Bob Hope and American Variety
Vaudeville

This program from New York's premier vaudeville theater shows how a typical vaudeville show was organized. It opens with a newsreel so latecomers will not miss a live act. The bill includes a novelty act—a singing baseball pitcher—a miniature drama, and a return engagement by a vaudevillian of years back, Ethel Levey, who was George M. Cohan's ex-wife. The headliners of this show at the Palace are Lou Clayton and Cliff Edwards. Clayton, a tap dancer, later appeared with Jimmy Durante and with Eddie Jackson. Edwards was a popular singer of the 1920s whose career was revived in 1940 when he sang “When You Wish Upon a Star” in Walt Disney's Pinocchio.

This ledger from Keith's Theater in Indianapolis, Indiana, provides a detailed view of “big-time” vaudeville in the early 1920s. The weekly bill and the performers' salaries are listed on the lower left-hand page. Daily receipts are posted above the bill. Expenses make up the other entries.

This ledger book from the “big-time” Palace Theatre in New York documents the vaudeville acts on each week’s bill, what each act was paid for the week, the name of the act’s agent, and additional costs incurred by the performers. In February 1931, Bob Hope performed for the first time at the Palace Theatre. Comedienne Beatrice Lillie and the band of Noble Sissle also appeared on the bill. Hope took out two ads in Variety for that week; the ledger entry shows that the cost of these ads was deducted from his salary. In that same issue of Variety, the influential trade journal gave Hope's act a lukewarm, but prescient, review, stating, “He is a nice performer of the flip comedy type, and he has his own style. These natural resources should serve him well later on.”

Bob Hope always tinkered with his material in an attempt to perfect it. Throughout the Bob Hope Collection are Hope's own handwritten notes on scripts and joke sheets. This outline of his act, listing jokes, exchanges, and songs is on the back of a 1929 letter from his agent.

In 1926 Lester Hope and George Byrne were booked on a tour in which the headliners were eighteen-year-old siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. The Hilton Sisters's show featured the twins telling stories of their lives, playing saxophone and clarinet duets, and dancing with Hope and Byrne.

The team of Lester Hope and George Byrne achieved considerable success from 1925 to 1927, touring the small-time vaudeville theaters with a dance act that they expanded to include songs and comedy.

In 1924, Bob Hope and his first touring partner, Lloyd “Lefty” Durbin, were booked in “tabloid” shows on the Ohio-based, small-time, Gus Sun circuit. “Tab” shows were low-budget, miniature vaudeville shows and musical comedies, which played in rural areas and small towns.

Touring in vaudeville was never easy and in the small-time it could be particularly arduous. “Lefty” Durbin died on the road in 1925. Initially, it was thought that food poisoning was the cause. In fact, he succumbed to tuberculosis.

This map represents one year of touring by Bob Hope on the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuit. It was Hope's first national tour, and his act was called Keep Smiling. Veteran gag writer Al Boasberg assisted in writing Hope's material. Hope recreated part of the act on a 1955 Ed Sullivan television program, which can be seen in the television section of this exhibit.

The Ballyhoo of 1932 revue starred Willie and Eugene Howard and Bob Hope. Similar to a vaudeville show, a revue usually consists of sketches, songs, and comedians, but has no overall plot. Unlike a vaudeville show, however, a revue runs for a significant period of time and may have a conceptual continuity to its acts. As this page indicates, Hope was the master of ceremonies in Ballyhoo. At the upper right, written in Hope's hand, is his remark to the audience about the opening scene of the revue.

As Hope and Byrne toured, they added more comedy to the act. When Hope found that he had a knack as a master of ceremonies, the act split, and Hope was booked as an “M.C.” at the Stratford Theater in Chicago in an engagement that would be seminal to his career. A master of ceremonies is a host, the link between the performance and the audience-providing continuity between scenes or acts by telling jokes, introducing performers, and assuring that the entertainment does not stop even if delays occurred backstage. Hope was such a success as a master of ceremonies in this Chicago engagement that his initial two-week booking was extended to six months.

Florenz Ziegfeld broke the color barrier in theater by hiring Bert Williams for his Follies of 1910, in which Williams was a sensation. He appeared in most of the editions of the Follies mounted in the 1910s and was among Ziegfeld's top paid stars.

This sentimental song was the first major hit of Tin Pan Alley composer Harry Von Tilzer (1872–1946). Von Tilzer claimed that his publisher paid him fifteen dollars for the song which sold 2,000,000 copies. He later founded his own publishing company. It was the tinny sound of Von Tilzer's piano which inspired the phrase “Tin Pan Alley” used to refer to music publishers' offices on West 28th Street and further uptown, in the early twentieth century.

Vaudeville performances of songs resulted directly in sheet music sales. Song publishers of the vaudeville era aggressively marketed their new products to vaudeville performers in a number of ways. “Song-pluggers,” salesmen who demonstrated new songs and coaxed variety performers to adopt them, worked for all major music publishers. Ads such as this in the trade newspaper, Variety, reached on-the-road performers who were inaccessible to the pluggers.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, vaudeville performers were paid by music publishers to sing the publishers' new songs. Covers of popular sheet music in the early twentieth century featured photographs of the vaudeville stars, promoting the performer as well as the song.

To ensure that a publisher's song catalog received the widest possible dissemination and sales, publishers commissioned instrumental and vocal arrangements of new works in all combinations then popular.

Bert Williams's most famous song was “Nobody,” a comic lament of neglect that he first sang in 1905. Both Williams's first recording of the song and Bob Hope's version from The Seven Little Foys can be heard in the Bob Hope Gallery.

Bob Hope owns the dancing shoes of Eddie Foy (1854–1928), a vaudevillian who performed with his seven children. Hope produced and played Foy in the 1955 film biography, The Seven Little Foys.

Harry Houdini escaped from handcuffs, leg irons, straightjackets, prison cells, packing crates, a giant paper bag (without tearing the paper), an iron boiler, milk cans, coffins, and the famous Water Torture Cell. In most of these escapes, later examination showed no sign of how Houdini accomplished his release.

Stock musical arrangements were created and sold by many music publishers for use by vaudevillians and other performers who could not afford to commission their own arrangements for their acts.

A common type of humor is based on unexpected juxtapositions or associations. This song shows how the technique can be reflected in music as well as in jokes.

In the early twentieth-century, jokes at the expense of women or of someone's national heritage and ethnicity were a staple of not only vaudeville but American life. This selection of humor books in this case shows that few groups were left unscathed.

Vaudevillians often obtained their jokes and comedy routines from publications, such as Southwick's Monologues.

This binder, like many others in the Library of Congress Bob Hope Collection, contains jokes and sketches written in the early 1930s. Most of the material was written by a gifted comedian, Richy Craig, Jr., who wrote for Bob Hope as well as himself.

The hotel front desk has been a very popular setting for sketch humor for more than a century. The Marx Brothers used it in The Cocoanuts, as did John Cleese in the British sitcom, Fawlty Towers. Bob Hope's sketch, shown here, is from a binder that contains jokes and bits written for him during his later years on the Vaudeville circuit. Most of the material was written by Richy Craig, Jr.

As with network television today, vaudeville promoted itself as family entertainment, but its shows often stretched the limits of common propriety. This report from a Boston stage censor outlines some of the questionable material in Bob Hope's 1933 act and preserves some of the jokes the act included. The pre-printed form catalogs common offenses found in variety acts.

The Bob Hope Collection includes more than 100 scrapbooks that document Hope's career. This one, said to have been compiled by Avis Hope, Bob Hope's mother, is the earliest. It includes many newspaper clippings relating to Hope and Byrne's tour with the Hilton Sisters.

Bob Hope's thirty-nine-week contract with the national Orpheum circuit included options for extension. The contract and tour resulted in the February 1931 engagement at the Palace Theatre in New York of his mini-revue, “Bob Hope and his Antics.”

Bob Hope's national Orpheum circuit tour of 1930 and 1931 included options for extension. The tour resulted in the February 1931 engagement at the Palace Theatre in New York of his mini-revue, Bob Hope and His Antics.

Theft of vaudeville material was common enough that a legal firm advertised its copyright services in the theatrical newspaper, The New York Clipper.

A railway guide was essential for the vaudevillian on the road.

Annual guides such as Cahn's provided theatrical professionals with information about the technical specifications of theaters, railroads servicing every major city, and other useful information.

In 1929 Bob Hope put together a popular act which included a female partner, intentionally discordant comic instrumentalists, and Hope's singing and dancing. To augment the comedy he hired veteran vaudeville writer Al Boasberg to write new material. This act toured for a year on the Orpheum circuit.

This 1913 mail-order course was directed toward aspiring vaudeville performers. Advice is included on “Handling your baggage,” “Behavior toward managers,” and “Eliminating Crudity and Amateurishness.” Among the ninety types of vaudeville acts explained in the course are novelties such as barrel jumpers, comedy boxers, chapeaugraphy (hat shaping to comic effect), and “lightning calculators.”