This captivating book presents a uniquely comprehensive cultural history of cabaret, where the most radical of artists, poets, writers, musicians, and theatre directors have gathered since 1881. Lisa Appignanesi takes us to the original cabaret - the smoke-filled rooms of the Chat Noir in Paris that served as a meeting place for the avant-garde and a laboratory of subversion against the establishment. She then follows the journey of the cabaret across Europe, through its satirical Weimar peak, and to the US and Britain, vividly tracing each development in cabaret history. Bringing that history to the present day, Appignanesi discusses the comedy/satire wave in the UK and US and examines the recent splintering of cabaret into its component parts, from comedy to political song to late night lifestyle.

This revised and updated edition of Appignanesi's classic work is enriched with materials that have only become more accessible in the post-Soviet era. It also features a variety of new illustrations from both East and West. The author sheds new light on The Four Cats cabaret in Barcelona where Picasso's work was first shown in 1900; London's Cave of the Golden Calf where a modernist avant-garde gathered in 1912; The Stray Dog, headquarters of pre-revolutionary St Petersburg bohemia; The Thorn, East Berlin's answer to West Berlin's cabaret culture during the Cold War; and Under the Sign of the Rams, an energetic Cracow cabaret that operated throughout the Communist years.

From its self-conscious origins at the end of the nineteenth century through the Great War, Weimar Germany, World War Two, the Cold War and the final decades of the twentieth century, the cabaret has reinvented itself repeatedly. This book provides a lively look at all aspects of cabaret, where art and entertainment join to mock and provoke, and where radical artistic, literary and political ideas have found expression for more than 120 years.