Alan Trachtenberg wrote of the "double-edged tradition" in the Protestant imagination that gave contrasting images of cities to Americans in the Gilded Age.¹Images of Vanity Fair with its corruption, commerce, and entertainments opposed to images of a celestial city of God informed American opinions and ideas as the nation experienced the rapid and often turbulent process of urbanization. Cities raised mystery to the "level of spectacle" with "parades of obscurity, of enigma, of silent sphinxes challenging the puzzled citizen" and reformers reacted with collective efforts to reshape the metropolis to the ideals of a "secular Celestial City."²Vaudeville, a primarily urban mass entertainment, used spectacle itself to decipher the mysteries of the city and control urban reality. Theatre owners, like "the father of American Vaudeville" B.F. Keith and his partner Edward F. Albee, strictly maintained order and propiety in their theatres, bringing an atmosphere of refinement and gentility to the entertainments of Vanity Fair.

The rapid pace and broad diversity inherent to a vaudeville show mirrored the lifestyles, tastes, and composition of urban audiences. Caroline Caffin wrote: "[vaudeville] is a very catholic and hospitable entertainment, embracing more forms of amusement than we could enumerate. . ."³The vaudeville stage brought together acts of every description, origin, and style just as cities in the nineteenth-century brought together more people of various backgrounds then ever before. These early sound recordings, primarily recorded for Edison Records' Vaudeville Series in the early twentieth century, present just a small sampling of that diversity. Interestingly, the majority of sketches on this page rely on dialect comedy and ethnic caricature. This type of act formed the bedrock of a great deal of vaudeville comedy, highlighting the form's deep roots in the traditions of blackface minstrelsy. Like minstrelsy, the ethnic caricature presented in vaudeville was a complicated phenomenon that transcends simple interpretations. The vaudeville stage often featured whites in blackface, blacks in blackface, Jews mimicking Italians, Italians impersonating the Irish, the Irish performing as Chinese, New Englanders pretending to be Southern "rubes," and so on and so forthad infinitum.Although critics quickly point out the inherent racism of such skits and maintain they function as assertions of the superiority of the dominant group, the broad base popularity and widespread ethnic participation in this type of comedy points to a far more tangled process. The portrayal of various ethnic groups by performers often praised for the realism in their acts served as an attempt to shed light on the dark mysteries of the city. Residents of cities in the nineteenth century suddenly found themselves surrounded by peoples whose languages, dress, customs, and lifestyles often drastically differed from their own. Spectacular investigations of living conditions for the "other half" filled the daily papers, providing a safe orientation to unfamiliar and "menacing spaces" for a curious public.⁴Arguably, the ethnic sketches on the vaudeville stage served a similar purpose, allowing performers and audiences alike the opportunity to safely explore their own identities in regard to "the other" through stereotype and pantomime.