In Praise of Burlesque
The New York Times has a nice medium-sized bit up on burlesque, or should we say ‘neo-burlesque.’ I find it all pretty endearing. Contrary to the expectations of some cultural libertarians, I am not a pent-up prude simply because I am unwilling to bet our public standards of moral decency over on the randiest instincts of spontaneous order. As it happens I look at burlesque as almost an ideal example of how a diverse society with contending but overlapping cultures can negotiate (and re-negotiate!) spaces in which people do anyway what’s not to be done. And as it happens, compromising raw sex with a sloppy accumulation of somewhat improvised cultural interdicts — from pasties to humor to health codes to banned prostitution — winds up increasing the sexy entertainment value.
This strikes me as the key sequence from the Times piece:
During the 1950s and ’60s, burlesque became an orphaned theatrical genre, surviving only in the hinterlands and later in nostalgic touring shows like Ann Corio’s “This Was Burlesque,” a summer stock perennial in the 1970s.
Postwar Manhattan wanted none of it, particularly in the deteriorating environs of Times Square, and grew fed up with the epidemic of pornography, ratty movie houses, drug dealers and Brueghelesque crowds. Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, burlesque’s stationary cousin and a long-lived attraction on Broadway near 43rd Street, closed in 1972, packing its sideshow grotesqueries off to Los Angeles. Even freak shows, it seemed, had been spooked by the creeping seediness.
Then in the 1990s came the wholesale rejuvenation of Times Square, purging the crime, re-electrifying the signs and drawing hordes of tourists. The district became the city’s major destination for visitors, and was for the most part as family-friendly as a theme park in the Ozarks.
New Yorkers, contrarian as always, soon reacted against this militant wholesomeness and found themselves grieving for lost monstrosities: Bickford’s dank all-night cafeteria, or the Fascination game parlors whose unsavory, glassy-eyed customers could be seen tossing rubber balls into holes for hours on end. They grew nostalgic for the spirit of P. T. Barnum and his lusty embrace of all that was — and remains — tacky, weird, low-rent and, whether or not they admit it, abidingly attractive to highbrow and lowbrow alike.
According to Jen Gapay, a producer of “Showdown,” New York neoburlesque was born in the mid-1990s, out of a hunger for good dirty fun that high-minded reform only whets.
It was also a rebellion against the reformers. “At least in part it was a reaction to the Giuliani crackdown on sex clubs,” Ms. Gapay said.
And what a fine tradeoff it was. Burlesque can flourish in a clean city. It can offer a high-class approach to the lowbrow, which, indeed, was what made the Wild West so awesome. I know I’m at risk of getting comments like “You only like sex if it’s as sanitized as you want it to be.” Yet let’s be clear that the sanitization question isn’t a matter or my or your private idiosyncrasies alone and more a matter of public prudence, which is something we can have mutually comprehensible conversations about. A judgment that sex clubs are trash to be swept out of town, whereas burlesque clubs are not, seems to me to reflect a completely enlightened and liberaltarian way of looking at things — one which, perhaps most importantly, can also be held by people who aren’t liberaltarians and feel mighty suspicious about cultural enlightenment, too.
(Burlesque cupcake courtesy of Flickrer/confectioner clevercupcakes.)