By Mike Marino Welcome to the Burly-Q! Tantalizing and tittilaing entertainment that has been a staple of American va-va-voom fun and frolic since the days before rimshots, runways and broken down comedians. It's a T & A art form that has deep roots in the world of vaudeville which exploded with megatonage at the turn of the century, but before butts and those monumental mountains of cleavage, we'll see that it's sexual seeds were planted long before we had sexy implants.
When the Pilgrims invaded the New World with decimating diseases like syphillis, their musical culture also came along to remind them of home sweet home in the land of persecution which in turn led to the implant of Puritanical thought such as covering up those fine bouncy native indian maiden breasts while also introducing the Missionary Position in what can only be described as the Readers Digest version of the Kama Sutra. In the place of sex, they played lutes and flutes and somewhere a guitar was transformed into a banjo Americans developed over time and new customs were developed and incorporated until the old ways disappeared and new music and dances were introduced and we now had the "hoe down" where the whole town emerged and they came from nearby towns as well to join in and participate in the entertainment around the village campfire.
Eventually the Manifest Destiny of James Monroe had the country on a binge of westward expansion and soon small towns cropped up. Snake oil salesmen set up traveling medicine shows with dancers, singers, sharpshooters and jugglers to help soften the masses before fleecing them of their hard earned greenbacks. Eventually the town wanting to show it was all class built their own Opera House where visiting singers would warble and charm the frontier psyche's most notably was Lily Langtree who was known far an wide across the expanse of the Old West. This in turn led to other "celebrities" going "on tour"
In the midwest on the river of Mark Twain the riverboats were havens for gambling and drinking along with singing and dancing, some of it risque where women with full skirts would lift it up so the men would whoop it up with the first sign of female flesh in the form of thigh and a hint of what lay just below the navel. The riverboat shows soon added Minstels and entertainers made up to look like "negroes" in the most grotesque exaggerated stereotypical makeup that was one part parody and two parts racism, but only whites were allowed to take to the stage. Never was make-up so hideous unless you take into account Betty Davis in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane!"
Vaudeville was spawned from these entertainment shows from the bars and saloons loaded with drunks and soiled doves. By the time of the shootout at the OK Corral, the V-shows were proliferating throughout the United States and Canada. The shows pre-dating television variety shows to the Fifties and Sixites were composed of various entertainers and seperate acts on a common bill. Singers, dancers, animals, magicians, mistrels and comedians. Vaudeville also had male and female impersonators, where gender bending had a Victorian flair about it and talked about in hushed tones. The very first theatrical vaudeville troupe emerged in 1871 in Louisville, Kentucky with the formation of the Leavitt and Sargent Show.
Unlike the raw traveling medicine shows and saloon bufoonery, these shows were meant to lend an air of respectibility to entice the middle class to them..they had more money. Vaudevilians became the rock stars of their day and as one century ended and the new on begun cities nd towns now sported vaudeville venues where the public came to the show and the shows were no longer intinerant intense. It was also soon after the turn of the century that motion pictures started up and the live act vaudeville houses were loosing money to the new medium so the vaudeville theaters turned into movie houses and showed the latest silent films until talkies were introduced. Curiously many vaudevillians found greater fame in film than on the circuit..Bert Lahr, Abbott and Costello, and the Mark Brothers to name a few. They also found concurrent fame in radio broadcasts as well. The new medium suited them just fine.
The lesser of the acts who couldn't cut the cinematic mustard found a niche playing the Catskill retreats in upstate New York, the so-called Borscht Belt while many just gave up altogether. Vaudeville influenced the new medium as well with the introduction of radio and television "variety" shows...one of those, meanwhile back where we started moments in time. These shows were hosted by the pioneers of television...Milton Berle in Uncle Miltie drag, Jackie Gleason, Sid Ceasar and of course...Ed Sullivan..the Mt Rushmore of non-personality himself. Another example of influence can seen on the silver screen during the golden age of Hollywood when the "screwball comedy" ruled the roost as a result of vaudevilles comedy parodies of well known storylines from literature that were modified for boffo laughs!
American burlesque was the inbred child offspring of the early 19th century vaudevillian era. It was part minstrel show and variety, but by the 1860's they introduced lewd jokes and female striptease, or at least what passed as striptease after the Civil War. The early years of American burlesque were call "leg shows" and had been introduced in NYC as early as the 1840's by troupes such as the British Blondes from Jolly Olde England and other traveling British shows getting a "leg up" so to speak. The first American troup was formed in 1870 called the Female Minstrels, a feminized minstrel show in effect with elaborate costuming and the inclusion of rauncy male comedians. Part of the show also included boxing and wrestling matches...however not with females rolling around in the mud or in the squared circle..that came much later much to our delight!
During the early part of the 20th century it became a compost pile of satirical performance, adult entertainment added to the nitrous mixture of stripping and comedy...rimshot comedians as a backdrop and filler to a runway filled with fan dancers and the promise of fleshy delights yet unseeen. Burlesque blossomed like a teenagers budding breast and was mostly in cabarets, bars, music halls and theaters where luscious well endowned females would dance and prance to the delight of the penis patrons who enjoyed the exotic costumes, especially the part where they were removed.
Burlesque at first was merely a more raucous form of vaudeville and variety shows. It was the stripping part that gave it a certain penile panache. It was saucy and sassy, and as it got more extreme...the moralists stepped in and tried to corral the rampant collapse of morality and the end of the world as they saw it.. It was right around the same time as Prohibition, and the government criminalization of marijuana. Coincidence? However...for every yin there is a yang...prior to Prohibition..the burlesque element of stripping was quite tame due to the times...alcohol yes, did fuel the rowdiness but did not remove clothing to anywhere near our sexual standards of today..so burlesque began to transform as booze went underground, and stripping took a new turn to replace the alcohol rush and full scale stripping was off to the races...more skin was now being exposed than ever was seen than in any harem of white slave prostitutes..and on stage no less!!!
It was also around this time that a film maker decided to film strip shows and acts in 1940 and sell the resultant films which in turn gave birth to camera clubs for soft porn and eventually pulp and sex magazines. It was the age of sex and exploitation films. The porn industry was born, thanks to the prohibition of Burlesque, much as Organized Crime was born from Prohibition. Ain't moralists great? Sex, Vice and Violence..the three basic American Food Groups!
It was now time for Burlesque to rocket to the moon and along with it create it's own galaxy of superstars from whip weilding Betty Page, Tempest Storm, Lily St. Cyr, Gypsy Rose Lee, fan dancing Sally Rand, and Carol Doda. Silicone implants and Jellolike gyrations, cleavage as deep as the Grand Canyon and bottoms as inviting as soft billowing pillows of fantastic fannies. It was a new age.....these women were about to set new T & A ground rules by tearing down the walls of sexual sexorship and censorship and literally ready to let it all amply hang out...topless was now the norm and bottomless all the rage...soon male strippers were introduced and we have the Chippendales today...porn on the web, and Youtube...go figure..next up holographic strippers..and Barbarella's sex machine along with Burroughs Steely Dan Dildo burrowing in a soft a fertile garden of pubic delights...welcome back to the Burly-Q....you've come a long way baby and we're glad to be along for the ride.