Abstract
The show’s title, The Ham Tree, was derived from a sketch McIntyre and Heath had performed on the stage. Greatly influenced by the minstrel show, the popular veteran song-and-dance blackface team developed comic routines in which they performed caricatures that degraded African Americans through exaggerated dialect and stereotyped portrayals. Heath played the straight man, foil, and fool to McIntyre, the smart-alecky trickster who ridiculed and lampooned his partner. As vaudeville headliners, they performed numerous sketches, the most popular being “The Georgia Minstrels” and “The Man from Montana,” which they performed on the Orpheum Show. From their skits they developed Broadway shows using similar formulas: cross-talk between their two caricatures, reworked routines, funny songs, and dancing clogs and jigs. The Ham Tree, for instance, was generated from a sketch with the same name.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Copyright information
© 2014 Arthur Frank Wertheim
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wertheim, A.F. (2014). The Ham Tree. In: W. C. Fields from Burlesque and Vaudeville to Broadway. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137300676_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137300676_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-67144-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30067-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)