Following is our list of the most famous vaudeville quotations and slogans. We've compiled this selection of inspirational vaudeville quotes. Hopefully, these vaudeville quotes will keep you motivated not only during hard times but to expand your vaudeville knowledge!
A farce, or slapstick humor, does well universally. — John Ratzenberger
The entertainment is in the presentation. — John McTiernan
Comedy is difficult, especially slapstick. The trick is to have fun while you are performing it. — Maureen O'Hara
The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy. — Dawn Powell
This...is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism. — Minnie Maddern Fiske
When I owned the theater, I had the Glen Miller Orchestra. I had 20 girls singing and dancing. I had a cast of characters. It was a big group production, as well as ushers, ticket takers. — Bobby Vinton
For me, making the show work was getting belly laughs - like most variety artists. But the straight actor believes you fix your performance in rehearsal and that's it. — Ron Moody
I love anything to do with ventriloquism and magic. — Illeana Douglas
On Saturday afternoons, there was a film, of course, and then we did about four shows between the films. And I would do a tap dance, a little military tap. — Barbara Cook
That's really what 'Jokers' is - an improv show. — James Murray
PANTOMIME, n. A play in which the story is told without violence to the language. The least disagreeable form of dramatic action. — Ambrose Bierce
Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage. — Charlie Chaplin
Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills. — David Mamet
There is a point in portraying surface vulgarity where tragedy and comedy are very close. — Barbara Stanwyck
God help us if we ever take the theater out of the auction business or anything else. It would be an awfully boring world. — A. Alfred Taubman
Short Vaudeville Quotes
With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink. — George Burns
They call television a medium because nothing's well done. — Goodman Ace
Courts are places where the ending is written first and all that precedes is simply vaudeville. — Charles Bukowski
If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in. — Larry Gelbart
Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater. — James Broughton
I do not like vaudeville, but what can I do? It likes me. — Anna Held
The world's a stage, & everything else is Vaudeville. — Alan Moore
George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved. — Tom Waits
My mother was in vaudeville, but after she had her children, she quit working. — Dean Stockwell
In God's great vaudeville, Mother is the headliner. — Elbert Hubbard
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility. — Neil Postman
Though I soon became typecast in Hollywood as a gangster and hoodlum, I was originally a dancer, an Irish hoofer, trained in vaudeville tap dance. I always leapt at the opportunity to dance in films later on. — James Cagney
I have never had anything that I can remember in the business - and that includes all the movies and the stage shows and everything - that I didn't enjoy. I didn't like some of the small-time vaudeville, because we weren't going on and getting better. Aside from that, I didn't dislike anything. — Fred Astaire
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. — Ishmael Reed
If you do a musical, it's really thrilling and it's a lot of work, but it's very rewarding. I would say, for me, what I like best is what I do, which is, I call it vaudeville, I call it live, I call it in concert, I call it what Bette Midler does, and what Garland did for years, and Ethel Merman. — Debbie Reynolds
NOTORIETY, n. The fame of one's competitor for public honors. The kind of renown most accessible and acceptable to mediocrity. A Jacob's-ladder leading to the vaudeville stage, with angels ascending and descending. — Ambrose Bierce
Look, I come from vaudeville, I come from burlesque, I come from heartaches, I come from sadness, I come from gladness, I come from work and sweat and respect for the craft. — Mickey Rooney
You bet I arrived overnight. Over a few hundred nights in the Catskills, in vaudeville, in clubs and on Broadway. — Danny Kaye
The idea of vaudeville clowns and court jesters is always to show the flaw, to point out what's not working and why it's not coherent. — John Baldessari
If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, "The light is better there." — Tom DeMarco
A man ought to get all he can earn. A man who knows he's making money for other people ought to get some of the profit he brings in. Don't make any difference if it's baseball or a bank or a vaudeville show. It's business, I tell you. There ain't no sentiment to it. Forget that stuff. — Babe Ruth
Do not permit yourself to fall in love with the end-game play to the exclusion of entire games. It is well to have the whole story of how it happened; the complete play, not the denouement only. Do not embrace the rag-time and vaudeville of chess. — Emanuel Lasker
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. — Edgar Bergen
So many people are working in vaudeville today that I looked for three weeks to book enough acts for an hour bill and didn't have them until the night before we opened in Buffalo and money was no object! — Edgar Bergen
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. — Leslie Nielsen
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. — Julie Andrews
Gypsy [Rose Lee], who was called Louise as a kid, gave her first performances here with her sister [June Hovac], playing for the local Masonic lodge halls. It was a tight-knit community, and the support and success the act enjoyed here enabled them to hit the road and make it in big-time vaudeville. — Karen Abbott
On the Bowery, in the ornate carcass of a formerly grand vaudeville theater, a dance marathon limps along. The contestants, young girls and their fellas, hold one another up, determined to make their mark, to bite back at the dreams sold to them in newspaper advertisements and on the radio. They have sores on their feet but stars in their eyes. — Libba Bray
TV - a clever contraction derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. However, it is our latest medium - we call it a medium because nothing's well done. — Goodman Ace
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
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. — Ethel Merman
I never cared about making one coherent masterpiece with a conventional narrative. I always wanted my movies to have images falling from all directions in a vaudevillian way. If you didn't like what was happening in one scene, you could just snooze through it until the next scene. That was the thing about vaudeville: You didn't have to worry about the beginning and ends of these things. — Harmony Korine
I'm living in a world that was created a hundred years ago with vaudeville and people traveling around and medicine shows and things and making live music on stage and I'm still doing that. I like it that way. I like to present something to people that's had 40 years of being honed and perfected. It's something that you're not going to find with an artist who's been around for two or three years, or even ten years. — Don McLean
Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place. — Arundhati Roy
It was a great challenge to reconstruct Gypsy Rose Lee life, and my interviews with her sister [June Havoc] proved invaluable. It's not often that writers have access to living primary source material; this was the only person who experienced life on the vaudeville circuit with Gypsy during the 1920s, and who saw her perform at Minsky's Burlesque in the 1930s. She knew things that no one else could ever possibly know. — Karen Abbott
I am not an educated person. I didn't come up through a ballet company. I came up through burlesque. So I have a lot of inferiority feelings concerning my own lack of education, my entry into show business. I'm not a Baryshnikov. I'm not a Nureyev. I came up in vaudeville. Strippers. So I've always had these feelings. But I think they've also helped me. — Bob Fosse
Anything really well-made has the effect of making you want to do what you do-better. Abrams has always made very beautiful books. It's exciting to see this same excellence applied to the presentation of comics. Abrams ComicArts shows comics are stepping out of vaudeville and into Carnegie Hall-but the Marx Brothers will always be welcome! — Jon J Muth
I will step outside the system. Voting for the “lesser evil”-or failing to vote at all-is part of the corporate agenda to crush what is left of our anemic democracy. And those who continue to participate in the vaudeville of a two-party process, who refuse to confront in every way possible the structures of corporate power, assure our mutual destruction. — Chris Hedges
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. — Carl Hiaasen
Tilting his head back he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed. — J. D. Salinger
Each couple is its own vaudeville act. — Zadie Smith
Stargirl began to improvise. She flung her arms to a make-believe crowd like a celebrity on parade. She waggled her fingers at the stars. She churned her fists like an egg-beater. Every action echoed down the line behind her. The three hops of the bunny became three struts of a vaudeville vamp. Then a penguin waddle. Then tippy-toed priss. Every new move brought new laughter from the line. — Jerry Spinelli
His sense of humor is purely cheap vaudeville, yet everyone falls for it. — Lisa Lutz
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of vaudeville quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about vaudeville to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of vaudeville quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
