Vaudeville Quotes

TV-a clever contraction, derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. We call it a medium, because nothing's well done. (Goodman Ace)
The violence or the vaudeville style of comedy is a technique all by itself. You get up there, and you are a comedian, and you're doing one thing. That is, you're going to make the audience laugh. View quote
Leslie Nielsen
I do not like vaudeville, but what can I do? It likes me. View quote
Anna Held
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons. View quote
Ishmael Reed
If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in. View quote
Larry Gelbart
I wasn't straining at the bit to become a movie star any more than I had plotted to get out of vaudeville and into Broadway musicals. View quote
Ethel Merman
Each couple is its own vaudeville act. View quote
Zadie Smith
About the only job left that a woman can beat a man in is female impersonator in vaudeville. View quote
O. Henry
The world's a stage, & everything else is Vaudeville. View quote
Alan Moore
You bet I arrived overnight. Over a few hundred nights in the Catskills, in vaudeville, in clubs and on Broadway. View quote
Danny Kaye
Charles Laughton is superbly vulgar in this whack at the backside of Victorianism. He makes a great vaudeville turn out of the role of an egocentric scoundrel, the prosperous bootmaker who doesn't want to part with his three marriageable daughters because they are too useful as unpaid labor. As the oldest daughter, the spinster in spite of herself, Brenda de Banzie is so "right" that when she marries her father's best workman and puts belching, drunken old Dad out of business, one feels the good old-fashioned impulse to applaud. (Pauline Kael)
Nobody seems to know yet how television is going to affect the radio, movies, love, housekeeping or the church, but it has definitely revived vaudeville. View quote
Edgar Bergen
As a lobbyist he had long ago concluded there was no difference in how Democrats and Republicans conducted the business of government. The game stayed the same: It was always about favors and friends, and who controlled the dough. Party labels were merely a way to keep track of the teams; issues were mostly smoke and vaudeville. Nobody believed in anything except hanging on to power, whatever it took. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
His sense of humor is purely cheap vaudeville, yet everyone falls for it. View quote
Lisa Lutz
Milton took vaudeville, which, if you look up 'vaudeville' in the dictionary, right alongside of it, it says 'Milton Berle' - and he made it just a tremendous party. View quote
Alan King
Somehow his grandfather had wrought an honorable and glamorous life from the sea. But that era was gone. The system was dying. Advising a young man to join the United States Merchant Marine was like advising him to go into vaudeville. View quote
James K. Morrow
There were a great many in vaudeville - people who never quite came through. But they had their place, and they filled it. They kept theatres open. Those pan-timers, those interstate-timers, those four-a-dayers, those six-a-dayers - they were an integral part of that endearing merry-go-round called vaudeville. View quote
Alfred Lunt
My mother was in vaudeville, but after she had her children, she quit working. View quote
Dean Stockwell
Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater. View quote
James Broughton
Vaudeville was characterized by sunny optimism, acts that were uplifting, cheerful, and clean. It provided a fanciful, magical escape, but after Black Friday, the tone of American entertainment changed almost overnight. View quote
Karen Abbott
I'm not subject to their rise and fall because I'm not accepted by them, so I have my own little curve going on. A lot of it is because of how much I play, I think I connect like when all you had was Vaudeville, I think I have an audience by performing a lot! (Leo Kottke)
... name association was big, as were my presumed interests in vaudeville and politics. In St. Louis the Bow tie was characterized as "very Charlie McCarthy", while in Chicago a young man defined it as "the pierced eyebrow of the Republican party". View quote
David Sedaris
I was raised never to carp about things and never to moan, because in vaudeville, which is my background, you just got on with it through all kinds of adversities. View quote
Julie Andrews
I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it. View quote
Steve Martin
George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved. View quote
Tom Waits