burlesco

Burlesco is Italian, from burla, meaning a joke, trick, or mockery. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, burlesque was a literary and theatrical genre that parodied serious works by treating elevated subjects in a low style, or low subjects in an elevated style. Miguel de Cervantes parodied chivalric romance in Don Quixote. Virgil Travesty (1664) by Charles Cotton retold the Aeneid in colloquial English. The genre was intellectual comedy — laughing at pretension by inverting registers.

British burlesque in the nineteenth century shifted the form from literary parody to theatrical spectacle. Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes toured the United States in 1868, performing comic sketches with music, dance, and cross-dressing. The shows were bawdy but not obscene — their transgression was women performing comedy and wearing tights, which was shocking enough. American burlesque absorbed the British import and added vaudeville comedy, slapstick, and increasingly, the striptease.

By the 1930s and 1940s, American burlesque was synonymous with striptease — the literary origins were completely forgotten. Gypsy Rose Lee became the most famous burlesque performer, and her act was more intellectual than her competitors', but the genre had narrowed to mean one thing. Burlesque houses were shut down in many cities. The word accumulated associations — tassels, bump-and-grind, seedy theaters — that had nothing to do with Cervantes or Cotton.

The neo-burlesque revival of the 1990s recovered some of the original breadth. Performers like Dita Von Teese combined striptease with theatrical production values, humor, and self-conscious commentary on the genre's own history. The word burlesque now carries all its accumulated meanings at once: literary parody, theatrical spectacle, striptease, feminist reclamation. The Italian word for a joke turned out to be the setup for a very long one.