Baggy Pants Comedy ― Burlesque and the Oral Tradition

Taking readers inside the burlesque houses of Depression-era America, Baggy Pants Comedy explores the role of comedy in a show remembered mostly for strip-tease. It examines how burlesque comics, straightmen, and talking women approached the craft of comedy, working in a genre that relied not on scripts but on a remembered tradition of comedy bits that circulated orally. The book opens a long-neglected area of American folklore, presenting transcripts of dozens of fondly-remembered routines like "Who's On First" and "Niagara Falls (Slowly I Turned)," as well as long-forgotten classics in print for the first time.

Andrew Davis teaches in the Interdisciplinary General Education Program at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, USA. As one-half of the comedy team of Doc and Stumpy, he is one of the few people for whom the label "straight man" is a job description. "Doc" and his comedy partner regularly perform classic burlesque comedy in Los Angeles and at burlesque and vaudeville festivals around the United States. He is the author of America's Longest Run: A History of the Walnut Street Theatre and operates the website BaggyPantsComedy.com.