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"Walk this way" is a recurrent pun in a number of comedy films and television shows. It may be derived from an old vaudeville joke that refers to the double usage of the word "way" in English as both a direction and a manner.
Vaudeville (/ ˈ v ɔː d (ə) v ɪ l, ˈ v oʊ-/; [1] French: ⓘ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment which began in France at the end of the 19th century. [2] A Vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition or light poetry, interspersed with songs ...
Stand-up comedy has roots in various traditions of popular entertainment of the late 19th century, including vaudeville, the stump-speech monologues of minstrel shows, dime museums, concert saloons, freak shows, variety shows, medicine shows, American burlesque, English music halls, circus clown antics, Chautauqua, and humorist monologues like those delivered by Mark Twain in his first (1866 ...
Jack Benny (born Benjamin Kubelsky; February 14, 1894 – December 26, 1974) was an American entertainer who evolved from a modest success playing the violin on the vaudeville circuit to one of the leading entertainers of the twentieth century with a highly popular comedic career in radio, television, and film.
The gags and comic premises were borrowed from classic variety entertainment, but Olsen and Johnson put an original spin on the material through their inspired improvisation in live performance. Described as a rule-breaking exercise in hysteria, Hellzapoppin was a comic amalgam of the best—or worst—of vaudeville and burlesque. It gloried in ...
Lyons and Yosco, vaudeville act and ragtime composers from the 1910s. The model for the modern double act began in the British music halls and the American vaudeville scene of the late 19th century. Here, the straight man was needed to repeat the lines of the comic because audiences were noisy.
"The Arkansas Traveler" was a popular comedy sketch on the vaudeville circuit. [2] It revolved around the encounter of a (usually lost) traveling city person with a local, wise-cracking fiddle player. Various jokes at the expense of the "city slicker" were interspersed with instrumental versions of the song.
Vaudeville actors often used gags in their routines. A classic vaudeville visual gag was for two actors to mirror each other's actions around a prop. [7] Visual gags were continued into silent films and are considered a hallmark of the genre. [2] In silent films, the actors in the mirror bit performed in silence with no music playing. [7]