A Quickie with Andrew Davis!
Andrew Davis teaches at Otis College of Art and Design and is one of the few people for whom the label “straight man” is a job description. He is the taller, more sophisticated half of the comedy team of Doc and Stumpy, and has performed classic burlesque comedy in Los Angeles and at burlesque and vaudeville festivals around the U.S. He holds a M.A. in Folklore from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU. He is the author of America’s Longest Run: A History of the Walnut Street Theatre (Penn State Press) and he operates the website BaggyPantsComedy.com. I interviewed Doc about his spectacularly detailed, informative, and entertaining book, Baggy Pants Comedy Burlesque and the Oral Tradition. When did you publish this book? How long did it take? The book was published in 2011. It was actually my doctoral dissertation, which I completed in 2000. I’d gotten another book contract in the meantime, so I delayed a few years in revising the dissert...