vau de vire

Vaudeville comes from Old French vau de vire, meaning 'valley of the Vire' — the Vire River valley in Normandy, where a fifteenth-century poet and clothier named Olivier Basselin was said to have composed popular drinking songs. These songs, topical, humorous, and sung to simple tunes, spread through France as vaudevires or vaux-de-vire, eventually contracted to vaudeville. By the seventeenth century the word had detached from its geographical origin and named a category of light topical song inserted into theatrical performances — a comedic number with a repeated refrain commenting on current events, characters, or manners. The Comédie-Française used vaudevilles as light interludes; the genre defined an entire category of French popular theater (the vaudeville théâtral) that ran in dedicated Paris theaters from the eighteenth century onward.

The American vaudeville that the word most commonly names today was not a direct descendant of the French theatrical form but a convergent evolution in the entertainment economics of industrial America in the 1880s. Tony Pastor, a New York impresario, is often credited with creating 'respectable' variety entertainment in the 1880s — an alternative to the saloon concert and the minstrel show that could attract middle-class women and families by banning alcohol and obscenity from the theater. B. F. Keith and Edward Albee built the Keith-Albee circuit into a national network of vaudeville theaters from Boston to San Francisco, standardizing the format: eight to fifteen acts per show, each act five to thirty minutes long, continuous performances from noon to midnight, the whole organized around a printed program that treated performers as interchangeable units in a calculated entertainment machine.

The vaudeville circuit was the training ground and the proving ground for an entire generation of American performers whose careers it shaped and whose names it made: Houdini escaped from handcuffs and water tanks. W. C. Fields juggled. Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel came to America on vaudeville tours. Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, Eddie Cantor, and Fanny Brice all developed their acts in vaudeville theaters before radio and film gave them audiences of millions. The circuit enforced a specific discipline: you had exactly as many minutes as you were booked for, the audience was continuous and demanded constant attention, and you played the same act dozens of times in the same week in the same city. The performers who survived this system developed the timing, the crowd management, and the material control that defined twentieth-century American comedy.

Vaudeville was destroyed by cinema and radio with remarkable speed: the circuits that had sustained thousands of performers and hundreds of theaters in 1920 were largely gone by 1932. The Keith-Albee circuit itself was absorbed into the Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corporation — RKO — which became a film studio. The medium that vaudeville had taught its audiences to consume entertainment continuously and without particular attention proved to be the same medium that made them prefer to stay home and listen to the radio rather than buy a ticket. What vaudeville left behind was the structure of American popular entertainment: the variety show, the talk show, the television special — all of them inherit the vaudeville format of distinct acts, audience warm-ups, and the management of attention across a program designed to satisfy everyone for some portion of the evening.