THE TRADITION OF THE ECCENTRIC BODY IN VAUDEVILLE: SUBVERSION AND POWER IN PERFORMANCE

The types of performance acts presented to audiences in American variety/vaudeville from its beginnings in the 1860s through its dying days in the 1930s include just about everything imaginable, as well as quite a few acts that audiences today would be hard pressed to accept as conventional performances. Besides the singers, dancers, comedians, athletes, and animal acts that made up the bulk of variety bills, appearances of notorious persons, regurgitators, champion pedestrians, handkerchief acts, living pictures, and other "nut acts" entertained and educated vaudeville audiences. Using Erving Goffman's theories of social negotiation, he notes that the performance of "freakery engages the social interaction order in a position that commands much greater power" than people of eccentric bodies are generally allowed.16 Vaudeville performers of eccentric bodies exercised an even greater ability to disrupt audience comfort because people came to the theatre to be impressed, not discomfited. Because they didn't carry in that "nameless, squirmy something" that disability scholar Jim Ferris describes as part of the thrill of freak shows,17 audiences might be caught by surprise by performers of eccentric bodies, upending expectations and giving the performer greater power to upend the social interaction order. [...]the descriptions draw attention to the eccentric body, not to the skills it performs: "boneless" and the comparisons to snakes and frogs indicate that the appeal was of the "grotesque," as they were also sometimes labeled. According to Robert Bogdan, the novelty type of freak act, that most adaptable to vaudeville, grew in the late nineteenth century, until "the line that divided vaudeville from dime museum displays was not always easy to draw, and various establishments competed with each other by imitation" (Bogdan 264-265), but as the quotes in this section from contemporary observers indicate, the interpretation at the time was otherwise. 44 "Decline of the Vaudeville," Harper's Monthly Magazine 106, April 1903, 814.