Inventing the Tramp: The Early Tramp Comic on the Variety Stage

In their tattered clothes and grotesque makeup, well over a hundred comic tramps staggered across the US vaudeville stage at the turn of the twentieth century.¹ One of the most popular stage types in vaudeville, comic tramps sang, recited monologues, juggled, rode bicycles, and performed in sketches.² Although these comic figures are well known in theatre history, to date, the variety theatre's distinctive role in the tramp's performance history remains unrecognized. Two decades before the widely popular vaudeville comic tramp, the figure first stepped onto the variety stage at the moment of the tramp's cultural invention.

Until the 1870s, the word "tramp" existed primarily as a verb in the American lexicon and referred to a long walk or march. When "tramp" emerged as a noun in the wake of the Panic of 1873, it resulted from a collective effort to understand and contain the mobile spectacle of unemployed men traveling across the country.³ In performance, American and European actors have performed variations on comic vagrants and beggars for hundreds of years, notably in commedia dell'arte, the circus, and minstrelsy.⁴ However, tramps distinguished themselves from their predecessors onstage and in American culture through their scale and exceptional mobility, which reflected the extent of the economic distress caused by the Panic as well as improvements in transportation, such as the railroad.

Transformations in mobility captured the popular imagination and offered variety theatre a way to appeal to their audience's fears and fantasies that accompanied the rapid economic and social changes sweeping through the country. Playing for primarily a working-class audience at a time when first-class variety theatres increasingly succeeded at drawing more middle-class audience members, the variety stage comic tramp reflected tensions between the negative caricature in the dominant imagination and the more sympathetic connotations rooted in working-class experience. The early comic tramp of the variety stage reflected the nation's complicated racial, ethnic, gendered, and classed power dynamics that determined who had the privilege, permission, and safety to move throughout the country. In the 1870s, the range of comic tramps illustrates the instability of the tramp figure and the struggle over its meaning. The earliest comic tramps, performed primarily as stage Irish or in blackface, were almost indistinguishable. Aside from reflecting the popularity of Irish and blackface characters on the variety stage, Irish and blackface racial and ethnic comedy created a visual vocabulary that offered a quickly recognizable stand-in for the seemingly invisible crime of lacking means of work.

As the decade progressed, performers portrayed the most popular comic tramps as Irish, aligning mobility with whiteness and turning the comic tramp into a performance of racial privilege, even for immigrant and ethnic groups who faced staunch prejudice. Through the comic tramp's transformation in the 1870s, the comic tramp became a site of cultural "spin" and the rapidly realigning racial hierarchies of the nation after the Civil War. The increasing popularity of the Irish comic tramp demonstrated the North's limited ability to imagine freedom of mobility for black Americans. The Irish tramp, by contrast, may have reflected many negative characteristics, including his wandering nature, his unemployment, and his drinking, but he also showed that the Irish comic tramp could be part of a community and in some instances, even a hero.

The Tramp in the Dominant Imagination

During the economic depression of the 1870s, when mobile, unemployed strangers wandered through towns and cities across the country, people grew anxious over their inability to distinguish between who was unemployed and genuinely searching for work and who was idle and potentially a threat to people and property.⁵ The figure of the tramp provided new possibilities for navigating these fears. The emerging image of the tramp in the dominant imagination, especially in the North, focused on an excessively mobile, idle, drunk, and potentially violent man, typically white. Reformers' construction of the tramp demonstrates how they conceived of the mobile unemployed—not as victims of the industrial economy but as criminals. This classification resulted not from any specific acts but from individual...