Funny walking : the rise, fall and rise of the Anglo-American comic eccentric dancer Wilkie, I http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2040610X.2017.1343971 Title Funny walking : the rise, fall and rise of the Anglo-American comic eccentric dancer Authors Wilkie, I Type Article URL This version is available at: http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/42954/ Published Date 2017 USIR is a digital collection of the research output of the University of Salford. Where copyright permits, full text material held in the repository is made freely available online and can be read, downloaded and copied for non-commercial private study or research purposes. Please check the manuscript for any further copyright restrictions. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at:
[email protected]. Funny Walking: The Rise, Fall and Rise of the Anglo-American Comic Eccentric Dancer Abstract This article considers the (seemingly) lost art of comic eccentric dance. As a form of popular entertainment, comic eccentric dancing is generally assumed to be an early to mid-twenti- eth century phenomenon that emerged in the UK from the late Victorian Music Hall period and remained unchanged throughout the Variety period, only to disappear in the era of new mass media’s lack of appetite for ‘turns’ and speciality acts. However, is comic eccentric dance really a lost performance form? Can incarnations of the form really be considered as obsolete and archaic as such routines as, say, mesmerism, blackface or budgerigar acts? This article will attempt to reposition comic eccentric dance as a metamorphic form that still, surprisingly, exists, and is to be found with reasonable ubiquity, in renewed incarna- tions within twenty first century media.