Vaudeville Quotes

• With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink.

  George Burns

  Evil, Talent, Stink

  19 Copy quote

• Vaudeville could not vouch for the honesty, the integrity, or the mentality of the individuals who collectively made up the horde the medium embraced. All the human race demands of its members is that they be born. That is all vaudeville demanded. You just had to be born. You could be ignorant and be a star. You could be a moron and be wealthy. The elements that went to make up vaudeville were combed from the jungles, the four corners of the world, the intelligentsia and the subnormal.

  Fred Allen

  Stars, Honesty, Integrity

  9 Copy quote

• A man ought to get all he can earn. A man who knows he's making money for other people ought to get some of the profit he brings in. Don't make any difference if it's baseball or a bank or a vaudeville show. It's business, I tell you. There ain't no sentiment to it. Forget that stuff.

  Babe Ruth

  Baseball, Men, Differences

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Movie Love, Church, Television

  10 Copy quote

• The world's a stage, & everything else is Vaudeville.

  Alan Moore

  World, Stage

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Adversity, Kind, Carp

  7 Copy quote

• Though I soon became typecast in Hollywood as a gangster and hoodlum, I was originally a dancer, an Irish hoofer, trained in vaudeville tap dance. I always leapt at the opportunity to dance in films later on.

  James Cagney

  Dance, Opportunity, Hollywood

  28 Copy quote

• Courts are places where the ending is written first and all that precedes is simply vaudeville.

  Charles Bukowski

  Law, Firsts, Court

  Charles Bukowski (2013). “Notes of a Dirty Old Man”, p.46, City Lights Books

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do not like vaudeville, but what can I do? It likes me.

  Anna Held

  Likes

  7 Copy quote

• If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in.

  Larry Gelbart

  Science, Technology, Television

  "Gelbart Holds Seminars On Comedy At Museum" by Peter W. Kaplan, www.nytimes.com. 1984.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Laughing, Comedian, Style

  7 Copy quote

• They call television a medium because nothing's well done.

  Goodman Ace

  Television, Done, Wells

  9 Copy quote

• You bet I arrived overnight. Over a few hundred nights in the Catskills, in vaudeville, in clubs and on Broadway.

  Danny Kaye

  Night, Broadway, Clubs

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• TV—a clever contraction, derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. We call it a medium, because nothing's well done.

  Goodman Ace

  Clever, Done, Tvs

  Letter to Groucho Marx, in 'The Groucho Letters' (1967) p. 114

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Stars, Broadway, Movie Star

  Ethel Merman, George Eells (1979). “Merman: an autobiography”, Berkley Pub Group

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.

  Tom Waits

  Performers

  "Tom Waits Interviews Tom Waits". www.npr.org. May 20, 2008.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.

  James Broughton

  Inspirational, Dance, Children

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Night, People

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Men, News

  Ishmael Reed (1995). “Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down”

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Leadership, Kindness, Angel

  Ambrose Bierce (2012). “The Devil's Dictionary”, p.85, Courier Corporation

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Years, Musical, Doe

  Source: editorial.rottentomatoes.com

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Ideas, Flaws, Clown

  Interview with David Salle, www.interviewmagazine.com. October 09, 2013.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.

  Arundhati Roy

  Political, Campaigns, Election

  "Arundhati Roy: 'The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution'". Interview with Arun Gupta, www.theguardian.com. November 30, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• His sense of humor is purely cheap vaudeville, yet everyone falls for it.

  Lisa Lutz

  Fall, Sense Of Humor

  Lisa Lutz (2011). “Lisa Lutz Spellman Series E-Book Box Set: The Spellman Files, Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I will step outside the system. Voting for the “lesser evil”-or failing to vote at all-is part of the corporate agenda to crush what is left of our anemic democracy. And those who continue to participate in the vaudeville of a two-party process, who refuse to confront in every way possible the structures of corporate power, assure our mutual destruction.

  Chris Hedges

  Crush, Party, Two

  105 Copy quote