Vaudeville
The Great Variety Shows
By Grayson Bain and Rick Chakraborty
Define:
Causes
(not ONE of which was offensive in any way)
Vaudeville was essentially the brilliant idea of combining all these shows into a beautiful mess of one, and it basically brought the end to most of the shows that inspired vaudeville in the first place.
Minstrel shows
Click here for nightmare fuel
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Minstrel_PosterBillyVanWare_edit.jpg
Freak shows
Dime museums
Interesting facts
Vaudeville unlike the predecessors which ranged from risqué(burlesque) to unsettling(freak show) to downright horrifying(minstrel shows), vaudeville was actually more safe and (occasionally) child-friendly but never truly G rated.( however, it was still much less terrifyingly racist)
In the UK, vaudeville was used to refer to burlesque.
Relevence
It also was a major influence in the slapstick scene as many of the famous stars of that era were originally performers in vaudeville.
vaudeville was absorbed into the mediums that replaced it for entertainment
(radio, movies) and many of the shows and programs in either were directly influenced by the vaudeville era.