Variety Acts Quotes

I call it 'new forms'. When you're starting out, they ask you to do four or five minute sets, but once you're a headliner, you do like 90 minutes. I try to think of different things to divvy up the show, like doing drawings, playing music... I gotta carry the show, that's the problem.

I've enjoyed appearing in Atlantic City. East Coast audiences are a bit brighter than Las Vegas audiences. I think most entertainers will tell you the same thing. The East Coast audiences are more perceptive - especially when it comes to a performer with a theatrical background.

How can you have a rock n' roll circus without a midget?

I used to watch the 'Jackie Gleason Show' and Phil Silvers, those early TV things. And a lot of them were patterned on the silent comedies of the '20s.

So many people are working in vaudeville today that I looked for three weeks to book enough acts for an hour bill and didn't have them until the night before we opened in Buffalo and money was no object!

Well, I have since seen you at Tinkle. It's a comedy show started by David Cross, me and Jon Benjamin. It features a wide variety of acts for all tastes and seasons.

There were a great many in vaudeville - people who never quite came through. But they had their place, and they filled it. They kept theatres open. Those pan-timers, those interstate-timers, those four-a-dayers, those six-a-dayers - they were an integral part of that endearing merry-go-round called vaudeville.

I did a lot of things when I first started out. In order to be in show business, I juggled, I did magic tricks, cards tricks and I played the banjo.

I had a very exciting life in Italy, and I was doing lots of variety shows.

Britain's got talent, enormous talent; that's very obvious.

When I was young, my parents made me listen to old music and watch Jimmy Durante. I fell in love with the whole mystique of acting and entertainment.

If you look at the Karamazov Brothers on TV, they're really small and the heart is taken out of their act. That's true for most variety acts. I'm an exception. When the camera comes in close and looks at those soap bubbles, you can really see what bubbles do.

You just don't see the same type of all-purpose entertainers nowadays.

When my brother and me got into performing in the late '40s and early '50s, it was a sensational opportunity to learn from our elders. Every show we played had a dancer, a comic, a juggler, a singer, an acrobat. I came to appreciate virtuosity in all forms of the business.

Britain's Got Talent' isn't all that far from 'The Gong Show' 35 years ago, is it?

I was that kid that did dance, singing, pageants. I did everything pretty much across the board, so it was kind of an adjustment solely doing music.

I'd seen all the great entertainers by the time I was 14 or 15. My mother was artistic. My father was a bookmaker, so he had access to all those nightclubs, and he was smitten by certain artists, and we would go see them. We'd see comics like Sid Caesar and Milton Berle - those kind of artists - many of whom I worked with later in my life.

My parents were in Vaudeville, in musical. And I would tour with them and had a couple of wonderfully lucky breaks in England.