Top 35 Vaudeville Quotes

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.

I once read that in vaudeville, it was often the straight guy who got paid more than the comic because that’s the tougher job. He has to set up the jokes in just the right way.

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.

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.

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

I’m like an old vaudeville act. They’ll have to pull me off the stage with a hook.

If I was on Broadway, I would want to do anything Vaudeville or a biopic.

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

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.

I’m a big fan of American vaudeville and Hollywood silent film-era slapstick and the music halls full of ridiculous, eccentric characters.

Magic has both feet planted in cheap vaudeville and childish posturing; in dishonesty and therefore not in art.

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.

I do some very high energy comedy, vaudeville, music hall stuff, and people who’ve seen my work on camera, on TV and movies, would not really know that.

I’m a fan of old vaudeville theaters.

If you look at vaudeville in theaters vamping between acts, it was always jokes written and banter in the moment.

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

My dad would take me downtown, and I’d stand backstage and watch him in the vaudeville pit band. I was 6 or 7. He was a musician, a band leader, a wonderful clarinetist and saxophone player.

In the United States, female fisticuffs were marginalized, first as erotic vaudeville in the 19th century and later as serious competition developed in the first half of the 20th. Legal wars waged by boxers in the 1960s and ’70s won women the right to compete professionally nationwide.

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

In the jargon of American vaudeville, Professors Frisch and Tinbergen are a ‘hard act to follow.’ But then, all my life, I have been following such great scholars and policy advisors as these.

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.

My father died when I was 11. He was a vaudeville comedian. He worked in one movie, ‘Ladies of the Chorus,’ as Marilyn Monroe’s father.

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.

My best memories growing up are of putting on musicals with my mom and dad, Both of them are real hams; it was like vaudeville in East Hampton.

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.

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!

My mother was in vaudeville, but after she had her children, she quit working.

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!

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.

Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.

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.

George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.

Mr Fosse was obviously influenced by Brecht and Weill, as well as Bergman and Fellini, and you could see the influence of vaudeville and African American hoofing – and Fred Astaire, too.

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.

For better or worse, I have a lot of vaudeville circus skills that you just can’t showcase in Aaron Sorkin’s work.