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The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface.
Minstrel shows lampooned black people as ignorant, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, joyous, and musical. The minstrel show began with brief burlesques and comic entr'actes in the early 1830s and emerged as a full-fledged form in the next decade. In 1848, blackface minstrel shows were the national art of the time, translating formal art such as opera into popular terms for a general audience.
By the turn of the century, the minstrel show enjoyed but a shadow of its former popularity, having been replaced for the most part by vaudeville. It survived as professional entertainment until about 1910; amateur performances continued until the 1960s in high schools, fraternities, and local theaters. As blacks began to score legal and social victories against racism and to successfully assert political power, minstrelsy lost popularity.
The typical minstrel performance followed a three-act structure. The troupe first danced onto stage then exchanged wisecracks and sang songs. The second part featured a variety of entertainments, including the pun-filled stump speech. The final act consisted of a slapstick musical plantation skit or a send-up of a popular play. Minstrel songs and sketches featured several stock characters, most popularly the slave and the dandy. These were further divided into sub-archetypes such as the mammy, her counterpart the old darky, the provocative mulatto wench, and the black soldier. Minstrels claimed that their songs and dances were authentically black, although the extent of the black influence remains debated. Spirituals (known as jubilees) entered the repertoire in the 1870s, marking the first undeniably black music to be used in minstrelsy.
Blackface minstrelsy was the first distinctly American theatrical form. In the 1830s and 1840s, it was at the core of the rise of an American music industry, and for several decades it provided the lens through which white America saw black America. On the one hand, it had strong racist aspects; on the other, it afforded white Americans a singular and broad awareness of significant aspects of black-American culture.
Although the minstrel shows were extremely popular, being "consistently packed with families from all walks of life and every ethnic group," they were also controversial. Racial integrationists decried them as falsely showing happy slaves while at the same time making fun of them; segregationists thought such shows were "disrespectful" of social norms, portrayed runaway slaves with sympathy and would undermine the southerners' "peculiar institution."
A revue is a type of multi-act popular theatrical entertainment that combines music, dance and sketches. The revue has its roots in 19th century American popular entertainment and melodrama but grew into a substantial cultural presence of its own during its golden years from 1916 to 1932. Though most famous for their visual spectacle, revues frequently satirized contemporary figures, news or literature. Due to high ticket prices, ribald publicity campaigns and the occasional use of prurient material, the revue was typically patronized by audience members who earned more and felt less restricted by middle-class social mores than their contemporaries in vaudeville. Like much of that era's popular entertainments, revues often featured material based on sophisticated, irreverent dissections of topical matter, public personae and fads, though the primary attraction was found in the frank display of the female body.
Revues are most properly understood as having amalgamated several theatrical traditions within the corpus of a single entertainment. Minstrelsy's olio section provided a structural map of popular variety presentation, while literary travesties highlighted an audience hunger for satire. Theatrical extravaganzas, in particular, moving panoramas, demonstrated a vocabulary of the spectacular. Burlesque, itself a bawdy hybrid of various theatrical forms, lent to classic revue an open interest in female sexuality and the masculine gaze.
With the introduction of talking pictures, in 1927, studios immediately began filming acts from the stage. Such film shorts gradually replaced the live entertainment that had often accompanied cinema exhibition. By 1928, studios began planning to film feature length versions of popular musicals and revues from the stage.
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Cherri Rocks - 1940s Burlesque "Decades of Decadence"by sinnersplayground29,088 views
Mr Bojangles was one of the first blacks who refused to wear black face and was ridiculed for it. He was accused by his own race of being rebellious.
mvies77 1 month ago
@tonetteholmes I am sorry that you misunderstood my response. Could you review the comment I responded to
kalifson 3 months ago
@kalifson : It was racism then. Are u serious?
tonetteholmes 3 months ago
@chanse117 It wasn't racism?! Just kill yourself, please.
kalifson 6 months ago
@chanse117 It WAS racism back then. It was legitimate form of entertainment for white people. It was NOT a legitimate form of entertainment for black people.
Unfortunately, black people did not have much of a say on censorship back then, being surrounded on all sides by hostile forces in all aspects life, backed up utimately and violently by police, army, government and courts.
pumpkinjollof 7 months ago
@MaliceDispersion1
It wasn't racism back then. It was a legitimate form of entertainment. You have to think of it in the context of the era. Of course, now it would be considered extremely "racist".
chanse117 8 months ago
OMG They actually painted their faces black. Wow racism was horrible back then
MaliceDispersion1 8 months ago
Strange how russian comunists in America destroyed our pride from this, to what is 2011 ... thanks for the memories thefilmarchieve ...
lybo5646b 1 year ago