Humane Amateur Night Uses Hooks No More
The practice of yanking awful performers off a stage using a hook from behind the curtain had disappeared by 1925, a New York Times Magazine article noted.
The journalist Bertram Reinitz wrote:
The hook, whose crook so often and so unaffectionately encircled [a performer’s] waist and drew him out of harm’s way, has been unused for years. Sweeping the stage while an ungifted aspirant was occupying it, a popular form of discouragement in the pre-polite period, has been banned as inhospitable.
Reinitz added that the hook had actually often been a good thing for the performers, relative to the alternative audience punishment that potentially awaited them.
I’ve seen tomatoes strike the curtain behind the artist with such vehemence that they instantly assumed the thickness and breadth of a slice of boiled ham. The hated hook was a welcome sight to the entertainer upon whom an open season had been declared.
Today, the entire concept is solely lampooned as a joke. In recent decades, the “vaudeville hook” has been referenced or imitated in The Simpsons, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and Shrek 2.
Humane Amateur Night Uses Hooks No More: Audiences More Refined Than in the Good Old Times When Budding Actors Were Pelted With Tomatoes
Published: Sunday, June 28, 1925