Quick Take
- Narration: Julia Farhat handles the oral history’s polyphonic structure with clarity and an appropriate sense of period glamour, she distinguishes between voices and registers in a way that keeps the assembled testimonies vivid.
- Themes: American entertainment history, female performance as labor, the gap between cultural notoriety and cultural respect
- Mood: Fond, ribald, occasionally heartbreaking, always entertaining
- Verdict: The definitive oral history of American burlesque’s golden age, irreplaceable as a historical document and genuinely absorbing as a listening experience.
I spent several months at graduate school studying the historiography of popular entertainment, which means I have read a fair amount of cultural history that treats variety forms, vaudeville, burlesque, minstrelsy, the circus, with the careful distance of academic reclamation. What distinguishes Behind the Burly Q from that tradition is its source material: Leslie Zemeckis has assembled the voices of the performers themselves, many of whom had never before given an interview, many of whom have since died. Reading the book with that knowledge lends the whole enterprise a particular urgency.
This is, as the subtitle suggests, an oral history. It is not primarily a critical argument, though Zemeckis makes one clearly enough through her selection and framing. The argument is that burlesque was one of America’s most popular live entertainment forms for the first half of the twentieth century, that it was systematically written out of cultural history, and that the people who made it deserve to be heard before they are entirely beyond reach.
The Performers at the Center
Zemeckis interviewed former musicians, strippers, novelty acts, club owners, authors, and historians, a wide enough net that the book manages to capture burlesque as an ecosystem rather than simply a spectacle. The stripper testimonies are what most readers come for, and they deliver: the accounts of working conditions, pay structures, the economics of the bump and grind circuit, and the specific technical craft of the striptease are detailed and often surprising. Several performers speak about the artistry of their work with a precision that throws into sharp relief how consistently that artistry was denied acknowledgment.
The comedians receive significant attention, which one longtime burlesque enthusiast reviewer notes with specific appreciation. The comics who worked burlesque houses, the straight men and the low comedians who built routines around double entendre and physical gag, are part of the tradition’s lineage that runs directly into television comedy. Abbott and Costello appear, as do connections to Jack Ruby and Robert Kennedy that speak to burlesque’s penetration of mid-century American life at every social level.
What the Documentary Could Not Fully Capture
Zemeckis produced the documentary of the same name before writing this book, and the audio format allows for something the film could not fully accommodate: extended testimony, the discursive memory of someone who is given time rather than managed into clips. The best oral histories work this way, the digressions and tangents often contain the most revealing material. One reviewer describes the research as the most thorough he had encountered on the subject, and having listened to a good deal of burlesque-era material, that assessment feels accurate. Zemeckis does not streamline her subjects into digestible types; she lets them be contradictory and specific.
The framing material is appropriately light. Zemeckis is present as a guide but does not interpose herself between the performers and the listener, which is the right editorial instinct for a project whose value lies in its primary material. At over twelve hours, the book is substantial, but the voices sustain it.
Julia Farhat and the Multi-Voice Structure
Julia Farhat’s narration serves the oral history format well. She brings a warmth and a period-appropriate quality to her reading that suits the glamorous and slightly seedy world the book inhabits. Where the book requires her to voice multiple testimonies in succession, she maintains clarity of speaker distinction without resorting to caricature, a necessary skill in oral history narration where the temptation to over-differentiate can undermine the documentary seriousness of the enterprise. Her reading of Zemeckis’s authorial framing is appropriately unobtrusive, keeping the performers’ voices primary.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listen if you have any interest in American performance history, gender and labor in entertainment, or the cultural history of the mid-twentieth century. This is essential primary source material for anyone who studies the variety entertainment tradition, and it is entertaining enough as pure listening that casual listeners with no prior interest in burlesque will find themselves drawn in. Skip it if you require conventional narrative structure, this is assembled testimony, not argued history, and its organization is associative rather than strictly chronological.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Behind the Burly Q appropriate for all audiences given its subject matter?
The book discusses the burlesque industry frankly, including its sexual content and the working conditions of strippers, though it is not gratuitous. It is adult material in the sense of subject matter rather than explicit content, Zemeckis approaches her subjects with historical seriousness rather than prurience.
How does this oral history compare to Zemeckis’s documentary of the same name?
The book allows for substantially more extended testimony than the documentary format permitted. Many of the performers are given more room to digress and contradict themselves, which produces more revealing material. The book and film are complementary rather than redundant, the book functions as an expanded archive of what the documentary compressed.
Does the book cover the current burlesque revival as well as the golden age?
The book’s primary focus is the golden age of burlesque in the first half of the twentieth century. The revival is acknowledged as context, it was part of what motivated the documentation project, but the historical testimonies are the core material and receive the great majority of the book’s attention.
Why is preserving these specific performer testimonies historically significant?
Many of the performers Zemeckis interviewed had never spoken publicly about their work before, and many have since died, making these the last and often only interviews they gave. Burlesque has been systematically excluded from official cultural histories despite its massive popular audience, so these voices constitute a form of historical documentation that does not exist elsewhere.
