Here’s an oddity, a Thomas Edison film from 1901 featuring an enthusiastically received striptease on the solo trapeze. True, she finishes with more skin still covered than most of today’s acts start with, but I suspect it was still pretty risqué at the time.

My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin