Content area
Full text
BAGGY PANTS COMEDY: BURLESQUE AND THE ORAL TRADITION. By Andrew Davis. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Per- formance History series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; pp. 304.
Andrew Davis's Baggy Pants Comedy: Burlesque and the Oral Tradition takes the comedians of the Depression-era burlesque stage seriously. Although the past decade has seen a popular revival of bur- lesque dancing, the comedy bits and sketches that wove together the larger production numbers of the burlesque show are remembered primarily by their popular culture relics, such as Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?" Davis, a folklorist, theatre histo- rian, and himself the straight man in a Los Angeles burlesque comedy duo, aims with Baggy Pants Com- edy to build a more comprehensive archive of the jokes and scenarios that circulated in the heyday of burlesque. In revisiting burlesque comedy, the book re-centers a collaborative oral tradition in order to intervene in the tendencies of folklorists to privilege rural contexts and theatre historians to privilege a text-based methodology. The book thus presents an essentially recuperative project, complicating com- mon understandings of burlesque comedy as sim- plistic, cliché, and repetitive by framing burlesque performance instead as a unique performance craft in which repeated material demanded more, not less, skill from the performer.
Baggy Pants Comedy begins by establishing the book's two main premises: that burlesque comedy demanded unique skills, and those skills are best understood by considering the tradition as folklor- ic. Rather than working from a fixed script, Davis argues, burlesque performers learned a premise or scenario and key jokes or lines, but improvised the...