The Ham Tree

Abstract

The show’s title, The Ham Tree, was derived from a sketch McIntyre and Heath had performed on the stage. Greatly influenced by the minstrel show, the popular veteran song-and-dance blackface team developed comic routines in which they performed caricatures that degraded African Americans through exaggerated dialect and stereotyped portrayals. Heath played the straight man, foil, and fool to McIntyre, the smart-alecky trickster who ridiculed and lampooned his partner. As vaudeville headliners, they performed numerous sketches, the most popular being “The Georgia Minstrels” and “The Man from Montana,” which they performed on the Orpheum Show. From their skits they developed Broadway shows using similar formulas: cross-talk between their two caricatures, reworked routines, funny songs, and dancing clogs and jigs. The Ham Tree, for instance, was generated from a sketch with the same name.