"A Hero! Is Dot a Business?" Vaudeville Comedy and American Popular Entertainment

Except for the silliness of their titles, Whirl-i-Gig, an 1899 Broadway musical show produced by the comedy team of Weber & Fields, and Whoopee!, a 1930 Hollywood film comedy, would seem to have little in common. Separated by two decades of entertainment history and created by two distinct cultural media with their own peculiarities and conventions, Whoopee! and Whirl-i-Gig nevertheless were cut from the same bolt of cloth. They exemplify what was arguably the most salient aspect of American popular entertainment from the late 1880s to the mid-1930s — its hybrid nature.

Whirl-i-Gig and Whoopee! both relied upon a mixture of aesthetic forms and practices. Both incorporated remnants of the minstrel stage, both had elaborately staged chorus numbers, both were social comedies that simultaneously poked fun at the WASP establishment and at ethnic outsiders. Finally, and most significantly, both featured romantic plots whose narrative conventions were disrupted by the anarchical zaniness of what film scholar Henry Jenkins calls “the vaudeville aesthetic”: fast-paced word play, gags, and physical humor.

The hybrid nature of American popular culture is often mentioned but rarely analyzed. A few film historians have examined the interaction between the vaudeville stage and the silent screen, and historians of popular entertainment have acknowledged, but have not systematically explored, the appropriation of vaudeville’s values, forms, and themes by musical comedy, radio, and talking film. ¹ Although the evolution of American popular entertainment from the early history of vaudeville to the era of the Hollywood sound film was hardly a seamless web, two recent books, one a study of early 1930s film comedy, the other a biography of comedian and theatrical producer Lew Fields, reveal that in the years between 1880 and 1935, the boundaries between genres, venues, and forms of comic entertainment were extremely permeable. Vaudeville, musical revue, musical comedy, radio, and early sound film comedy drew upon each other’s practices, performers, and producers. These books call our attention to the cross-fertilization of comic forms, the class and ethnic dimensions of that exchange, and to the larger question of what made “popular” culture popular in a given historical context.

Armond and L. Marc Fields’s From the Bowery to Broadway, a well-researched and insightful study of comedian Lew Fields (and his long-time partner in comedy, Joe Weber), analyzes the impact of variety entertainments such as minstrel shows and vaudeville on emerging forms of middle-class entertainments like musical comedy and musical revue in the Progressive Era and the 1920s. It goes beyond Felix Isman’s 1924 publication, Weber and Fields: Their Tribulations, Triumphs, and Their Associates, by tracing the career of Lew Fields after the break-up of his partnership with Joe Weber in 1904.

In 1877 Moses Schoenfeld (Lew Fields) and Morris (Joe) Weber were ten-year-old eastern European Jewish immigrant sons living on New York’s Lower East Side. Hoping to escape from their lower-class immigrant origins (Joe’s father was a Kosher butcher, Lew’s ran a sweatshop), they longed to enter the potentially more glamorous world of entertainment. Frequenting the working-class Bowery beer dives and dime museums, they “stole” their earliest material from popular “Irish” dialect and blackface minstrel acts. Eventually they developed what would become their signature routine and prove the stepping stone to Broadway “legitimacy” — their famous “Dutch” duo act, “Mike & Myer.” ² Using a Yiddish inflected German (Dutch) dialect, they burlesqued the awkwardness of the unassimilated immigrants of their day. Fields played Myer, a tall, lanky, urban know-it-all to Weber’s, short, fat (and heavily padded) downtrodden rube, Mike. Their routines melded two primary comic forms — the physical abuse...