Charley Case
Charley Case (August 27, 1858 – November 26, 1916) was an American vaudeville performance artist who delivered the first known example of stand-up comedy in the late 1880s, delivering humorous monologues directly to the audience while standing in one spot without props or costumes. He is credited with creating the term "punchline" as he often used his arms in a punch-line motion during his stories. Case also wrote and sang vaudeville parodies of the 19th-century ballad style. He influenced F. Gregory Hartswick, who wrote similar songs.
Case is thought to have been mulatto. He started his career as a blackface comedian in America, but switched to a monologue format without props. Little official documentation of his personal history is available, but there are reports that he was mixed and sought to "pass". It was not uncommon at the time for African-Americans to perform in blackface as a loophole into the entertainment business.
In 1910, after recovering from a nervous breakdown, he went on tour in England, where for the first time he performed the song "There was once a poor young man who left his country home." The 1933 film The Fatal Glass of Beer is based on this song, and comedian W. C. Fields performs it at the onset. Critic Harold Bloom remarked several years later that Fields, "croaking his ghastly dirge to the uncertain sound of his dulcimer, is a parodic version of the Bard of Sensibility, a figure out of the primitivism of Thomas Gray or William Blake."
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