Burlesque

Lore & Background

The word first appears in a title in Francesco Berni's Opere burlesche of the early 16th century. For a time, burlesque verses were known as poesie bernesca in his honor. In 17th century Spain, Miguel de Cervantes ridiculed medieval romance in his satirical works. Burlesque was intentionally ridiculous in its imitation of several styles and often used interchangeably with pastiche, parody, and the mock-heroic. It depended on the reader's knowledge of the subject to make its intended effect. In the 17th and 18th centuries, burlesque was divided into high and low types. High burlesque applied an elevated manner to a commonplace subject, as in Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. Low burlesque applied an irreverent style to a serious subject, as in Samuel Butler's Hudibras. In music, the term was used from the early 18th century to describe works juxtaposing serious and comic elements. Victorian theatrical burlesque, popular in London between the 1830s and 1890s, took the form of musical theatre parody adapting well-known operas, plays, or ballets into broad comic plays. The dialogue was often in rhyming couplets with bad puns. A later use of the term in the United States from the 1860s to the 1940s referred to variety show performances featuring bawdy comedy and female striptease.

Reader's Guide

Burlesque's significance lies in its long history as a mode of comic critique, spanning literature, music, and theatre from the 16th century onward. It provided a means to mock high culture and serious works, relying on audience literacy to appreciate the parody. In the Victorian era, it became a popular theatrical form in London, blending music, puns, and travesty roles. Its later American incarnation as a variety show with striptease influenced Hollywood films from the 1930s to the 1960s and saw a resurgence since the 1990s. Burlesque's legacy includes its influence on later comedic forms and its role in challenging conventions through humor and exaggeration.

Did You Know?

• The word 'burlesque' derives from the Italian burla, meaning a joke, ridicule, or mockery.
• Shakespeare's Pyramus and Thisbe scene in Midsummer Night's Dream is an early example of burlesque imitation.
• Victorian burlesque dialogue was generally written in rhyming couplets liberally peppered with bad puns.

Literary and Victorian Roots

The word "burlesque" originally described a creative work designed to provoke laughter by mocking or caricaturing serious art forms. In literature and theater throughout the 19th century, this meant deliberately absurd imitations—blending pastiches of various authors with ridiculous descriptions. The humor relied heavily on the audience's familiarity with the source material, assuming a well-read public. In London between the 1830s and 1890s, this evolved into what was called "travesty" or "extravaganza": a musical parody of a famous opera, play, or ballet, rendered as a broad comic production. The comedy arose from juxtaposing classical subjects in realistic period settings with modern, absurd behavior. Dialogue was typically written in rhyming couplets full of puns. A classic example involved a burlesque of Macbeth where the witches greet the characters with "Hail! hail! hail!" and the punchline played on the double meaning of "hail" as weather and "reign" as rule. While attractive women in tights were a staple of these productions, the content was generally only modestly risqué.

The American Arrival and Early Backlash

Their shows combined pantomime, comedy, parody, satire, improvisation, song, dance, variety acts, cross-dressing, extravagant stage effects, risqué humor, and saucy costumes—a combination familiar to British audiences but electrifying to New York. However, the enthusiasm was short-lived. The New York Times repeatedly expressed revulsion, even running a headline reading "Exit British Burlesque." Critics described the shows as a "disgraceful spectacle of padded legs jiggling and wriggling." This early backlash established a pattern of moral controversy that would shadow the genre throughout its American history.

Structural Evolution and the Four Pillars

As American burlesque developed through the 1870s and 1880s, it absorbed the tripartite structure of the minstrel show. Part one featured songs and dances by a female company interspersed with low comedy from male performers. Part two consisted of short specialties and olios without the women. The show closed with a grand finale, sometimes followed by a boxing or wrestling match. By the 1880s, four defining characteristics had crystallized: minimal costuming that emphasized the female form; sexually suggestive dialogue, dance, and staging; quick-witted humor built on puns but lacking deeper complexity; and short, loosely connected sketches with minimal plot cohesion. The era saw a proliferation of troupes—Ida Siddon's Female Mastodons, Lillie Hall's Burlesquers, Bob Manchester's "Night Owls," the "Parisian Folly," and many others—many with all-female casts. The Columbia Amusement Company, known as the Columbia Wheel, would later dominate the first two decades of the 1900s, producing over three dozen touring shows annually that rotated through affiliated venues.

Decline, Nostalgia, and Modern Revival

By the late 1920s, the striptease element had grown to overshadow the comedy that had originally defined the genre, and this shift drew extensive local legislation targeting burlesque performers. The art form's popularity began a steady decline starting in the 1940s. Yet the memory of burlesque proved commercially potent: from the 1930s through the 1960s, numerous producers attempted to capitalize on nostalgia by recreating the format both on live stages and in Hollywood films. These efforts sought to recapture the glamour and spectacle of earlier decades, even as the original tradition had largely faded. The genre's story, however, did not end there. Beginning in the 1990s, a renewed interest in burlesque as a performance format emerged, signaling a resurgence that reconnected modern audiences with the variety-show roots—comedy, parody, music, and dance—that had characterized the art form long before it became synonymous primarily with the striptease.