Quotes & Sayings About Burlesque

Me personally, I want to entertain people above all. When you look back at burlesque in history and the real golden age of burlesque, those entertainers were there to entertain, and there wasn't usually some big political message behind what they were doing. — Dita Von Teese

The silent film has a lot of meanings. The first part of the film is comic. It represents the burlesque feel of those silent films. But I think that the second part of the film is full of tenderness and emotion. — Pedro Almodovar

Classic burlesque in the style of Gypsy which many modern burlesque troupes practice is, at its core, so playful and teasing and innocent. It's not hardcore stripping so much as letting your body tell a story; the women are playing characters and unfolding a complete narrative onstage, with beginning, middle, and end. — Karen Abbott

Assimilated by the deceit of its divine origin, its tenets are reward for obedience, punishment for transgression, both holding good for all time (this world and another). This moral code is a dramatised burlesque of the conceptive faculty, but is never so perfect or simple in that it allows latitude for change in any sense, so becomes dissociated from evolution, etc; and this divorce loses any utility and of necessity for its own preservation and the sympathy desired, evolves contradictions or a complication to give relationship. Transgressing its commandments, dishonesty shows us its iniquity, for our justification; or simultaneously we create an excuse or reason for the sin by a distortion of the moral code, that allows some incongruity. (Usually retaing a few unforgiveable sins- and an unwritten law.) — Austin Osman Spare

The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice
although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical. — Edgar Allan Poe

There is a surprising amount of overlap between the storytelling and burlesque communities, maybe because they both, in a way, involve getting naked. People who choose to be vulnerable are rare. People who manage to do it well are even more so. — Mara Wilson

I was performing in this burlesque group, and we would go to dance rehearsals every day. You'd use every part of your body. Even though some of it is slow, it takes a lot of muscle to be able to dip down and come back up. — Carmen Electra

Just the whole concept of burlesque, I've always been fascinated with it. I've always collected so many books about burlesque. — Christina Aguilera

Elmer Gantry never knew who set him thirty dimes, wrapped in a tract about holiness, nor why. But he found the sentiments in the tract useful in his sermon, and the thirty dimes he spent for lovely photographs of burlesque ladies. — Sinclair Lewis

A burlesque word is often a powerful sermon. — Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

I know my comfort zone and I know what my strong points are and my first love was always music. I'm a huge cinema fan. I was taking my time; I got offered a lot of scripts and things along the way but until Burlesque showed up at my doorstep, it really spoke to me. I have a collection of burlesque books at home that I've had for years. I've always been intrigued and fascinated with the topic, the beauty and the art of it and the comedic value of it. I think it's just a beautiful, empowering thing for women. — Christina Aguilera

Following Big Boss Lady's dictate to write about offbeat places in Edinburgh - I found Arkangel and Felon, an eclectic clothing boutique, the Voodoo Rooms, a chic fringe bar with a burlesque show, and Angels with Bagpipes, a bijou wine bar on the Royal Mile. — Leah Marie Brown

There is nudity, of course striptease is an essential component of burlesque but it's much more complex and intelligent than a display of nudity for nudity itself. And its often laugh-out-loud funny. — Karen Abbott

You know what my earliest memories are? Going from one burlesque town to another. My father was in burlesque. — Alan Alda

Objectivity is almost a choice you make. As a burlesque performer, I didn't choose to be objectified. — Esme Bianco

They don't realize that burlesque for centuries has been a legitimate branch of show business. I'll admit it's the lowest branch, but that's the limb nearest the people. — Joseph DiMona

heard in America's streets. Yiddish theaters are still drawing crowds, and off-color humor fueled by vaudeville, jazz, and burlesque is flourishing in the Jewish Riviera resorts of the Catskills. Jewish humor — Paul Goldberg

The prosecutor uttered the party line that would distinguish revue from burlesque for the next thirty years. The difference is movement. On Broadway, unadorned female figures are used to artistic advantage in tableaux. They do not move. — Dita Von Teese

Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741), a scurrilous burlesque, written mostly by John Arbuthnot, that poked fun at Grub Street twittishness. He chose this indelicate item because it was a source of interesting words like 'chicanery', 'confidant', 'troglodyte' and 'piazza', and even the distinctly modern-sounding 'skylight'. — Henry Hitchings

Auctions are bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theatre and burlesque ... a lot of people are going to be making a lot of excuses or maintaining that they were never part of this. — Jerry Saltz

Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses. — Molly Crabapple

When I started performing, there was no Internet; I didn't really have anything to copy. I kind of had to just make up what I thought burlesque was, based on photographs of Sally Rand or whatever. — Dita Von Teese

Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. — E. E. Cummings

Some of the pictures I must say every now and then I just think are going to be funny. When it gets that much, you might as well just pull out all the stops and make it more of a burlesque. — Martin Mull

I've had 79 to 80 years of show business. I started when I was 5 with a man called Tom Mix. I didn't have time to go to school because I was in silent movies, I was in radio, I was in burlesque, I worked with the circus. I'm all show business! — George Sidney

There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first - the Orwellian - culture becomes a prison. In the second - the Huxleyan - culture becomes a burlesque. No — Neil Postman

You are a nice person, and you're also full of anger. You're a walking tangle of contradictions. That's okay. Most of us are like that. Women, most of all. How could we not be? People want us to be sexy warriors who roll over and play dead on command. They want us to be flirty burlesque dancers in burkas, aggressive conquistadors with cookies in the oven, Dorothy Parker meets Dorothy Gale, Sandra Bernhard meets Sandra Dee, Kristen Stewart meets Martha Stewart. — Heather Havrilesky

This is why convicts take such pleasure in boasting and exaggerating their own unhappy personalities to the point of burlesque.
They find in boasting the one thing they long for - a semblance of life and liberty. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The very greatest satire, I came to think
the kind that lives forever
ultimately grew out of a debunking attitude toward the self. To see the world mock-heroically was necessarily to engage in a sort of preliminary self-burlesque. You couldn't take yourself *that* seriously. You were part of it. All the Lilliputian preening and pomposity was, at bottom, one's own. — Terry Castle

Every one of my products - my lingerie, my perfume, and everything that I do beauty-related with regard to building my burlesque shows - is just me. — Dita Von Teese

The difference between burlesque and the newspapers is that the former never pretended to be performing a public service by exposure. — I. F. Stone

It just seemed fitting to have our own lounge with our own dance review that paid homage to where The Pussycat Dolls originated, ... So it wasn't just another nightclub. It was somewhere where people can go and see an old school show with real dancing and real performing and real singing. It's perfect for Vegas. It's got that whole cabaret, burlesque-inspired review of dancing, and the whole fishnets, and boas. — Nicole Scherzinger

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy. — Dawn Powell

I have this fantasy that the second movie would begin with a brief statement by all of the young actors who had played the children in the first movie, explaining how it had ruined their lives, so we would catch up with Emily Browning drinking heavily in the back of a burlesque bar, and maybe Liam Aiken would be living underneath a bridge, and then instead of the twins who played Sunny, we would just try to find the oldest woman in the world, and get an interview with her sitting in a trailer park. — Daniel Handler

Heroics that don't come off are the very essence of burlesque. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I'm happy for you Agastya,you're leaving for a more meaningful context. This place is like a parody, a complete farce, they're trying to build another Cambridge here. At my old University I used to teach Macbeth to my MA English classes in Hindi.English in India is burlesque. But now you'll get out of here to somehow a more real situation. In my time I'd wanted to give this Civil Service exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L. H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

I am not an educated person. I didn't come up through a ballet company. I came up through burlesque. So I have a lot of inferiority feelings concerning my own lack of education, my entry into show business. I'm not a Baryshnikov. I'm not a Nureyev. I came up in vaudeville. Strippers. So I've always had these feelings. But I think they've also helped me. — Bob Fosse

Movies, vaudeville, burlesque, the local stock companies - all survived together. Then radio came in. For the first time people didn't have to leave their homes to be entertained. — Kliph Nesteroff

Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society's economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The "ideological superstructure" of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories. — Ludwig Von Mises

The new acts' major influences were movies and their curvy queens Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe. With their big blonde hair, ample breasts, and highly fertile hips, these bombshells inspired women everywhere to exxagerate their own voluptuousness. — Dita Von Teese

Would you believe I devise my entire show based upon a single one of these jewels? It's true I choose a color from my collection ( ... ) and with it I can imagine a whole world. — Dita Von Teese

Burlesque thrived during the Great Depression, and by extension, so, too, did Gypsy [Rose Lee]. Men could no longer afford to pay $5.50 to see a show on Broadway, but they could scrape together $1.00 for a matinee at a burlesque house. — Karen Abbott

I've been involved in burlesque for a really long time and I've always been really interested in burlesque, and I was writing musicals for different studios. — Steve Antin

Slapstick was named after the battacio, or 'slap stick,' which made a dramatic popping sound when actors hit one another with it and which was used in the Commedia dell'arte, an Italian stage tradition whose blend of stereotype, sketch and shtick was passed down through circus and pantomime to vaudeville and burlesque and into cinema — David Parkinson

What caricature is in painting, burlesque is in writing; and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other; as in the former, the painter seems to have the advantage, so it is in the latter infinitely on the side of the writer. For the monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the ridiculous to describe than paint. — Henry Fielding

My mother worked in the old Minsky's troupe, which toured the country in the golden age of burlesque theatre. — Seymour Cassel

Burlesque had stock routines and it was no big deal if one comic had the same act as another. But no one expected interchangeable burlesque routines to find a home on a national broadcast. Other comedy teams like Wheeler & Woolsey and Howard & George had done versions of "Who's on First?" prior to Bud and Lou, but Abbott & Costello now got all the credit. — Kliph Nesteroff

It was a great challenge to reconstruct Gypsy Rose Lee life, and my interviews with her sister [June Havoc] proved invaluable. It's not often that writers have access to living primary source material; this was the only person who experienced life on the vaudeville circuit with Gypsy during the 1920s, and who saw her perform at Minsky's Burlesque in the 1930s. She knew things that no one else could ever possibly know. — Karen Abbott

It is a sin to be a mocker. — William Shakespeare

In the early '90s, it was grunge; everybody was fully clothed. Alanis Morissette was one of the biggest artists in the world, never wore makeup, wearing Doc Marten boots, and then the Spice Girls turn up, and suddenly it all looks a bit burlesque; suddenly they're the biggest band in the world. — Caitlin Moran

What modern day burlesquer hasn't been influenced by Sally Rand? My own pink ostrich fans -designed by Catherine, naturally- were the largest fans on any stage in the world (even I must up the ante). They are absolutely stunning! Made with four graduated shades of pink and hundreds of rose-colored crystals, they measure seven feet across and weigh 2.3 pounds each. — Dita Von Teese

Pie throwing is kind of a lost art, and although it may be a rather rudimentary, burlesque humor, there's something inherently funny about taking a pie in the face, under the right conditions. — Johnny Carson

Rehearsals at the Silver Slipper's Burlesque Review had been brutal because of the physical toll on the body. Rehearsals for Cristos the Incredible were brutal because Cristos was an ass. — Kristen Painter

It was noted long ago that the front row of burlesque houses was occupied predominantly by bald-headed men. In fact, such a row became known as the bald-headed row. It might be assumed from this on statistical evidence that the continued close observation of chorus girls in tights caused loss of hair from the top of the head. — Harry S.N. Greene

I actually had a movie green lit at Disney the same week 'Burlesque' was green lit - a movie for Disney called 'Mash-Up', about a high school marching band. — Steve Antin

There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off. — P. J. O'Rourke

I love making dances and I love the sexiness of burlesque," I admit and she smiles. "But I'm worried they won't see it that way, they'll think it's stripping or something degrading. — Toni Aleo

every one of the novels. To some the delightful freshness and humour of Northanger Abbey, its completeness, finish, and entrain, obscure the undoubted critical facts that its scale is small, and its scheme, after all, that of burlesque or parody, a kind in which the — Jane Austen

There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Look, I come from vaudeville, I come from burlesque, I come from heartaches, I come from sadness, I come from gladness, I come from work and sweat and respect for the craft. — Mickey Rooney

I've always had a love affair with New York City, and I've threatened to get an apartment there one day. But it just made sense for me to set 'Burlesque' on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. It's a place I know intimately well and love, and I think there's a great story to be told with L.A. — Steve Antin

Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is as usueful as bread. — Azar Nafisi

There have been a lot of roles and scripts that have come my way but nothing that really inspired me or intrigued me like when "Burlesque" showed up at my door. Just the whole concept of burlesque, I've always been fascinated with it. I've always collected so many books about burlesque. I've been intrigued by the time that it's set in, in the 20's, 30's, 40's and so I knew it was a no brainer for me to be a part of once I met with the team. — Christina Aguilera