Tag Archives: jargon

JOINTS AND JOKES 2 – BURLY Q

February 15, 2026 By in slang Tags: , Leave a comment

H.C. Miner Litho. Co. – Library of Congress[1]Bon Ton Burlesquers – 365 days ahead of them all.” Poster of U.S. burlesque show, 1898, showing a woman in outfit with low neckline and short skirts holding a number of upper-class men “On the string”. Color lithograph.

Burlesque comes from the Italian burla, for a joke or to mock – was characterised by the appearance of young women in relatively little clothing and what there was of that was designed to show their bodily form to best advantage. As well as this primary attraction for its mostly male audiences, Burlesque also had a strong element of social satire from its origins as lower class spoofs of high society diversions such as opera and ballet.

While Burlesque is usually associated with America it received its greatest boost in the 1860s when the famed showman P T Barnum imported a British Burlesque troupe led by Lydia Thompson. Lydia and her blonde ladies rapidly became superstars, although there was soon a strong moral backlash against this form of entertainment. As usual, this only increased the popularity of Burlesque and by the early twentieth century it operated through an extensive circuit of theatres, known as a wheel, with large troupes travelling the same show for up to forty weeks of the year. By then, the typical Burlesque show included many of the same style of acts found in Vaudeville, although the scantily clad ladies remained the primary attraction.

In burly-q speech the main player in a comic act was known as the top banana, a phrase that has entered the broader slang repertoire. Those supporting him or, less frequently her, were second banana, third banana and so on. These terms are said to derive from the comic’s last resort of slipping on an imaginary banana skin in order to get a laugh. In this form of slapstick (a term derived from pantomime rather than burlesque, though this very basic form of humour was common to both forms), the lower a performer ranked in the bunch the more likely he or she was to receive the pies in the face and the host of other undignified bits, or skits, that made up most comedy acts. Other terms related to the business of being funny were skull – to pull a funny face and the talking woman – one who delivers lines for the comic to joke about, equivalent to the straight man of a stage comedy act.

An oft-performed bit from the later Burlesque poked fun at business names. It doesn’t take much to see and hear a couple of the Marx Brothers banging this one out:

Man at Desk: (picks up phone) Hello, Cohen, Cohen, Cohen and Cohen.
Caller: Let me speak to Mr. Cohen.
Man at Desk: He’s dead these six years. We keep his name on the door out of respect.
Caller: Then let me speak to Mr. Cohen.
Man: He’s on vacation.
Caller: (Exasperated) Well then, let me speak to Mr. Cohen.
Man: He’s out to lunch.
Caller: (Yells) Then let me speak to Mr. Cohen!
Man: Speaking.

The occupational jargon of burly-q included colourful phrases like the asbestos is down – a reference to the fireproof stage curtain being down, making the audience unable to hear the jokes – which purportedly explained why they were not laughing. A mountaineer was a comic from the Catskill Mountains resort circuit and the Boston version referred to a sanitised rendition of an act with the blue elements removed or toned down. The term cover, meaning to take over another performer’s role, as in ‘Will you cover for Mac?’, has passed into the wider vernacular of the English-speaking world, its Burlesque origins known by few.

Despite the similarities between Burlesque and Vaudeville, there was a barrier between the forms, with Vaudevillians considering themselves superior to Burlesque. But the continual operating mode of the Burlesque circuit meant that it provided fairly reliable work and many Vaudeville acts also worked the Burlesque circuits under different names. As a result, there is a considerable overlap between Vaudeville and Burlesque lingoes. The olio was used in both forms to describe a mixture of short acts performed rapidly at the front of the stage with the main curtain, often an oilcloth, a technique probably borrowed from the earlier blackface minstrel shows. Other common terms included yock and milking an audience, the latter of which became a standard showbiz term and has moved beyond that into everyday slang.

Like Vaudeville, burly-q declined with the rise of the cinema. By the 1920s it had become largely a bump and grind strip show, with the comic acts little more than a hangover of the past. The striptease developed its own language as well. Strippers used pasties to cover their nipples. A G-string was a gadget, while a trailer was the provocative walk leading up to the strip itself. The breasts of a stripper were blisters to be quivered and her buttocks were cheeks to be shimmied for the titillation of the audiences, known in the business as jerks.

JOINTS AND JOKES 1 – TALKING VAUDEVILLE

February 11, 2026 By in slang Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

By Strobridge Lithographing Co., Cincinnati & New York – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs divisionunder the digital ID cph.3g12307. See Commons:Licensing., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11158985

Always looking for a yock, a really big laugh from the audience, or a show stopper of any kind, the Vaudeville performer’s heyday was from the late nineteenth century until the 1920s. Originating in a variety of occasional performances in bars, theatres and wherever else a show could go on, its first appearance under that name is usually said to have been at a Boston saloon in 1840.

Vaudeville was essentially a travelling collection of comedy routines, musical acts, jugglers, acrobats, animal acts, ropers, (cowboy acts) and pretty well anything else that would play – and possibly pay. It became very popular throughout America and Canada, with around two thousand theatres by the start of the twentieth century. By the mid-1920s Vaudeville was destined for oblivion when the movies turned into the talkies. As Vaudeville was increasingly threatened, so many of the houses became blue, incorporating risqué items in an attempt to lure audiences away from the enticements of the silver screen. The overlapping entertainment form that came to be known as Burlesque suffered the same fate, its once glittering shows descending into little more than strip joints.

The name Vaudeville is said to derive from a French slang term for songs of the town – voix de ville, but there are a number of other stories, all of which have a French connection. There is a tradition in the carnival that a circus clown began Vaudeville, but this more likely reflects the close relationship between the two forms of entertainment, a relationship also reflected in the sharing of some lingo. Wherever the term came from, it was firmly established in the 1880s when a circuit of glittering Vaudeville theatres flourished in the northeastern states of America, providing non-stop daily performances for audiences keen to pay for the comedy and out-of-the-ordinary acts available.

Unlike more settled entertainments, such as revues, Vaudeville generally changed its acts each week or so. The acts were known by in-group names. An acrobatic or similarly physical act was called an alley-oop, allegedly from the fact that many of these acts were European in origin and spoke French. They would use a combined form of the French for everyone – ‘allez’ and the English ‘up’ as a command to begin their performance. A slapstick act was known as a baggypants comic. A blackout was a short comedy routine followed immediately by the houselights being turned off. The deuce spot was the least popular second act on a bill, straight after the opener which was usually the worst, but just before the best feature act, which meant that your number two performance was forgotten almost before it was over. Worse still, the audience might simply sit on their hands and decline to show their appreciation at all. The last act was called playing to the haircuts, meaning the performer was playing to the back of the departing crowd.

The vernacular of Vaudeville is full of terms for playing to an unappreciative house or bombing in front of an audience, a reflection of the difficulties of the business. A Brodie was a disaster, said to be named after a performer who survived a fall off the Brooklyn Bridge. As in other forms of showbiz, to flop or die was a common term for failure and an unappreciative house could be called a morgue. A poor act might be called a fish (because it stank). There was always a chance that the act could wow the stubholders, as the audiences were known, or if they were only applauding politely, milk them of more by reappearing onstage, or refusing to leave it until the bitter end.

Acts were often made up of shorter sections,called business. Soemetimes these wereso highlyexaggerated or overdone that they were described as Schtik, a term that moved beyond its original showbiz location and is now used to mean any kind of overly cloying presentation or approach.

Many Vaudeville terms were shared with the closely related entertainment known as Burlesque, or burly-q to its practitioners and aficionados, as expressed in my next post.