My wife asked me about the word vaudeville, so I turned to the OED (entry from 1916):
1. A light popular song, commonly of a satirical or topical nature; spec. a song of this nature sung on the stage.
[…]
2. A play or stage performance of a light and amusing character interspersed with songs; also without article, this species of play or comedy. Now in frequent use in the U.S. to designate variety theatre (variety n. Compounds C.b) or music hall.
The “now” is amusing (and, I would think, embarrassing — can’t they fix things like that even if they’re not doing a full update?), but it’s the etymology that’s of interest:
< French vaudeville, earlier vau (plural vaux) de ville, vau de vire, and in full chanson du Vau de Vire a song of the valley of Vire (in Calvados, Normandy). The name is said to have been first given to songs composed by Olivier Basselin, a fuller of Vire in the 15th cent.
Alas, apparently that’s considered dubious in these sterner times; Wiktionary says “Unclear. Possibly a corruption of voix de ville (‘voice of the city’), or vallée de Vire (‘valley of the (river) Vire’).”
“God Save Donald Duck, Vaudeville and Variety.” (Seeming doublets of seeming synonyms are of course a common rhetorical strategy in quasi-liturgical contexts.)
Looking at wiktionary for variant spellings in other languages which have likewise taken it as a loanword, my initial favorites are Tagalog “bodabil,” Polish “wodewil,” and of course Kartvelian ვოდევილი (via Russian водевиль). For some reason Belarusian disagrees with both Polish and Russian on the first-syllable vowel, with вадэвіль.
Regarding the “now,” I remember in one of Tina Fey’s award acceptable speeches for her work on 30 Rock she said (and I think this is the exact quote): “This is such an exciting time to be on broadcast television. It’s like being on vaudeville in the sixties!”
Actually, Belarusian and Russian have the same first-syllable vowel, but Belarusian writes its vowels phonetically (making the language look like hick-speak to Russians).
“This is such an exciting time to be on broadcast television. It’s like being on vaudeville in the sixties!”
She presumably meant the 1860s.
The Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (2010 edition, from the people responsible for the Robert line of dictionaries) has the following:
Yet more options!
She presumably meant the 1860s.
No, she meant the 1960s. You missed the joke.
I was making my own little joke.
Although I’m not competent to explain the difference, my understanding is that vaudeville and variety were quite different things, with separate communities of performers (possibly of a never-the-twain-shall-meet type).
(So the point of the OED definition is not really about how often the word is used, but about the relative frequency of its use in the US for what would be called variety or music hall in the UK. Although I don’t deny it needs updated!)
The Kinks quote is fine (although I’m more familiar with the Kate Rusby version, and had to look up who it was).
I see most of the loans are 3 syllables.
I had only ever heard /ˈvɔd.vɪl/ until I heard the Kinks’ song.
But it looks like Serbian and Macedonian have водвиљ and водвил, respectively. Parallel syncope or borrowed straight from American English, I wonder?
I was making my own little joke.
Ah, layers upon layers
Borrowed from French, where syncope of schwa is common in the spoken language.
Wiktionary’s “unclear” follows the TLFi’s “ritournelle” etymology, which follows Pierre Guiraud’s Dictionnaire des étymologies obscures (1982), which summarizes a long and fascinating discussion in the same author’s Structures étymologiques du lexique français (1967, 1986), pp. 34–42 (here). I really enjoy seeing this kind of thorough scholarship, which follows all the rabbit holes, bolsters its case with parallel constructions, and carefully explains how “il est remarquable que la presque totalité des étymologies toponymiques de ce type sont apocryphes.” I haven’t yet read it as thoroughly as I should.
(P.S. Guiraud’s Dictionnaire historique, stylistique, rhétorique, étymologique, de la littérature érotique is also at archive.org, all 652 pages of it, arranged by subject. Approved by the Board of National Stereotypes.)
I looked at the Russian corpus and came back with 2 interesting tidbits. First from Trediakovsky (1752) An opinion about the beginnings of poetry and verses in general
Повествуют, что поэзию изобрел некто Македонянин именем Пиерид и оной дочерей своих обучил, а за сие отцом назван Муз, называемых от его имени Пиеридскими, или Пиеридовнами. Но кто он, о сем точно не известно. Может быть, что он токмо в большее употребление ввел поэзию в Македонии и воспевал с дочерьми своими, ходя по улицам, какие-нибудь песни, сочиненные стихами, наподобие французских водевилей, а для того не можно сего инако разуметь, как токмо о соединенной же уже поэзии с стихами.
I won’t try to translate (ridiculous for a modern reader) archaizing style, but the content is interesting as well: “They say that poetry was invented by a Macedonian named Pierid, who taught it to his daughters, and for this he was called the father of Muses, which are called from his name Pierides, or Pieridicals [I really don’t know how to translate this play of affixes]. But who he is, is not known exactly. It may be that he only introduced poetry into a greater use in Macedonia and sang with his daughters, walking through the streets, some songs composed in verse, like the French vaudeville, and for that it is not possible to understand it in any other way, as only as already poetry and verses united.” (DeepL, with my mistakes)
The second tidbit is from F.N. Glinka Letters from Russian officer about Poland, Austrian possessions and France, with detailed description of patriotic and foreign war from 1812 to 1814 : “Опера, Фейдо, Варьете, Водевиль и Амбигю поглощали весь наш досуг!” (Opera, Feydeau, Variétés, Vaudeville and Ambigu took all our free time!)
Tu veux conduire, ou tu veux que je conduise ?
T’veux conduire, ou t’veux qu’j’conduise ?
[tvøkõˌⁿdɥiʀutvøkʃkõˈⁿdɥiz]
With -[kʃk]-.
The languages of the Caucasus chuckle condescendingly at your -[kʃk]-.
Georgian, yes. (French has a hard limit on four consonants in a row, and even that is only possible if the consonants are the right ones in the right order. Georgian laughs.)
The East and West Caucasian ones not so much. My impression is many have a limit of just two consonants per cluster.
Georgian can have long clusters, but it uses them in moderation, among long runs of CV syllables.
@JiE:
the sense i have (some of it from reading, some from being in the performance/theater worlds i am) is that the words used in the u.s. for different parts of the “illegitimate” theater, or for it as a whole, have varied and shifted a lot over the past 150 years (sometimes in concert with the u.k. terminology but mostly not) – with the industry-worker language, publicity language, and general-public language often diverging.
a lot of that has been about positioning acts, programs, and venues in relation to different categories of sex work that had/have different legal statuses, or to degrees of respectability that usually have to do with proximity to sex work. so “burlesque” goes from “an act or full-length show in any genre that parodies a specific existing work” to “dance acts (often with singing or monologue) incorporating increasing nudity”, becoming along the way a marker that a venue can use to let audiences know to expect a mixed bill that includes raunchy humor, specifically obscene song parodies, and other acts that would not themselves be called “burlesque”. and similarly, “vaudeville” becomes a marker for less respectable but not necessarily specifically sexual mixed bills, in contrast to the supposedly ‘cleaner’ fare promoted as “variety”.
all of this, fundamentally, being spillover from the expulsion of sex workers from the venues that presented “legitimate” theater, and the rest of the mid-/late-19thC domestication of theaters that suppressed audience responsiveness (and most eating, drinking, and socializing, even in the gods). that process also, gradually, established the Proper form for “legitimate” theater as the single evening-length production, pushing almost all mixed bills (including even most revues*) into the “illegitimate” theater’s terminological swamp of vaudeville/variety/burlesque/etc.
.
* the desperate grasping after plot in contemporary jukebox musicals** in preference to simply staging them as revues, to my eye, shows the persistence and extent of this industry-segmenting imperative. the exceptions are telling as well: the most prominent, of course, being various evenings of songs by sondheim, the composer of modern musicals with the most definitively Highbrow reputation (despite his love for the “illegitimate” theater in all its forms).
** i wish i could forget every moment of Girl From The North Country.
My comment yesterday was eaten by Akismet. I wouldn’t insist, but I think the Glinka’s quote from it is a nice companion to rozele’s comment.
@rozele: It had never occurred to me (and I have been out of musical theater for decades) that that was the reason for the proliferation of jukebox musicals (which I generally cannot stand), but once stated it makes perfect sense.
?
Der oberste Rang in einem Theater, die Galerie, mit den billigsten Plätzen. Leicht spöttisch: “[Where] the gods [sit]”.
@DM: apologies for jargonizing! “the gods” is the uppermost level of theater seating – usually the cheapest seating, and historically the slowest to be forced into compliance with the new norms of theater decorum imposed in the 19thC. i don’t know the origin of the english term, but it’s parallel to the french “paradis” (as in Enfants de…); “peanut gallery” isn’t the same conceptual move, but the idiom does link heckling and snacking as the distinctive activities of the upper balcony.
[ninja’d (valkyried?) by Stu!]
(I have rescued D.O.’s comment.)
Speaking of musical comedy, I wonder about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_(2024_film)
The medium is the message says Marshall MacLuhan;
even vultures sometimes gag says R A Lafferty
This kind of behavior was still going on in the cheap seats in the 1860s.
Do opera singers still take requests for endless encores anywhere, as they did a century ago? (Not “Melancholy Baby”).
Valkyrie with plenty of Zuckerberg’s “masculine energy”. I myself am rather slim-hipped.
@Y: … requests for endless encores … (Not “Melancholy Baby”)
You refer to the apocryphal story about Callas and a drunk man in the audience requesting that ?
It’s quite older than Callas, with or without the crude punchline. Red Ingle parodied it already in 1947, when Callas was just starting out.
I’m not sure why Melancholy Baby became a punch line. It’s a fairly typical song of its era.
Vaudeville in its heyday generally didn’t have suggestive material, although some acts pushed the boundary. Go too far and you’d get relegated to burlesque, which provided much less prestige and money.
Vaudeville wasn’t just comedy and light entertainment. It included all sorts of things, like target shooting, acrobats, serious music, and famous actors doing bits from “legitimate” plays.
I guess it was popular enough to be the cliché of a popular song, and maudlin enough to be requested by a drunk in the mood.
I first heard of the meme of a drunk requesting the song, in an issue of Mad magazine from the ’60s or ’70s, in a list of clichéd sayings that you never hear in real life, along with “Brother, can you spare a dime” and others.
Marshall McLuhan v. R.A. Lafferty is the sort of intellectual confrontation you cannot expect our leading universities in these feckless and decadent times to promote or even comprehend, and jack morava’s post is thus evidence of the comparative excellence of the hattery as a forum for serious and significant intellectual (or “innerleckshul” in the Flannery O’Connor sense) discourse. Not that I think the recent movie Prof. morava references is necessarily the ideal petri dish for pursuit of that discourse.
@ JWB, thankee kindly! BTW I mentioned that particular film only because I’d seen it recently with children,
Another song that seems to have a history as a stereotype of maudlin banality is “Sonny Boy.” It was apparently a huge hit for Al Jolson in 1928, and P. G. Wodehouse was already mocking in 1929 in “Jeeves and the Song of Songs.” I’ve run into other instances of “Sonny Boy” being treated derisively, although off the top of my head I can’t recall any of them (the Wikipedia page being no help) except this one. And that (which was extra filler for the British version of an episode of the vaudeville-inspired The Muppet Show, since—due to differences in the time spent on commercials—ITV timeslots were slightly longer than American ones) is no sillier than most other renditions of songs by the Muppets.
@Y: i don’t go to the opera enough to really know about that world, but i was once part of an audience that refused to let kiki & herb leave the stage for quite a few encores more than they’d intended. i don’t remember whether we demanded anything in particular (though i can certainly imagine either Melancholy Baby or Free Bird being called out along the way).
@jack: i wonder so many things about so many aspects of that movie, mainly in forms beginning with “why…” and ending with my head shaking despondently. and that’s having mostly enjoyed the experience of watching it.
Kiki and Herb would not be intimidated by Free Bird.
Speaking of Wodehouse, an incidental character (in Portrait of a Disciplinarian) is a revue star (appearing in “Toot-Toot”), whose number was ruined by a comedian upstage pretending to drink ink. That is the usage that “upstaging” came from; did UK revues or US vaudeville shows have multiple different acts on the same stage at the same time?
The OED disagrees about “upstaging”:
s.v. “upstaging”:
1933
‘Crowding’ and ‘up-staging’ are tricks of the selfish actor… ‘Up-staging’ is to take up a position nearer to the back of the scene than the other players. This forces them to turn three-quarter-back to the audience when speaking to the up~stage actor.
P. Godfrey, Back-stage iii. 40
s.v. “upstage” (verb)
1958
Miss Tempest always ‘upstaged’ her—..she slowly pushed her chair to the rear so that..Miss X was obliged to turn away from the audience.
B. Nichols, Sweet & Twenties 200
that’s closer to my understanding of it, as being about a performer’s effect on people in their own act (or onstage in the same scene, in a narrative piece).
I stand corrected. Aside from that, I am still trying to imagine the singer and the ink-swallower sharing the stage.
Very interesting thread! Thanks to rozele, Y, and everyone else. I had never thought about the etymology of upstage. From Guiraud on vaudeville:
Loved the reference to the phraseology (tic-tac du moulin) of songs like this. (Or from the vaudeville and music-hall era, this.)