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.
Alan King
My best memories growing up are of putting on musicals with my mom and dad, Both of them are real hams; it was like vaudeville in East Hampton.
Alexa Ray Joel
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.
Alfred Lunt
I do not like vaudeville, but what can I do? It likes me.
Anna Held
In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia. She's a theatrical figure, related to vaudeville in some respects. She inhabits a world in which there are comparatively few female exponents of comedy.
Barry Humphries
You bet I arrived overnight. Over a few hundred nights in the Catskills, in vaudeville, in clubs and on Broadway.
Danny Kaye
My mother was in vaudeville, but after she had her children, she quit working.
Dean Stockwell
Magic has both feet planted in cheap vaudeville and childish posturing; in dishonesty and therefore not in art.
Derren Brown
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
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.
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
A real New Yorker is always someone who came here from somewhere else to avoid some kind of persecution, often sexual-preference based, or to be discovered in one of the infinite-though-no-longer-thriving alternative scenes, i.e. theater, music, dance, vaudeville, art, drag, or, in those of the greatest egos, to be 'the next Andy Warhol.'
Genesis P-Orridge
Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.
George C. Wolfe
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 came to N.Y.C. in 1988 and got very involved with Act Up. I also started making movies, including two very gay shorts, 'Vaudeville' and 'Lady.' It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and New York City was both dying and very alive at the same time.
Ira Sachs
Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.
James Broughton
It's strange because even in the vaudeville days, ventriloquists were never the main attraction. They were the guys brought out to stand in front of the curtain while sets were being changed. Ventriloquism wasn't even celebrated as an art until Edgar Bergen came along in the 1930s.
Jeff Dunham
I think there's a lot of, unfortunately, unfunny ventriloquists out there, so they've got a bad rap. It came after Edgar Bergen because everybody had a little cheeky boy dummy like Charlie McCarthy, and everybody decided to become a ventriloquist because Bergen had popularized it. He brought it back from the doldrums of vaudeville.
My dad would take me downtown, and I'd stand backstage and watch him in the vaudeville pit band. I was 6 or 7. He was a musician, a band leader, a wonderful clarinetist and saxophone player.
Joel Grey
For better or worse, I have a lot of vaudeville circus skills that you just can't showcase in Aaron Sorkin's work.
Joshua Malina
My mother and stepfather were in Vaudeville. And my stepfather was an alcoholic. It was a lot of roller coaster times. But it's all I knew. I think they did the best they could under the circumstances, with me and all the family.
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.
My parents were in Vaudeville, in musical. And I would tour with them and had a couple of wonderfully lucky breaks in England.
When you are traveling in vaudeville, you experience so many different kinds of audiences, depending on what time of the week it is, how long the pubs have been open, and things like that.
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.
If I was on Broadway, I would want to do anything Vaudeville or a biopic.
In the United States, female fisticuffs were marginalized, first as erotic vaudeville in the 19th century and later as serious competition developed in the first half of the 20th. Legal wars waged by boxers in the 1960s and '70s won women the right to compete professionally nationwide.
I've always been a cabaret-vaudeville artist - an hourlong cabaret and a floor show in a hotel - somebody like that. That's my main forte.
If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in.
I was always a fan of the old-style comics. I loved vaudeville. I loved Milton Berle, Dick Shawn, Phyllis Diller, Don Rickles, Charlie Callas, all those guys. Hilarious. I love the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope movies, and Abbott & Costello. My television influences were 'Monty Python's Flying Circus,' 'Benny Hill,' and 'Hee Haw.'
I'm like an old vaudeville act. They'll have to pull me off the stage with a hook.
I'm a big fan of American vaudeville and Hollywood silent film-era slapstick and the music halls full of ridiculous, eccentric characters.
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!
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.
For me, my preference for comedy is grounding it in the psychology of the character, and not just kind of making faces. Even when it's a crazy character, grounded comedy resonates more with people because it doesn't look like you're watching someone do vaudeville. No offense to vaudeville.
I once read that in vaudeville, it was often the straight guy who got paid more than the comic because that's the tougher job. He has to set up the jokes in just the right way.
If you look at vaudeville in theaters vamping between acts, it was always jokes written and banter in the moment.
Touring on 'Folie' was like being the last act at the vaudeville show: We were rotten vegetable targets in clandestine hoods.
In the jargon of American vaudeville, Professors Frisch and Tinbergen are a 'hard act to follow.' But then, all my life, I have been following such great scholars and policy advisors as these.
I'm a fan of old vaudeville theaters.
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.
My father died when I was 11. He was a vaudeville comedian. He worked in one movie, 'Ladies of the Chorus,' as Marilyn Monroe's father.
George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.
