The “rube” character, a burlesque of the rural working class, was among the most popular caricatures in American vaudeville performance. The comic, agro-pastoral rube figure blended together the legitimate stage’s “Yankee” character, the blackface stump speaker of the minstrel tradition, and the caricature of ethnic types on the stages of vaudeville’s golden age. Beginning on the variety stage with Denman Thompson’s 1875 debut as “Uncle Josh Whitcomb,” the rube character became a favorite of the vaudeville audiences, and, over the next five decades, it made stars of Frank Bell, Will M. Cressy & Blanche Dayne, Byron Harlan & Frank Stanley, Cal Stewart, and Chic Sale.
In the 1890s, the rube emerged from the cultural caricatures of the vaudeville stage. Although the rube character has roots in the history of the Yankee figure in American drama and the rural type in world comedy, it shares a lineage also with minstrelsy and vaudeville’s blackface single and duo comedy, Dutch comedy acts, and Irish caricature. The rube is a version of the vaudeville stage’s cultural caricature, adapting its style and characterization from the blackface stump speech. Rube caricature displayed two parallel lines of development: the yeoman, a country type in the pastoral mode, and the barbarian, a shiftless and violent stereotype.
By the 1920s, the rube was among the preeminent comic forms on the popular American stage and in the fledgling recording industry. In the context of evolving conditions of race and culture in the early twentieth-century United States, the rube figure articulated the connections among the representation of American rural ideals in the burlesque of African American slave life of the minstrel show and the caricature of the white rural working class in twentieth century American theatre and film. Achieving popularity at a time when the historic tensions between the country and the city crystallized in massive changes in American society and culture, the rube played a critical role in the negotiation of the vanishing American rural ideal and its successor, the burgeoning urban image of American commerce, industry, and empire as representative of the modern United States.