Vaudeville Humor The Collected Jokes, Routines, and Skits of Ed Lowry   Edited with an Introduction by Paul M. Levitt     November 2002 cloth, 0-8093-2453-9, $55.00s 544 pages, 6 x 9 Theatre Studies   This is a marvelous look at an era of American entertainment now faded from most people's memory. . . . The subject as presented serves as a compendium of vaudeville and its reflection of a culture much different from today's. The work has added value because it provides a view of that world as seen by one man—Ed Lowry. Robert F. Nisbett, Colorado State University     From Vaudeville Humor: The Collected Jokes, Routines, and Skits of Ed Lowry . . . Marriage is like a three-ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring, and suffering.   Do you realize that when Lincoln was your age, he was chopping wood and helping his parents? / Yeah, and when he was your age he was president.”   A Scotsmans wife was running a fever of 105, so he had her moved into the basement and used her to heat the house.   A Russian was being led off to execution by a squad of Bolshevik soldiers on a rainy morning. ‘What brutes you Bolsheviks are, grumbled the doomed man, to march me through the rain like this. How about us? retorted one of the squad. We have to march back.   Vaudeville Humor: The Collected Jokes, Routines, and Skits of Ed Lowry contains vaudeville jokes, skits, and routines from the first three decades of the twentieth century originally compiled by comedian Ed Lowry (1896-1983). Although occasionally found in bits and pieces in anthologies and in some period dramatic comedies, vaudeville humor has never before been available in one collection performers rarely if ever kept a record of their jokes and routines. Fortunately, Ed Lowry was an inveterate collector. He kept copious notebooks of jokes and routines that he not only commissioned but also stole from other comics, clipped from newspapers, and copied from now defunct popular magazines of the day.   Editor Paul M. Levitt has reorganized the material into categories that preserve some of the flavor of Lowry’s scrapbooks yet provide for finer distinctions. Part one, “Jokes,” is organized by subject matter and cataloged by genre, dialects, and wordplay. From “Accidents” to “Work,” this exhaustive catalog of humor features over one thousand jokes with topics that range from city slickers and country hicks through midgets and old maids to Swedes and tattoos. Part two, “MC Material: Biz, Jokes, Routines, and Skits” is germane to the job of master of ceremonies, routines, and skits. It features topics from fractured fairy tales to stuttering. Part three, an appendix, “Ed Lowry Laffter,” reproduces a privately published collection that is now a rare collector’s item.   “Although some of the jokes can undoubtedly be found in other places,” explains Levitt in his introduction, “I know of no source as rich as this one for the twenties and thirties, a period so abundant in humor that for years afterward it fueled radio, cinema, and television.”   Paul M. Levitt is a professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he teaches modern drama and theatre history. Levitt has also written books and articles on theatre, radio plays for the BBC, trade books on medicine, tales for children, and a novel, Chin Music. He is the editor of Joe Frisco: Comic, Jazz Dancer, and Railbird by Ed Lowry and Charlie Foy (also available from Southern Illinois University Press).