Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [904]
Variety was strictly a downtown affair, housed in Bowery showcases like the London Theatre, Miner’s Bowery, and the Globe Museum. These houses jumbled acts together in a way calculated to please a diverse constituency. Minstrels too had presented a succession of turns, but all were performed by members of the same troupe. Variety assembled a melange of performers, a division of labor that allowed for greater range and specialization. The result was a potpourri of entertainment bits, unconnected by persona or plot, that drew upon a host of plebeian entertainments. From the Turn-verein and Harmonie-Bund came gymnastic and musical routines; the circus provided animal acts and acrobats; dance competitions supplied Lancashire and hornpipe clogs and jigs.
Variety’s staples were its songs and comic sketches. Skits were often ribald and physical, geared to the male and working-class audience. Performers set their topical gags and routines in the city’s saloons, sidewalks, and shipyards. The most popular bits were ethnically oriented, with performers mimicking New York’s diverse populations, doing Irish turns and Dutch (German) shtick.
Black comics were not numerous in variety. African Americans did pour into minstrelsy in these years, on the strength of the argument that they could “act the nigger”—depict grotesque caricatures of plantation slaves—“with greater fidelity,” as the Clipper argued of Haverly’s Colored Minstrels, “than any ‘poor white trash’ with corked faces can ever do.” White comics fled to variety, where they did their old dialect putdowns of shiftless and irresponsible darkies or used blackface as a cover for raunchier humor than they could get away with if clad only in their own white skins.
As new immigrant groups arrived they were quickly added to the cast of comic characters, with sharp-witted Jews, song-loving Italians, and opium-smoking Chinamen tossed in among the pugnacious Irishmen, lazy Africans, beer-drinking Germans, tight-fisted Scots, and ignorant farm rubes who peopled the virtual Lower East Side. These personas varied from good-humored to derogatory, benign to malignant, and the songs and spiels conveyed both the antagonisms and alliances between groups. Most variety skits never rose above one-dimensional stereotyping, but some did, and in the process gave rise to a new entertainment form, the ethnic sitcom.
“PROMINENT TYPES WHICH GO TO MAKE UP LIFE IN THE METROPOLIS”
Edward “Ned” Harrigan, born in New York in 1845, left home at eighteen to become a traveling song-and-dance man. Tony Hart (originally Anthony J. Cannon), born ten years later, left an Irish slum in Worcester, Massachusetts, and also took to the stage. They teamed up in 1871 and, for the next nine years, settled into Josh Hart’s Theatre Comique, a variety house at 514 Broadway. Soon they were among the most popular performers in New York City.
Where other variety houses rejuvenated their weekly bills by bringing in all new acts, the Theatre Comique relied on Harrigan and Hart to constantly turn out fresh bits themselves. The talented Harrigan wrote comedy sketches in profusion, as well as lyrics for the songs to accompany them. For fresh scenes and characters, Harrigan turned to the Lower East Side. His “The Mulligan Guards,” one of over forty sketches he churned out in the team’s first three seasons, was a takeoff on the city’s hundred-plus immigrant “target companies,” pseudomilitary outfits that on Sundays donned homemade uniforms and went to Jones’ Wood or Hoboken, where they marched, caroused, and shot at targets.
Harrigan’s loving spoof was a smash success, and in 1879 he began