, a trumpet, or a trombone. Some fancier clubs had a couple extra musicians. The music was a raunchy and raw mix of Dixieland and hot jazz. Variations on the style were called things like hoochie coochie, boogie woogie, and tittytwisters; there was an occasional cool jazz or sultry vocal number sung by a dancer with singing talent. Colored spot lights were added and chorus lines remained a part of the show.
The comedians stayed also. Usually they were a pair with a straight man and a stooge, both of them wearing baggy trousers, loosened neckties, and threadbare coats. Their lack of decorum helped to break down the barrier between the performers and the commoners in the audience. The humor was suggestive and double-entendred, often not very funny and each punchline was highlighting with a snare-roll and cymbal smash just in case nobody knew it was meant to be a joke. “The other day I was standing at a bus stop next to a lady and a gust of wind blew up her skirt. I could see she had nothing on underneath.” “What did you say to her?” “Airy, isn’t it?” “And what did she say?” “What did you expect? Feathers?” Those corny jokes your grandfather used to tell were probably learned from burlesque. Comedians knew when they were bombing. Hecklers made it clear and shouts of “bring on the girls” was an indication they shouldn’t drag their act out for too long. Very few jokes were original and a seasoned audience member knew each one by heart. The best burlesque comedians were like blues guitarists who take a familiar tune and make it into something of their own.
But some comedians were original and not all of them were bad. The list of stand-up comics who got their start in burlesque reads like a who’s who of midcentury American entertainment. Red Skelton, Bob Hope, Zero Mostel, Milton Berle, and Morey Amsterdam all got there start on the burlesque wheels before moving on to radio, film, and television. One comedian was Pinky Lee whose TV show became the prototype for Paul Reuben’s Pee Wee Herman character. Abbot and Costello first performed their “Who’s on First” shtick in burlesque shows before booking agents for radio saw their potential. Lenny Bruce got his first break doing his own seminal brand of blue comedy when his mother got him a job in a burlesque theater where she worked. And while Bald Bill Hagan was the premier musician of the Minsky circuit, it is also believed that a schmaltzy young crooner named Bing Crosby got his start there as well.
Some of the comedians were gay cross-dressing men. Their frank and open talk about their sexual orientation was tolerated as long as they made it part of a comedy act. Surprisingly, audiences showed little hostility considering the times and the stage became a place of liberation for these otherwise closeted individuals.
As for the dancers, as more clothes began coming off, their costumes became more elaborate. Layers of gowns, capes, gloves, scarves, feather boas, and veils were used to cover as much as possible. Long hair was used for a similar effect. Eye make up, fake lashes, and lipstick heightened the sensual features of their faces. As the outer garments came off, they revealed teddies, lace bras and panties, stockings, high heeled shoes, and beneath all that were pasties, g-strings, merkins, sometimes even body paint. Some dancers wore tight skin-colored bras with make-up on the tips to make it look like their nipples were showing. Others glued brillo pads to their panties to make men think they had seen a little bush when a leg was thrust high up into the air. The trick was to tease by showing as much as possible without actually showing anything at all.
The longer a striptease lasted the better. The aim was to titillate, not to reveal. A little bit was shown, then a little bit more and a little bit more but the end point resided in the imagination. A good performer knew how to look every male member of the audience in the eye and meet their gaze with a look that said,”You’ll be getting something hot in the bedroom tonight but you’re gonna have to wait.” Typical moves were the bump, a sudden, staccato thrust of the bust, pelvis, or butt and the grind, a slow, writhing movement of the hips that evoked images of the dancer in a reverse cowgirl position, taking her time to make the pleasure and ecstasy last. Dance steps and body movements were perfectly times to the high-pulsed and explosive beats of the drums while facial expressions and lingering looks were carried along gently by whatever sweaty lines were being played on the sax. A striptease ended when the dancer was bare except for a see-through negligee or a bikini bottom and tassels tacked onto her breasts. The best dancers could entice the audience into imagining them naked rather than showing off the real thing. Striptease was a sexy, psychological game of hedonistic brinkmanship.
Many of the strippers were Southern girls who fled to the big cities to escape the hopelessness of poverty. Taking off clothes on a stage before an audience of strangers was preferable to starvation and the trappings and uncertainties of rural, hillbilly life. Most of them were teenagers when they entered the business. Use of narcotics was almost unheard of but smoking and drinking were routine. Alcohol addiction made life rough for many dancers. While wages remained low at working-class rates, the most famous strippers made millions and some went on to become successful businesswomen on their own. Top name performers like Blaze Star, Lili St. Cyr, and Gypsy Rose Lee were blessed with fame and fortune. A small number of dancers were from ethnic backgrounds; an audience might see a Mexican, Asian, Native American or African-American lady on stage, their costumes and performance themes being gaudy caricatures of racial stereotypes, glaring examples of the exotica kitsch that fascinated bland, middle-class America. Sometimes there were even effeminate male cross-dressers doing striptease for comic effect.
Audience members went through transformations over time. What started as family entertainment changed into evenings out for married couples. They sipped cocktails while watching the show before returning home to relieve the tensions that had built up inside the nightclub. When dancers progressed towards more and more erotic and revealing routines, the couples subsided and single men took their place. Dancers might look out into a crowd of lonely guys in trench coats, their hands in the pockets and their hats on their laps in a vain attempt to conceal the fact that they were playing with themselves.
In the 1920s, the 18th Amendment to the American Constitution was ratified by Congress and the Prohibition era began. While Americans had less access to liquor, beer, and wine, the authorities began to loosen up on sexual morality. When the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway began featuring bare-breasted dancers in their chorus lines, burlesque theaters soon followed suit. Some strippers finished their performance by mooning the audience or flashing a nipple. Topless women were allowed on stage as long as their movements were not sexually suggestive in any way. Thus a strange phenomenon was incorporated into the act. While dancers danced center stage, young women who were nude from the waist up would stand in the back, still as statues. If one of them made any movement at all, the police would have the club closed in no time. While more flesh was being revealed it was the plain-clothes police who were doing the most watching. Stakeouts and shakedowns became commonplace. A stripper who spread her legs just a little too far or swiveled her hips with a little too much emphasis would bring on a raid, the girls would be rounded up and taken downtown. But bookings were rare. Sometimes bribes were demanded but mostly the cops just wanted to make a show of their power. It wasn’t uncommon for a dancer to have charges dropped in exchange for a glossy, autographed photo of herself in skimpy clothing.
By the 1930s, Prohibition had ended and the Great Depression had begun. Burlesque continued to rise in popularity, mostly because the poor, huddled masses of America had so little else to do with their time when unemployed. Sagging spirits and other body parts could be propped up by a day of escapism in a theater with comedy, music, and stripping. There was no shortage of cute young females who were willing to learn a few dance moves and take off their clothes to earn a bite to eat or gain a couple bucks to pay rent. Some audience members were so poor that they couldn’t afford the price of admission so they brought extra dishes or old clothes to be passed on to the performers in exchange for entry. Outside the big cities, nightclubs were often forced out into the seedier neighborhoods on the outskirts of town and often the landlords were members of La Cosa Nostra. Despite that shadowy element, the bars themselves were safe. The crime lords were rarely ever around, showing up once a month to collect rent or sit in with some friends for a performance. Mob business was done off-premises and in secrecy.
But the arbiters of American morality wanted to be sure that the wicked should never be allowed to rest. New York City’s uptight Catholic mayor Fiorello LaGuardia began to crack down. Raids on Minsky theaters and other burlesque venues became more and more frequent. Undercover cops tried to entrap dancers with offers of money in exchange for sex. Charges of public lewdness increased in seriousness until 1937 when LaGuardia banned all burlesque theaters in New York and a Minsky’s theater got raided and closed down with charges filed against the managers. Jail time was served, fines were collected, but the ban did not extend outside of city limits and the Minsky’s moved their operations to nearby Newark, New Jersey.
Then the next big event for America, and burlesque, was World War II. Soldiers heading out overseas would go to see burlesque for one last night out before leaving on a journey into a dangerous and uncertain future. Men returning after deployment were also eager to party and a bar full of dancing beauties was just what they wanted. To a man in uniform there was nothing more attractive then a stripper and to a stripper there was nothing more attractive than a man in uniform. Many soldiers departed with pictures of their favorite dancers in their packs. While stuck in trenches or bunks, the sweet gaze of a scantily-clad woman gave any man a fantasy to escape into. Some of the dancers went overseas to entertain the troops. Many strippers were moonlighting as pin-up girls and models for calendars and girly magazines. Other ladies went to work for the notorious Irving Klaw or clandestine photo studios where they posed in bondage, being hog-tied, gagged, and strapped to a wrack or standing menacingly over submissives with bullwhips in their hands. This was the time when burlesque reached its peak in popularity.
The troops eventually returned home. Soon burlesque had a new competitor. Television was new to the American public. People started spending less time outside their homes. Music and comedy skits could be seen, for free no less, when beamed into the living rooms of many family homes. Variety entertainment could be watched, minus the strippers, on shows hosted by the likes of Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen. People no longer wanted comedy in burlesque clubs so to stay in business, the nightclubs eliminated the appetizer and dessert, serving up only the main course in bigger and bigger portions. Stripping became the main attraction and the performers drew bigger crowds by getting raunchier and more explicit. The art of the tease was disappearing, the bump and grind were growing stale, and the baring of tits and asses for tips became de rigeur. It was the age of felt suits, cheap cigars, and three-martini lunch breaks so managers encouraged the dancers to sit with sexually frustrated businessmen. The price of companionship was buying drinks for the girls at wildly inflated prices. The rum and cokes had no rum and the screwdrivers had no vodka but the guys got to be seen with a nubile-looking young sweetheart who otherwise had no interest in them.
By the end of the 1960s, the sexual revolution was in full swing and pornography had been legalized. Close-up films and pictures of the human reproductive system, at work in all its variations, proliferated and were on display in dirty bookshops and scummy movie theaters in every major American city. Strippers gave up stripping and exotic dancers took over, sometimes coming onto the stage without any clothes on to begin with. It was all done for quick fixes, cheap thrills, and maximum stimulation. Erotic entertainment was no longer about the tease, the enticement, how much could be shown without actually showing anything, or how to leave the best parts up to the imagination; erotic entertainment became about how much could be shown, leaving nothing hidden and with very little creativity. Burlesque was all but dead.
But not entirely. In about 1967, the famous striptease dancer Ann Corrio made it to Broadway with her production This Was Burlesque. It was a nostalgic tribute to the edgy form of entertainment of the past but it was also entirely clean. The focus of the show was on comedy, music, chorus lines, and sexy dancing. A tame striptease or two was tacked on at the end but very little flesh was revealed. Burlesque had come full circle. It was family entertainment once again. This Was Burlesque toured around the country and made millions of dollars well into the late 1970s.
By the 1990s, the end of the 20th century was coming into sight. Americans and Europeans began to look back over what had gone on for the last 100 years. All things retro came into style. Forgotten trends like lounge music, tiki bars, ballroom dancing, and rockabilly came back from the dead. Along with this vintage revival there was a renewed interest in burlesque. A small number of people got bored with porn and rediscovered the charm of the tease, trying to imagine a lost age of innocence. Neo-burlesque has been with us ever since and its status as an art form has finally been recognized, even if its adherents are just a small number of people. Of course, he new fans are probably hoping that the men in the audience with trench coats and hats on their laps are a permanent thing of the past.
Zemeckis, Leslie. Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America. Skyhorse Publishing, New York: 2013.
