Baggy Pants Comedy Burlesque and the Oral Tradition

Baggy Pants Comedytakes readers inside the burlesque houses of Depression-era America to explore the role of comedy in a show remembered mostly for strip-tease. It examines how burlesque comics, straightmen, and talking women approached the craft of comedy, working in a genre that relied not on scripts but on a remembered tradition of comedy bits that circulated orally. The book opens a long-neglected area of American folklore, presenting dozens of fondly-remembered routines like "Who's On First" and "Niagara Falls (Slowly I Turned)," as well as long-forgotten classics in print for the first time.

Andrew Davis teaches at Otis College of Art and Design and is one of the few people for whom the label "straight man" is a job description. He is the taller, more sophisticated half of the comedy team of Doc and Stumpy, and performs classic burlesque comedy in Los Angeles and at burlesque and vaudeville festivals around the US. He holds a Master's degree in Folklore from UCLA and a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU. He is the author of America's Longest Run: A History of the Walnut Street Theatre and he operates the website BaggyPantsComedy.com.

Who’s On First * Oral Tradition on the Popular Stage * Pressures of Stock Burlesque * Cast and Characters * Learning the Business * Running the Bits * Scenarios, Scripts, and Schemas * Double Entendre * Flirtations * Trickery * Brutality * Body Scenes * The Appeal of Burlesque Comedy