Vaudeville quotes:

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  • George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved. -- Tom Waits
  • The world's a stage, & everything else is Vaudeville. -- Alan Moore
  • If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in. -- Larry Gelbart
  • I do not like vaudeville, but what can I do? It likes me. -- Anna Held
  • Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater. -- James Broughton
  • You bet I arrived overnight. Over a few hundred nights in the Catskills, in vaudeville, in clubs and on Broadway. -- Danny Kaye
  • Nobody seems to know yet how television is going to affect the radio, movies, love, housekeeping or the church, but it has definitely revived vaudeville. -- Edgar Bergen
  • I was raised never to carp about things and never to moan, because in vaudeville, which is my background, you just got on with it through all kinds of adversities. -- Julie Andrews
  • The violence or the vaudeville style of comedy is a technique all by itself. You get up there, and you are a comedian, and you're doing one thing. That is, you're going to make the audience laugh. -- Leslie Nielsen
  • So many people are working in vaudeville today that I looked for three weeks to book enough acts for an hour bill and didn't have them until the night before we opened in Buffalo and money was no object! -- Edgar Bergen
  • If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, "The light is better there." -- Tom DeMarco
  • Each couple is its own vaudeville act. -- Zadie Smith
  • With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink. -- George Burns
  • If I was on Broadway, I would want to do anything Vaudeville or a biopic. -- Kat Graham
  • I wasn't straining at the bit to become a movie star any more than I had plotted to get out of vaudeville and into Broadway musicals -- Ethel Merman
  • TV - a clever contraction derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. However, it is our latest medium - we call it a medium because nothing's well done. -- Goodman Ace
  • Vaudeville was characterized by sunny optimism, acts that were uplifting, cheerful, and clean. It provided a fanciful, magical escape, but after Black Friday, the tone of American entertainment changed almost overnight. -- Karen Abbott
  • Look, I come from vaudeville, I come from burlesque, I come from heartaches, I come from sadness, I come from gladness, I come from work and sweat and respect for the craft. -- Mickey Rooney
  • NOTORIETY, n. The fame of one's competitor for public honors. The kind of renown most accessible and acceptable to mediocrity. A Jacob's-ladder leading to the vaudeville stage, with angels ascending and descending. -- Ambrose Bierce
  • I came to N.Y.C. in 1988 and got very involved with Act Up. I also started making movies, including two very gay shorts, 'Vaudeville' and 'Lady.' It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and New York City was both dying and very alive at the same time. -- Ira Sachs
  • I have never had anything that I can remember in the business - and that includes all the movies and the stage shows and everything - that I didn't enjoy. I didn't like some of the small-time vaudeville, because we weren't going on and getting better. Aside from that, I didn't dislike anything. -- Fred Astaire
  • When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility. -- Neil Postman
  • If you do a musical, it's really thrilling and it's a lot of work, but it's very rewarding. I would say, for me, what I like best is what I do, which is, I call it vaudeville, I call it live, I call it in concert, I call it what Bette Midler does, and what Garland did for years, and Ethel Merman. -- Debbie Reynolds
  • I am not an educated person. I didn't come up through a ballet company. I came up through burlesque. So I have a lot of inferiority feelings concerning my own lack of education, my entry into show business. I'm not a Baryshnikov. I'm not a Nureyev. I came up in vaudeville. Strippers. So I've always had these feelings. But I think they've also helped me. -- Bob Fosse
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  • My mother was in vaudeville, but after she had her children, she quit working. -- Dean Stockwell
  • For better or worse, I have a lot of vaudeville circus skills that you just can't showcase in Aaron Sorkin's work. -- Joshua Malina
  • Touring on 'Folie' was like being the last act at the vaudeville show: We were rotten vegetable targets in clandestine hoods. -- Patrick Stump
  • I wasn't straining at the bit to become a movie star any more than I had plotted to get out of vaudeville and into Broadway musicals. -- Ethel Merman
  • Milton took vaudeville, which, if you look up 'vaudeville' in the dictionary, right alongside of it, it says 'Milton Berle' - and he made it just a tremendous party. -- Alan King
  • I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it. -- Steve Martin
  • In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia. She's a theatrical figure, related to vaudeville in some respects. She inhabits a world in which there are comparatively few female exponents of comedy. -- Barry Humphries
  • It's strange because even in the vaudeville days, ventriloquists were never the main attraction. They were the guys brought out to stand in front of the curtain while sets were being changed. Ventriloquism wasn't even celebrated as an art until Edgar Bergen came along in the 1930s. -- Jeff Dunham
  • There were a great many in vaudeville - people who never quite came through. But they had their place, and they filled it. They kept theatres open. Those pan-timers, those interstate-timers, those four-a-dayers, those six-a-dayers - they were an integral part of that endearing merry-go-round called vaudeville. -- Alfred Lunt
  • For me, my preference for comedy is grounding it in the psychology of the character, and not just kind of making faces. Even when it's a crazy character, grounded comedy resonates more with people because it doesn't look like you're watching someone do vaudeville. No offense to vaudeville. -- Matt McGorry
  • I think there's a lot of, unfortunately, unfunny ventriloquists out there, so they've got a bad rap. It came after Edgar Bergen because everybody had a little cheeky boy dummy like Charlie McCarthy, and everybody decided to become a ventriloquist because Bergen had popularized it. He brought it back from the doldrums of vaudeville. -- Jeff Dunham
  • I'm not subject to their rise and fall because I'm not accepted by them, so I have my own little curve going on. A lot of it is because of how much I play, I think I connect like when all you had was Vaudeville, I think I have an audience by performing a lot! -- Leo Kottke
  • I was always a fan of the old-style comics. I loved vaudeville. I loved Milton Berle, Dick Shawn, Phyllis Diller, Don Rickles, Charlie Callas, all those guys. Hilarious. I love the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope movies, and Abbott & Costello. My television influences were 'Monty Python's Flying Circus,' 'Benny Hill,' and 'Hee Haw.' -- Larry the Cable Guy
  • In God's great vaudeville, Mother is the headliner. -- Elbert Hubbard
  • His sense of humor is purely cheap vaudeville, yet everyone falls for it. -- Lisa Lutz
  • Courts are places where the ending is written first and all that precedes is simply vaudeville. -- Charles Bukowski
  • The idea of vaudeville clowns and court jesters is always to show the flaw, to point out what's not working and why it's not coherent. -- John Baldessari
  • No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons. -- Ishmael Reed
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