Quotes About Vaudeville

#1. I wasn't straining at the bit to become a movie star any more than I had plotted to get out of vaudeville and into Broadway musicals.

Ethel Merman

#2. I have never had anything that I can remember in the business - and that includes all the movies and the stage shows and everything - that I didn't enjoy. I didn't like some of the small-time vaudeville, because we weren't going on and getting better. Aside from that, I didn't dislike anything.

Fred Astaire

#3. No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

Ishmael Reed

#4. With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink.

George Burns

#5. His sense of humor is purely cheap vaudeville, yet everyone falls for it.

Lisa Lutz

#6. Gussie opened his vaudeville career

P.G. Wodehouse

#7. I'm a big fan of American vaudeville and Hollywood silent film-era slapstick and the music halls full of ridiculous, eccentric characters.

Lenny Abrahamson

#8. Within the space of a few shows you can hear the band morph between their various identities as savvy arena rockers, intense starship pilots, vaudeville nostalgists, modest American folkies, boundary-dissolving improvisers, roots-conscious spiritualists, and mind-fucking pranksters.

Richard Gehr

#9. Look, I come from vaudeville, I come from burlesque, I come from heartaches, I come from sadness, I come from gladness, I come from work and sweat and respect for the craft.

Mickey Rooney

#10. Mae West, a famous vaudeville actress, once said, "A man's kiss is his signature." I grinned to myself. If that was true, then Ren's signature was the John Hancock of kisses.

Colleen Houck

#11. My mother was in vaudeville, but after she had her children, she quit working.

Dean Stockwell

#12. Each couple is its own vaudeville act.

Zadie Smith

#13. Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.

James Broughton

#14. For better or worse, I have a lot of vaudeville circus skills that you just can't showcase in Aaron Sorkin's work.

Joshua Malina

#15. George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.

Tom Waits

#16. So many people are working in vaudeville today that I looked for three weeks to book enough acts for an hour bill and didn't have them until the night before we opened in Buffalo and money was no object!

Edgar Bergen

#17. If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, "The light is better there."

Tom DeMarco

#18. In God's great vaudeville, Mother is the headliner.

Elbert Hubbard

#19. A man ought to get all he can earn. A man who knows he's making money for other people ought to get some of the profit he brings in. Don't make any difference if it's baseball or a bank or a vaudeville show. It's business, I tell you. There ain't no sentiment to it. Forget that stuff.

Babe Ruth

#20. In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia. She's a theatrical figure, related to vaudeville in some respects. She inhabits a world in which there are comparatively few female exponents of comedy.

Barry Humphries

#21. Touring on 'Folie' was like being the last act at the vaudeville show: We were rotten vegetable targets in clandestine hoods.

Patrick Stump

#22. I came to N.Y.C. in 1988 and got very involved with Act Up. I also started making movies, including two very gay shorts, 'Vaudeville' and 'Lady.' It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and New York City was both dying and very alive at the same time.

Ira Sachs

#23. Movies, vaudeville, burlesque, the local stock companies - all survived together. Then radio came in. For the first time people didn't have to leave their homes to be entertained.

Kliph Nesteroff

#24. Milton took vaudeville, which, if you look up 'vaudeville' in the dictionary, right alongside of it, it says 'Milton Berle' - and he made it just a tremendous party.

Alan King

#25. If I was on Broadway, I would want to do anything Vaudeville or a biopic.

Kat Graham

#26. The world's a stage, & everything else is Vaudeville.

Alan Moore

#27. I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it.

Steve Martin

#28. Gypsy [Rose Lee], who was called Louise as a kid, gave her first performances here with her sister [June Hovac], playing for the local Masonic lodge halls. It was a tight-knit community, and the support and success the act enjoyed here enabled them to hit the road and make it in big-time vaudeville.

Karen Abbott

#29. Nothing that exists can be comic; it was like a floating analogy, almost entirely elusive, with certain aspects of vaudeville.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#30. TV - a clever contraction derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. However, it is our latest medium - we call it a medium because nothing's well done.

Goodman Ace

#31. Nobody seems to know yet how television is going to affect the radio, movies, love, housekeeping or the church, but it has definitely revived vaudeville.

Edgar Bergen

#32. I do not like vaudeville, but what can I do? It likes me.

Anna Held

#33. If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in.

Larry Gelbart

#34. I'm not subject to their rise and fall because I'm not accepted by them, so I have my own little curve going on. A lot of it is because of how much I play, I think I connect like when all you had was Vaudeville, I think I have an audience by performing a lot!

Leo Kottke

#35. Do not permit yourself to fall in love with the end-game play to the exclusion of entire games. It is well to have the whole story of how it happened; the complete play, not the denouement only. Do not embrace the rag-time and vaudeville of chess.

Emanuel Lasker

#36. I was raised never to carp about things and never to moan, because in vaudeville, which is my background, you just got on with it through all kinds of adversities.

Julie Andrews

#37. You see, Evey, all the world's a stage. And everything else ...
... is vaudeville.

Alan Moore

#38. Courts are places where the ending is written first and all that precedes is simply vaudeville.

Charles Bukowski

#39. I once read that in vaudeville, it was often the straight guy who got paid more than the comic because that's the tougher job. He has to set up the jokes in just the right way.

Michael Dirda

#40. If you do a musical, it's really thrilling and it's a lot of work, but it's very rewarding. I would say, for me, what I like best is what I do, which is, I call it vaudeville, I call it live, I call it in concert, I call it what Bette Midler does, and what Garland did for years, and Ethel Merman.

Debbie Reynolds

#41. The world's a stage, & everything else is Vaudeville.

Alan Moore

#42. The idea of vaudeville clowns and court jesters is always to show the flaw, to point out what's not working and why it's not coherent.

John Baldessari

#43. heard in America's streets. Yiddish theaters are still drawing crowds, and off-color humor fueled by vaudeville, jazz, and burlesque is flourishing in the Jewish Riviera resorts of the Catskills. Jewish humor

Paul Goldberg

#44. For me, my preference for comedy is grounding it in the psychology of the character, and not just kind of making faces. Even when it's a crazy character, grounded comedy resonates more with people because it doesn't look like you're watching someone do vaudeville. No offense to vaudeville.

Matt McGorry

#45. NOTORIETY, n. The fame of one's competitor for public honors. The kind of renown most accessible and acceptable to mediocrity. A Jacob's-ladder leading to the vaudeville stage, with angels ascending and descending.

Ambrose Bierce

#46. Posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats ...

Roberto Bolano

#47. The violence or the vaudeville style of comedy is a technique all by itself. You get up there, and you are a comedian, and you're doing one thing. That is, you're going to make the audience laugh.

Leslie Nielsen

#48. Vaudeville was characterized by sunny optimism, acts that were uplifting, cheerful, and clean. It provided a fanciful, magical escape, but after Black Friday, the tone of American entertainment changed almost overnight.

Karen Abbott

#49. You bet I arrived overnight. Over a few hundred nights in the Catskills, in vaudeville, in clubs and on Broadway.

Danny Kaye

#50. Though I soon became typecast in Hollywood as a gangster and hoodlum, I was originally a dancer, an Irish hoofer, trained in vaudeville tap dance. I always leapt at the opportunity to dance in films later on.

James Cagney

#51. It's strange because even in the vaudeville days, ventriloquists were never the main attraction. They were the guys brought out to stand in front of the curtain while sets were being changed. Ventriloquism wasn't even celebrated as an art until Edgar Bergen came along in the 1930s.

Jeff Dunham

#52. How to explain Time and Separateness back to God, Who had never thought of them, Who could let the whole world come to grief in a scattering moment?

Eudora Welty

#53. It doesn't matter how cheap and tinny the show is ... Soon as the house lights go down and the band starts up, I could cry.

Frank D. Gilroy