What are “Teh Internets”? Urban Dictionary offers a quick explanation (Click here to go to Urban Dictionary’s definition. WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE) while you can find a more thorough explanation of the term on Wikipedia’s “Internets” page.

“Teh Internets” is a half hour long program that seeks to academically understand the popularity of different content online, identifying common themes such as absurdist humor, cuteness, and a dada-esque ability to recontextualize traditional media for comedy’s sake. The conversation seeks to build upon the first six episodes of Make ‘Em Laugh series by identifying Internet humor as the next step in the rich history of comedy. We hope to show that our current comedic trends online are still just standing on the shoulders of giants — the comedic greats of the last century.

Vaudeville was the next logical extension of the music hall, a popular form of urban entertainment in the mid-19th Century, which provided for a variety of acts to perform in front of an all-male audience, while it enjoyed a beer or two. Music hall (or variety, as it was also called) was basically a theater with a saloon attached. One of the great pioneers of vaudeville was producer Tony Pastor, who opened his eponymous theater off New York’s Union Square in 1881, with the provision that there be no liquor in the audience and that the material on-stage be fit for middle-class audiences; this subsequently opened the doors for women to attend and vaudeville soon achieved massive, nationwide popularity. The roots of its name are shrouded in legend (voix de ville, or French for “voice of the city” sounds pretty reasonable), but Americans in nearly every city—by 1900, there were 2,000 vaudeville houses, half of all theaters in the country—understood that vaudeville meant the best, or at least the most energetic, form of live entertainment.

Shows in vaudeville featured almost a dozen different artists, or acts, at a time, performing all kinds of material—songs, comedy routines, magic, acrobatics, novelty acts, dramatic readings–on what were called “bills.” The performers repeated their acts (which lasted around ten minutes) at least twice a day for a week, and then moved on to the next town (or in big cities, the next theaters). By the turn of the century, vaudeville was such a big business that it needed a monopoly to come in and manage its bookings and presentations. E.F. Albee and B. F. Keith joined forces to create the largest network (or circuit) of theaters and artists in the country; their business means involved a 5% charge to each performer and their strict regulation of conduct, salaries, and material (the phrase “blue material” supposedly comes from the blue envelopes in which Keith managers would send back censored gags) made them detested figures in the eyes of performers. Still, their management of family-friendly acts, railway logistics, and “continuous” vaudeville (non-stop shows from lunchtime to after-dinner) created a system that drew thousands of performers to devote their whole lives to breaking into the “Big Time”—the best theaters on the best circuits—a vaudeville phrase that, like many others, has entered the American lexicon.

To develop one’s act in vaudeville was often a career-long endeavor. A performer had to define and refine his or her skills in a hotly competitive world and come up with something that no one else could do—or at least no one could do as well. For a comedian, this was a particular challenge. A dog act or a magician required little from an audience other than sheer amazement; a comedian had to land a gag whether he or she was in Sheboygan or Brooklyn or Fort Worth, Texas. It was in the latter town that a young Bob Hope flopped with his audience, using material that had scored elsewhere.

A vaudeville manager came backstage and told him, “Why don’t you slow down and give them a chance? These people aren’t going anywhere. They came in here to be happy. It’s summertime. It’s hot. This is Texas. Let them understand you. Why make it a contest to keep up with your material? Relax and you’ll be all right.” Hope took the advice—grudgingly—and within the week he was all right. Texas seemed a particularly tough state for urban acts: when an early incarnation of the Marx Brothers were playing Nagodoches, someone burst into the theater in the middle of their act and announced that there was a runaway mule on the main street. The audience quickly filed out to catch that event, leaving Groucho to remark, “Nagodoches—is full of roaches.”

Comedians also had to suffer through the easy transmission of their material. Fred Allen, who stumbled up the ladder as a comic juggler recalled:

Comedy acts were always the target of pirates. For many years performers had no way to protect their gags, parodies or bits of business. . . and good gags spread like bad news. There was a young comedian whose father regularly attended the opening show at the Palace. If any of the acts had new lines, jokes, or song titles, the father copied them down and wired them to his son. The act continued convulsing the Palace audience in New York, little dreaming that its best jokes were being told in Omaha, San Francisco, or wherever the son happened to be playing.

There was little remedy for such deviousness. Some comedians even made it part of their act; Milton Berle was so open about his larceny that he was dubbed by Walter Winchell as “The Thief of Bad Gags.”

Vaudeville was tough on anyone working their way up the ladder; the pay was poor, the conditions were terrible, the billing was never big enough. Still, performers kept at it, even if they had little to offer. The young George Burns, ne Nathan Birnbaum, was so lousy that “after playing a theater, I would have to change my name. The booker who booked me would never give me another job if he knew who I was. It never crossed my mind that there was any reason to change the act, so I changed my name instead.” Among Burns’ more than two dozen noms de guerre were Jimmy Ferguson, Jimmy Delight, even a member of the team of “Links and Burns”—although he was “Links.” Go figure. What vaudeville did offer was an unparalleled training ground for comedians to refine their personalities into something so special it was money in the bank. It also created a variety of performance styles that still exist to this day: genial hosts with witty banter (Frank Fay, Milton Berle), double-acts (Smith and Dale, Burns and Allen), triple acts (Durante, Clayton, and Jackson; the Three Stooges), even quadruple acts (the Marx Brothers). Even the impressionist act—extremely popular up until the early 1980s—was created in vaudeville. What comedians really had to learn was economy, speed, and variety—it often helped if, like Eddie Cantor or Jimmy Durante, you could tell jokes, sing, dance, and play a musical instrument. “I got a million of ‘em!” rasped Durante about his jokes—and he wasn’t exaggerating, either.

Much has been made about the sudden death of vaudeville. It wasn’t all that sudden. The Broadway revue siphoned off stars, as did radio by the mid-1920s. Vaudeville might have drifted away without the rivalry from technology or more upscale entertainments; it was an exhausting grind, with a pretty low ceiling for success; once it turned into a stepping stone for other, more lucrative and more relaxing professions, its days were numbered. Sound film provided the final resting place for vaudeville; many historians claim May 7, 1932 as the funeral date, when the Palace, New York’s most prestigious vaudeville house switched from two-a-day shows to the lower rent four-a-day shows, interspersed with short films. A few months later, they began to screen feature films exclusively; ironically, the first one was The Kid from Spain, starring Eddie Cantor, one of the Palace’s greatest headliners.

Perhaps, at least at the beginning of vaudeville’s demise, Broadway inflicted more wounds than did the motion pictures. Broadway revues were becoming increasingly upscale after World War I, and more competitive with each other. (Variety magazine added a category called “Legit” to distinguish these classier productions from “Vaude.”) One way for a revue producer to rise above the crowd was to import a vaudeville superstar, or, even better (and cheaper), to create a Broadway superstar from the rank-and-file. No one was better at this than Florenz Ziegfeld and his stable of comedians—Will Rogers, W.C. Fields, Bert Williams, Fanny Brice, and Eddie Cantor, among many others—was legendary. But tastes changed somewhat in the mid-1920s and audiences demanded narrative shows and, thus, the musical comedy was born: a trifle, to be sure, but at least a trifle with the pretensions of a plot. This proved to be a boon for a successful comedian—the first “crossover” in popular entertainment. A comedian could now go from touring in vaudeville to being one of several bananas in a Broadway revue to holding down an entire musical comedy vehicle that showcased his talents exclusively. Cantor was the most successful of these crossover comedians, but Fanny Brice, the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Durante, Willie and Eugene Howard, Ed Wynn, Clark and McCullough, Bert Lahr, and Bob Hope eventually followed suit and created brand-new audiences for themselves.

At the same time Broadway comedies were beginning to find their own unique voices, with or without crossover comedians. Before the 1920s, native comedies were skimpy and formulaic: scrappy boy meets scrappy girl, he loses her, he gets her and they live scrappily ever after. But these plays said little about who we were as a culture, and confronted few, if any, of the issues that preoccupied the rapacious and, well, scrappy Americans who emerged after World War I. That soon changed with the emergence of playwright George S. Kaufman who, along with collaborators such as Marc Connelly and Edna Ferber, created the first full-fledged American satires, such as the silent-film spoof, Merton of the Movies and the show business comedy of manners The Royal Family. With the Gershwin brothers, Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind were the first playwrights to poke fun at American government and the presidency in musicals like Of Thee I Sing and Kaufman even took on the unenviable task of corralling the Marx Brothers into their first legitimate musical comedy, The Cocoanuts. Following in Kaufman’s rat-a-tat-tat, wise-cracking satirical style were other gifted playwrights like Moss Hart (a frequent Kaufman collaborator), George Abbott, Mae West, Philip Barry (more genteel), and Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, whose blissfully anarchic The Front Page and Twentieth Century would both go on to have major Hollywood legacies.

The Golden Age of American stage comedy would be further diluted by the advent of sound film as many idiosyncratic stage comedians and Broadway writers went West. With the exception of zany, free-wheeling Hellzapoppin in 1938 and a few classics, such as Kaufman and Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner, the “take-no-prisoners” style of 1930s comic anarchy no longer seemed appropriate during the Second World War. Serious minded musicals, created either by or in the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein mode, precluded outsized comedians and the successful comedies of the 1940s, such as Harvey and Arsenic and Old Lace were comparatively benign. In the 1950s, stage comedies were forced to compete with television and did so with the only weapon available to them: mild doses of suggestive sexuality. The best of the breed was George Axelrod’s The Seven-Year-Itch (a more interesting play than movie, despite the appearance of Marilyn Monroe), but more typical was Never Too Late by Sumner Arthur Long, in which a man in his fifties discovers that he has impregnated his wife.

Ironically, just as sound films gave vaudeville stars a new immortality by capturing their work forever, television managed to reinvigorate Broadway comedy in the 1960s, especially musical comedy. Five veterans of the writing staff of Your Show of Shows turned their hands to writing successful musical comedy librettos: Larry Gelbart (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), Neil Simon (Little Me; Promises, Promises), Michael Stewart (Bye Bye Birdie, Hello, Dolly!), Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), and Mel Brooks (actually, his 1960s musicals were flops—but wait until The Producers). They were joined by such veterans as Abe Burrows and Betty Comden and Adolph Green in creating a new era of joyously silly musical comedies—shows for the proverbial “tired businessman.” A new generation of Broadway clowns invigorated the proceedings, almost all of whom originally started on stage, but were now television stars eager to spread their wings, bring their comic talents to a starring role in a narrative musical, and, not coincidentally, grab a huge percentage of the weekly gross. They included Phil Silvers, Jackie Gleason, Sid Caesar, Lucille Ball, and Carol Burnett. Among these buoyant musical comedies, pride of place must be given to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), written by Gelbart, Burt Shevelove, and Stephen Sondheim, an homage to burlesque reset in Ancient Rome. Forum maintains its low comic genius and, over the years, in revivals, tours, and a film version, has provided a happy home for such varied comics as Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Dick Shawn, Mickey Rooney, Buster Keaton, Nathan Lane, and Whoopi Goldberg.

The last three decades have not been kind to stage comedy. Clearly television and the movies have swallowed up not only writers, but the performers whose finely crafted and often manic personas inspired decades of comic writers. But, Broadway has recently seen a rebirth of the musical comedy, after about a two-decade preponderance of ponderous pop operas. Led largely by Mel Brooks’ The Producers in 2001, there has been a march of shows conceived almost exclusively to tickle the funny bone in song and dance: Hairspray, Avenue Q, Monty Python’s Spamalot, Xanadu, and Young Frankenstein. Such hijinks would have been inconceivable in the 1990s, when Broadway was mired in the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Co. But the theater has always embraced certain stars as their own, comedians who both ennoble and energize a live event with their presence: Beatrice Lillie, Carol Channing, Sam Levene, Robert Morse, Zero Mostel, and Nathan Lane (and Lane often succeeded in some of Mostel’s great parts). Alas, these comedians were not always able to make successful transitions into film or television—something about them being larger-than-life.

But, “larger-than-life” is what a comedy audience demands, whether it knows it or not. Vaudeville and Broadway have given center stage to a special kind of performer who can connect with a spectator across the footlights all the way to the back row in the balcony. When you bought a ticket to see them, in person, cavorting around a stage, it was a once-in-a-lifetime event; it was the stuff of legend.

Windsor McCay was one of the most successful and technically brilliant newspaper cartoonists of the early twentieth century. His baroque inventive Little Nemo in Slumberland series galvanized readers across the country as the title hero’s adventures sprawled over an entire page in the Sunday morning funnies. Influenced by his son’s “flip book,” McCay tried his hand at animating Little Nemo for a brief cartoon—it took him four years of painstaking work. After a second attempt, he decided to create a character specifically for the movie screen, a gentle giant named Gertie the Dinosaur, whom McCay unveiled in 1914. It took 10,000 separate drawings, each hand-drawn by McCay on onion-skin, to bring Gertie to life in a one-reeler. Audiences didn’t know what hit them, but clearly the animated short was going to be an essential part of film vocabulary.

The early days of silent cartoons are filled with as many different experiments as their live action counterparts. Animators had to find ways to get beyond the sheer novelty of the process and create something amusing and fluid, a particularly difficult chore, considering the huge manpower required to churn out cartoons at a time when all the technology was done by hand. Transparent celluloid, or “cels”, allowed for a more efficient way of reproducing each frame and pioneer animators Max and Dave Fleischer invented a process called the Rotoscope in 1916, which projected live-action clowning directly onto a drawing board. Their Koko the Clown character was initially created by having one of the Fleischer brothers act out Koko’s antics, while the other rendered the action frame-by-frame. Many early characters were simply transfers from newspaper strips—Krazy Kat, Mutt and Jeff—but in 1919, an original character appeared, a cat who was easy to draw because he was all black. His name was Felix, and his plucky resourcefulness led critics to compare him with Chaplin (who briefly appeared as an animated character himself in the 1910s). In 1923’s “Felix in Hollywood,” our hero actually unscrews his own tail and uses it as a cane for a Chaplin imitation. Felix was also the first animated character to be licensed for commercial products.

According to animation historian Leonard Maltin, as the 1920s ended, “more and more artists and cartoonists got the hang of animation and began to explore more and more with each passing year how you could do things in animation you couldn’t do in a live action film. They created a whole new language for the animated cartoon which gave those characters abilities even beyond Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton–and that’s really saying something.” But cartoon animation might have been stopped in its tracks without the invention of sound synchronization in the mid-1920s. There had been some crude “follow-the-bouncing-ball” shorts, which used music, but the industry was revolutionized in 1928, when producer Walt Disney reintroduced a character named Mickey Mouse in a short called “Steamboat Willie.” Mickey’s previous two silent adventures had not even been picked up for distribution, but his new short subject had a synchronized sound score (and was delightfully illustrated by Ub Iwerks). Audiences loved it and Disney built his empire on the little mouse—to whom he always gave credit.

Exaggerated sound fit exaggerated motion to a T—and it was just the element that cartoons needed to lift off the ground. Sound also accelerated the need for tempo; now it was even more crucial for a successful cartoon to have the right timing; it was a difficult trick to master. Pioneer animator Chuck Jones said that “animation is the art of timing. . . . the difference between a huge laugh and a flop can be one frame.” With the success of Walt Disney’s short subjects (Silly Symphonies), movie studios in Hollywood set up full-time animation divisions (Disney’s short cartoons were distributed by RKO); as every feature presentation at the time included several short subjects and cartoons, animation became crucial moneymakers for the studios. Also, as with the creation of real-live movie stars, studios needed to create characters with whom the audience could identify and welcome back week after week. The creators of cartoons now had to expand their canvas dramatically—and that meant becoming part of the world of drama. As another pioneer, Walter Lantz (Woody Woodpecker) put it:

An animator is like an actor before the camera, only he has to act out his feelings and interpret that scene with his pencil; he also has to know how to space characters because the spacing of their movements determines the tempo; he must know expression; he must know feeling; he has to know the character and make him walk with a funny action.

Life as an animator for a studio division was chaotic, intense, frustrating, and often heck of a lot of fun. Executives—other than Disney—rarely knew how to handle these strange men who drew cartoons and animators, frequently fed up with one slight or another, shuttled among the various studios with an alarming frequency; even the most ardent animation fan would have trouble keeping the scorecard straight. Warner Bros started its own division in 1930 by animating songs from their vast musical catalogue with the rip-off title of Looney Tunes and soon added another series of one-offs called Merrie Melodies. But these were initially conceived without successful characters; other studios were having better luck drawing their own stable of stars. Fleischer created Betty Boop in 1930 and brought the comic strip hero Popeye to the screen in 1931. Disney added Donald Duck to Mickey’s menagerie in 1934 and the cantankerous waterfowl soon outstripped his friend’s popularity. Disney outpaced all of his rivals during the Depression years, adding professional voice talent and Technicolor to his cartoons. In 1937, he offered his competitors the greatest challenge of all: a feature-length adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which used 750 artists who created a quarter of a million drawings at the cost of $1.5 million dollars. It earned six times that amount in its initial release.

Yet for many aficionados, the most exciting animation of the period (and into the 1950s) was to be found at Warner Bros. In the years 1936-1937, the studio (which stuck their animators in a remote bungalow they dubbed “Termite Terrace”) assembled the All-Star Team of cartoonists: directors Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Frank Tashlin, as well as voice professional extraordinaire Mel Blanc and musical director Carl Stalling. Working in deranged concert with each other, they demonstrated that classic comedy animation was a rare combination of design, voice, effect, character, timing, and point of view. Any combination of those would be amusing; to have all six at once, as Warner Bros often did, was exhilarating. Their stable of two-dimensional celebrities was impressive: Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, and, joining them after WWII, Sylvester and Tweety, Yosemite Sam, Pepe le Pew, and Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. What the animators did with them was even better.

Each director had his own take on the material and although the differences might be subtle for the average viewer, they were clear to the animators. Tex Avery is widely created for taking a stock character, Bugs Bunny, and investing him with a definitive character for “A Wild Hare” in 1940. According to his biographer Joe Adamson, “Avery said, ‘How about a character who just isn’t fazed by anything? He comes up out of his rabbit hole, and he’s got a gun in his face, and he just chews his carrot and says, “What’s up, Doc?”’ Avery was known as a keen gag man who wanted his cartoons to be louder, faster, funnier and he was the first animator to have his characters talk to the audience

Chuck Jones, on the other hand, was interested in subtlety and the release of a quiet moment or humorous aside. He saw Bugs Bunny as a cool cookie, a character who only reacted when provoked. The creator of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, Jones was a comedy purist and the Stanislavksy of animation, for whom motivation was key: “It was important to give the characters some disciplines—rules that defined the limits of the game,” he once wrote. “Everyone I’ve ever respected used restricted tools. The greatest comedians were the ones who wore the simplest costumes and worked in prescribed areas like Chaplin.” Tashlin experimented in camera angles, blackouts, pace, and absurdity and went on to become a highly valued live-action comedy director, working with stars like Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis. When, on his first non-animated assignment, he created some dueling gags for a Bob Hope period comedy, Tashlin recalled that “It was full of cartoon jokes. I remember Bob saying—they must have told him I came from the cartoon business—things like, ‘Jesus Christ, now I’m a rabbit!’”

However innovative the gang at Warner Bros was, the fact remains that as the 1950s began, short cartoons for the movies were on the wane. The studio system had broken down and executives could no longer insist that exhibitors take two or three cartoons as part of the presentation package. Animation, which was always labor-intensive, became more and more expensive to produce; even Disney was cutting back. New animation units were sprouting up, looking for new ways to do things. UPA was created in 1944, and cut costs by simplifying the visual depth of their characters and abstracting backgrounds. They called the process “limited animation” and their new characters were Gerald McBoing-Boing and Mr. Magoo.

Television soon opened up a whole new market for cartoons; the Faustian bargain was a huge drop in quality and detail. It did little good for animators to wring their hands over the decline of artistry—the small black-and-white rectangular screen mercilessly dictated what looked good and what didn’t. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera had burnished their reputation with the Academy Award-winning Tom and Jerry series at MGM; when they bailed out of movies to work in television, they were shocked by the meager budgets offered by the networks. To make the numbers work, they created an even more limited animation style, often pixilating only the moving elements of a character: the mouth, the hands (or paws). Beginning in 1958, Hanna-Barbera introduced new characters directly to television: Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, and, in 1960, created the first half-hour animated comedy series, The Flintstones, which was a huge ratings hit.

If you grew up in the 1960s, you had a nearly unlimited supply of cartoons available to you; every weekday afternoon, some local affiliate was repackaging old Bugs Bunny or Popeye cartoons, and every Saturday morning, there was nearly three hours of animated programming on each of the three major networks. Not to mention an entire menagerie of tigers, tunas, and toucans pitching products during the commercials. The quality of these candy-colored entertainments varied enormously—both as art and as literature—but they were omnipresent. Some shows broke out of the pack, such as Jay Ward’s various Rocky and Bullwinkle incarnations, which were absurdist, witty indictments of Cold War pieties (although Chuck Jones dismissed their visual crudity as “illustrated radio”).

While television often lacked the virtuosity to create first-rate animated comic characters, they borrowed an astonishing amount of real-life comedy to prime the pump. The Flintstones were Stone Age versions of The Honeymooners and another Hanna-Barbera prime-time show, Top Cat, was a feline adaptation of The Phil Silvers Show. The creators of Amos ‘n’ Andy resurfaced after a decade-long absence to create an animated rip-off called Calvin and the Colonel. Bargain-basement animated versions of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Laverne and Shirley, Jerry Lewis, the Fonz, the Mask, and the Three Stooges (once as human beings, the second time as robots) made the Saturday morning rounds, but even the best cartoons borrowed from their three-dimensional progenitors—who doesn’t recognize a shot of W.C. Fields in Mr. Magoo, a hint of Groucho in Bugs Bunny, a slather of Senator Claghorn in Foghorn Leghorn?

A combination of boredom with the limitations of television animation, computer technology, the freedom of cable networks, and some bright entrepreneurial thinking all help to, well, reanimate the field at the beginning of the 1990s. Disney found a way to recapture its old feature-length magic by tapping into Broadway-style musicals with The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, two major blockbusters that spawned countless imitations both at Disney and other, often brand-new, studios. Cartoon Network was added to the cable system in 1992, eventually acquiring the Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros catalogues while developing some immensely creative cartoons, such as Dexter’s Laboratory and Powerpuff Girls. MTV took their freedom in another direction, using crudely conceived animation to deliver such counter-culture slackers as Beavis and Butthead and Daria directly to the Generation X audience. First-rate comic talent was no longer reduced to Saturday morning purgatory; comedians such as Nathan Lane, Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Ellen Degeneres, Billy Crystal, Woody Allen, Tim Allen, Mike Myers, Roseanne Barr, and Jerry Seinfeld gleefully leaped upon the voice-over bandwagon, providing signature personalities of such dimension in animated cartoons that they were often billed above the title for a film in which they never actually appeared. In 1997, The Simpsons beat The Flintstones’ record for most consecutive prime-time cartoon episodes, and they keep on ticking. . . .

In the 21st Century, animation has transformed, as Aladdin’s cartoon couple would put it, into a whole new world. Cartoons are more popular than ever, and they reach Americans in more ways, in more forms, with more resonance than ever before. It’s a medium that achieves hair-raising technical brilliance on one level—say, Shrek—while making countless viewers giggle uncontrollably with products that could be just as easily created with construction paper and school paste—say, South Park. Cartoon now exist in a wide, tense universe bracketed by alpha and omega, and it makes some purists wistful for the glory days. As Leonard Maltin put it, “Television has reinvigorated animation, has created a new audience for animation, but sadly, has forgotten the history of animation. Modern cartoons couldn’t exist without those [classic] cartoons, and yet they don’t have the heart or originality or the organic humor and originality of those cartoons.” Cartoons remain a comic medium; no matter how detailed a computer can pixilate the green fuzz on an ogre’s nose, it all begins with an artist brandishing a sharp gag and a sharp pencil.