Burlesque Trivia
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56 free Burlesque trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Burlesque started as a literary joke, became a Victorian pun-fest in tights, crossed the Atlantic with Lydia Thompson's British Blondes and turned into the striptease circuit that made Gypsy Rose Lee a star before Mayor La Guardia shut it down. This quiz has 47 free burlesque trivia questions with answers spanning all of it, plus the neo-burlesque revival and the 2010 film with Cher and Christina Aguilera. Expect a mix: easy questions on who owns the lounge in the movie and what prop Dita Von Teese fills, harder ones on the Chicago editor Lydia Thompson horsewhipped, the burlesque circuit that folded in 1931, the young comedian who wrote Dream Follies, and where the Burlesque Hall of Fame ended up. There are questions on the word's Italian roots and the literary high and low burlesque of Pope and Butler too. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on burlesque, its performers and the film, and each question carries a citation. Good for a themed pub quiz, a cabaret night warm-up or settling a backstage argument.
30 of 56 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'burlesque' comes through French from the Italian word burla, meaning what?
A joke or mockery
A joke or mockery is what burla means; in English the word described comic parodies of serious works for some two centuries before American theatres attached it to shows built around striptease.
Q 02Which poet wrote The Rape of the Lock, the classic 'high burlesque' about a snipped curl?
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope based it on a real quarrel: Lord Petre had cut a lock of Arabella Fermor's hair, and the poem's grand epic style for so small a theft was meant to laugh their two families back into friendship.
Q 03Which lyricist wrote the words for Gypsy, the 1959 musical about Gypsy Rose Lee and her stage mother?
Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim had hoped to write the music too, but star Ethel Merman did not want an unknown composer, so Jule Styne wrote the score and Sondheim was talked into supplying lyrics only.
Q 04Which 1974 Tom Stoppard play puts Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara together in Zurich?
Travesties
Travesties, Stoppard's 1974 burlesque, throws James Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara together in wartime Zurich by way of The Importance of Being Earnest.
Q 05Which composer wrote a Burleske for piano and orchestra at 21, in 1885-86?
Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss, later famous for Also sprach Zarathustra, saw it go unperformed until 1890, when pianist Eugen d'Albert took it up; Strauss dedicated the revised score to him.
Q 06To show off their legs in tights, the actresses of Victorian burlesque often played which kind of part?
Male heroes
Male heroes went to actresses in what were called breeches roles, while men often took the older women's parts; the fashion faded in the 1890s, when London's burlesque houses turned to musical comedy.
Q 07How was the dialogue of Victorian burlesque generally written?
In rhyming couplets full of puns
In rhyming couplets full of puns, usually awful ones: W. S. Gilbert learned his trade writing such burlesques, starting with a Donizetti send-up subtitled 'the Little Duck and the Great Quack', before he teamed up with Sullivan.
Q 08Which two London theatres were the home of Victorian burlesque from the 1860s?
The Gaiety and the Royal Strand
The Gaiety and the Royal Strand made burlesque their speciality for some thirty years; when the fashion passed in the 1890s, the Gaiety switched to musical comedy and made stars of its chorus line instead.
Q 09Which troupe led by Lydia Thompson launched the burlesque craze in New York in 1868?
The British Blondes
The British Blondes, a company of English actresses, introduced Victorian burlesque to America in 1868; home-grown troupes soon copied them, turning an English parody form into the American burlesque show.
Q 10What was Lydia Thompson's first American show, in 1868?
Ixion
Ixion, her version of F. C. Burnand's 1863 burlesque of the Greek myth, opened at Wood's Museum in New York in September 1868.
Q 11In 1870 Lydia Thompson and colleagues did what to Wilbur Storey, owner of the Chicago Times?
Horsewhipped him in the street
Horsewhipped him in the street: after his paper attacked her dancers' virtue, Thompson, her manager and Pauline Markham waylaid Storey on his walk home; all three were arrested and fined for the assault.
Q 12Which 1866 musical extravaganza is remembered as an early American 'leg show'?
The Black Crook
The Black Crook put a chorus of dancers in flesh-coloured tights into a melodrama at Niblo's Garden; it ran for more than a year, is often called the first American musical, and set off a craze for 'leg shows'.
Q 13Which family ran the famously racy burlesque theatre at New York's National Winter Garden?
Q 21Which Rodgers and Hart number satirised Gypsy Rose Lee's highbrow musings while stripping?
Zip
Zip comes from Pal Joey (1940), where a reporter recalls her interview with the star; by a neat twist, the show's original Broadway cast included Lee's own sister, June.
Q 22Sally Rand's most famous fan dance appearances were at which event?
The 1933 Chicago World's Fair
Sally Rand rode a white horse to the 1933 Chicago World's Fair dressed, more or less, as Lady Godiva; the stunt won her a spot on the Midway, where her fan dance became the hit of the fair.
Q 23Sally Rand, born Helen Gould Beck, is said to have taken her stage name from what?
The Minskys
The Minskys were brothers who started on the Lower East Side; when the Depression emptied Broadway's theatres they took burlesque to 42nd Street in 1931, into a house that is now a children's theatre.
Q 14In the early 1900s, America's burlesque circuits competed with which cleaner, family-friendly kind of variety show?
Vaudeville
Vaudeville courted families with 'polite' bills, while burlesque grew bawdier: by the mid-1920s striptease had become its main attraction.
Q 15Which New York mayor's crackdown from 1937 effectively killed burlesque in the city?
Fiorello La Guardia
Fiorello La Guardia called the shows a corrupting moral influence; in 1937 his licence commissioner refused to renew the city's burlesque licences, and by the early 1940s the business in New York was dead.
Q 16Which journalist coined 'ecdysiast' in 1940 as a grander word for a striptease artist?
H. L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken built the word from ecdysis, the term zoologists use for a snake shedding its skin, and dictionaries have listed it ever since.
Q 17What was Gypsy Rose Lee's surname at birth?
Hovick
Hovick was the family name, echoed in her sister June's stage name Havoc; their mother forged the girls' birth certificates so often, to get round child-labour laws, that neither was sure of her real age.
Q 18Which burlesque star made an onstage bubble bath her signature act?
Lili St. Cyr
Lili St. Cyr made stepping into an onstage bubble bath her signature; arrested over the act at Ciro's nightclub in Hollywood, she hired celebrity lawyer Jerry Giesler and was acquitted.
Q 19What was the title of Gypsy Rose Lee's 1941 mystery novel?
The G-String Murders
The G-String Murders (1941) is a backstage whodunit set in a burlesque theatre, narrated by a stripper named Gypsy Rose Lee herself; it was filmed in 1943 as Lady of Burlesque.
Q 20Which film director was the father of Gypsy Rose Lee's son Erik?
Otto Preminger
Otto Preminger fathered Erik during a 1944 affair, but Lee swore him to silence and gave the boy her husband's surname; Erik learned who his father was only as an adult.
A Rand McNally atlas
A Rand McNally atlas is said to have inspired Cecil B. DeMille when he renamed the young dancer; she later devised a second act, dancing with a giant bubble instead of her fans.
Q 24Which of these comedy duos first teamed up on a New York burlesque stage?
Abbott and Costello
Abbott and Costello, both burlesque comics, first worked together at the Eltinge Theatre on 42nd Street in 1935; 'Who's on First?' grew out of the old wordplay sketches they had learned on the circuit.
Q 25Which actress played Gypsy Rose Lee opposite Rosalind Russell in the 1962 film Gypsy?
Natalie Wood
Natalie Wood played Louise, the shy daughter who becomes the star stripper, and sang the part herself, though her songs in West Side Story a year earlier had been dubbed by another singer.
Q 26Who won a Tony as a television comic in the 1951 Broadway musical Top Banana?
Phil Silvers
Phil Silvers, later television's Sergeant Bilko, played Jerry Biffle, a character said to be modelled on Milton Berle; 'top banana' was show-business slang for the lead comedian of a burlesque bill.
Q 27Which 1979 Broadway revue starred Mickey Rooney in a tribute to old-time burlesque?
Sugar Babies
Sugar Babies gave Mickey Rooney his Broadway debut more than fifty years after his first film, opposite MGM dancer Ann Miller, and brought him a Tony nomination.
Q 28Which stripteaser assembled the nostalgic 1962 off-Broadway show This Was Burlesque?
Ann Corio
Ann Corio, a striptease headliner of the 1930s, put the show together, directed it and performed in it herself, then took it out on the summer-stock circuit for several seasons.
Q 29Which young comedian wrote the 1954 burlesque film Dream Follies?
Lenny Bruce
Lenny Bruce wrote it while working the strip clubs of Los Angeles with his wife, the stripper Honey Harlow; a year earlier the couple had acted together in another of his scripts, Dance Hall Racket.
Q 30Which Broadway star played Chauncey Miles, a gay burlesque comic in 1930s New York, in the 2013 play The Nance?
Nathan Lane
Nathan Lane earned a Tony nomination as Chauncey, who plays the 'nance', a camp stock character of burlesque bills, on stage while keeping his own life secret off it.