This essay examines the “tramp” on the variety stage at the moment of its cultural invention. In the wake of the Panic of 1873, the dominant imagination first invented the specter of the tramp as the nation debated how to deal with the new masses of mobile unemployed. For the earliest comic tramps in the 1870s, Irish and blackface comedy created a visual vocabulary that offered a quickly recognizable stand-in for the seemingly invisible crime of unemployment. As the decade progressed, performers portrayed the most popular comic tramps as Irish, aligning mobility with whiteness and turning the comic tramp into a performance of racial privilege. The Irish-American tramp may have reflected many of the negative characteristics of the tramp, including his wandering nature, his unemployment, and his drinking, but he also showed that the Irish-American comic tramp could be part of a community and in some instances, even a hero.

中文翻译：

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发明流浪汉：综艺舞台上的早期流浪汉漫画

本文考察了在其文化发明那一刻的综艺舞台上的“流浪汉”。在 1873 年的恐慌之后，当全国争论如何处理新的流动失业者时，占主导地位的想象力首先发明了流浪汉的幽灵。对于 1870 年代最早的喜剧流浪者，爱尔兰和黑脸喜剧创造了一种视觉词汇，为看似无形的失业犯罪提供了一个快速识别的替身。随着十年的发展，表演者将最受欢迎的喜剧流浪者描绘成爱尔兰人，将流动性与白人结合起来，并将漫画流浪者变成了种族特权的表演。爱尔兰裔美国流浪汉可能反映了流浪汉的许多负面特征，包括他的流浪天性、失业和酗酒，