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This chapter focuses on the show business career of Dorothy's father Lew Fields. Fields and childhood friend Joe Weber first developed was a patchwork of entertaining bits—songs, dances, and humor, both verbal and physical. For five years, until 1889, they moved around the country as members of assorted traveling variety shows. In 1890, when they were twenty-three, Weber and Fields felt ready to produce and manage their own traveling show. By May 1896, Weber and Fields were playing at the Olympia Theater on Broadway between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth Streets. Their success was a reaffirmation of the belief that the team could entertain audiences not only on the Lower East Side where they had spent their childhood or touring across the nation where they had spent much of their adolescence, but also on Broadway.

This chapter explores Mark Twain's life-long fascination with ethnic humor and caricature, highlighting the oxymoronic logic involved in his affection for “the genuine nigger show” and other forms of patently racist entertainment. This book traces the history of minstrel comedy in America and its transformation during the late 19th century into a new set of comedic conventions, including the “coon show” and the “variety show.” The chapter also explores the relationship between Huckleberry Finn's illustrations, which draw heavily on “coon” imagery and the novel's ostensibly “realist” tendencies.

This chapter examines Central Television's use of holiday programming to evaluate and negotiate audience needs. It first discusses the place of television in the Soviet festive system before explaining how holiday variety shows emerged during the 1960s as a solution to the problem of television entertainment amid the state's focus on enlightenment and mobilization. It then considers the variety show Little Blue Flame and its emergence as a modest, flexible form of television festivity based on gift exchange, along with its New Year's broadcasts and how it was affected by the crisis of 1967–1970. It also looks at the creation of a new holiday program entitled Song of the Year in 1970 and how it turned to audience voting and other, more procedural, ways to reflect the musical tastes of Soviet young people in its lineup. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the fragmentation of Central Television's holiday musical programming that began to be reflected in Song of the Year's own broadcasts.

Kate Smith is best known today for popularizing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”. However, her ability to sell Berlin’s song rested in her radio fame: she hosted her own weekly evening program and daily commentary show for decades. In 1950 her television program paved the way for the variety show to be a staple of the medium because it accommodated the viewing habits of the housewife and played on the desires of the amateur in the audience while teaching viewers to appreciate professional entertainment. Moreover, as a mismatched woman, Smith posed no threat to the invasion of the home that could have been associated with television; she was neither mother nor temptress. Smith relied on her professionalism, patriotism, and mismatch to make a tacit argument that television was an ideal medium for representing American talent.

This chapter narrates the account of P. T. Barnum, an entrepreneur who harnessed the growing popularity of the theatre to further his business ventures. During his stint at the Vauxhall, Barnum noticed that the taste for popular family entertainment of a reasonably respectable kind existed even among members of the artisan class. While pleasure gardens welcomed families, theatres traditionally did not, Barnum recognized the benefits of breaking this tradition. When he learned in 1841 that Scudder's American Museum, on the corner of Broadway and Ann, had been put up for sale, he secured it. Here, in 1841, Barnum began mounting spiritually invigorating dramas and family-oriented minstrel and variety shows.

This book analyzes the career of film exhibitor and radio broadcaster, Samuel Lionel “Roxy” Rothafel (1882–1936), between the years 1908 and 1935. It shows how Roxy did not merely project motion pictures to audiences but presented unitary texts that extended well beyond film exhibition and formed the theoretical basis of his work in broadcasting. This intervention in the nascent field of radio and its programmatic forms led to his development of the variety show format, which he pioneered and promoted over the air. The book also examines Roxy' unique role during World War I as both an exhibitor and a producer of pro-war films and stage shows; his position as one of America's most popular and influential interwar broadcasters; his national stardom and its implications for Jewish visibility and assimilation; and his work in converging film, broadcasting, and music publishing and recording.

This chapter investigates how the revue became all the rage in the 1910s. At this time, the London Hippodrome specialized in showing big variety shows. Joy-Land! (1915) was typical of this type of show, each number calling up gala visuals and gigantic ensembles. In the 1920s, Charles B. Cochran reinvented revue as a small but arty performance. It became sophisticated in not only its material but its fizzy performing talent. In the 1910s, however, size mattered as well as the emerging American style. The furor for the American sound, stimulated by local dance bands adopting the American style, led producers to hire American songwriters. The chapter looks at titles such as The Cabaret Girl (1922), The Maid Of the Mountains (1917), Chu Chin Chow (1916), and The Bing Boys Are Here (1916). The chapter also studies Mister Cinders (1929), which became the most vital British musical of this era.