Deadpan and the Nineteenth-Century Emergence of a Comic Style

When the term 'deadpan' first appeared during the early twentieth century, it meant 'expressionless face. Sarah Balkin upends received wisdom in this original study of deadpan's emergence, which takes the vaudeville era as an endpoint rather than a beginning. Drawing on examples from Britain, the United States, and Australia, she investigates deadpan's earlier history in theater, comic opera, lecture culture, minstrelsy, cakewalking, burlesque, and vaudeville. In doing so, she reveals the terms performance makers, audiences, and critics used to describe deadpan before the style was named. She shows how deadpan mimicked and parodied socially central values and attitudes to make audiences laugh during a period better known for earnestness and self-control. She also explores how classed, racialized, and gendered comic conventions shifted across cultural contexts. This is the untold story of how deadpan became legible to audiences.