Wealth & Money Quote by Edgar Bergen

Panic, punctured by punchline: Bergen is doing the oldest vaudeville trick in the book, using an overstuffed setup to reveal an emptiness underneath. On the surface, it reads like a simple gripe about scheduling. The real payload is the contradiction he engineers. “So many people are working in vaudeville today” should mean abundance, ease, a thriving circuit. Instead he claims he spent three weeks scrambling to fill a single hour, and only landed the acts “the night before” opening. Then he twists the knife: “money was no object!” In an industry built on hustling and scarcity, that last phrase isn’t a flex; it’s an indictment. Even unlimited budget can’t conjure quality, reliability, or actual talent on demand.

Bergen’s context matters. As a performer who straddled vaudeville and radio, he watched vaudeville’s late-era churn: too many people “working” doesn’t necessarily mean too many good acts; it can mean desperate laborers, thin material, and a booking ecosystem running on noise rather than craft. The specificity of “Buffalo” gives it road-grit authenticity: not Broadway glamour, but the hard reality of touring where opening night is a cliff edge.

The subtext is cultural triage. Vaudeville is crowded the way a sinking ship is crowded: bodies everywhere, fewer lifeboats. Bergen’s humor masks professional anxiety about a form losing its standards and its infrastructure, even as it’s full of people insisting it’s still alive.