ABSTRACT
Composers Joe Raposo and Sam Pottle had extensive Broadway experience as pianists and musical directors. The performers in Sesame Street's house band were skilled studio musicians, and several played in the Tonight Show band. While Sesame Street's creators and audiences often consider comedy-variety, pop culture parodies, advertising, and television flow as the vehicles for educational content, they also comprise one of the program's most important and lasting messages. Sesame Street fit squarely into the tradition of short-form comedy that manifested itself in nineteenth and early twentieth-century minstrelsy, vaudeville, burlesque and revue, and mid-century "vaudeo" and comedy-variety. In co-opting styles and techniques of music and humor that had proven successful in entertaining adult and family audiences from vaudeville to variety television, Sesame Street also promoted cultural literacy, introducing young people to a range of historically important artists and idioms they might not otherwise have heard.
