Autobiography as publicity

The terms used have specialised usages in the entertainment industry, though not without dispute.The contortionist Valantyne Napier argued in her memoir, Act as Known: Australian Speciality Acts on the World Vaudeville/Variety Circuits from 1900 to 1960 (Melbourne: Globe, 1986), that 'vaudeville' was a high-class form of live entertainment consisting purely of a sequence of unconnected demonstrations of skill (jugglers, magicians, ventriloquists, etc.); that it was in 'revues' (which also had comedy skits within a loose narrative structure and would have included most of the shows in which Howard appeared) that elements included sexual innuendo; while 'burlesque' was a vulgar low-class entertainment with explicit sexual material, strip-tease, etc.The nineteenth-century phrase 'music hall' was sometimes used as a synonym for all variety entertainment and came back into widespread usage in the 1960s.Although Jenny Howard was most often advertised as a vaudevillian, sometimes described as a 'revue artist', and later in life as a 'music hall' performer, 'variety entertainer' is probably most accurate.3 The British Library online newspaper resource includes mostly regional publications but also magazines, notably the Stage; the search 'Jenny Howard' yielded 779 hits with no noted misattributions.4In spite of using the advanced '-' search function, the Trove results are contaminated (e.g. by the actor Leslie Howard and the Australian politician John Howard), but not to a significant degree.5

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