The purpose of the sketch is not to leave a single impression of a single story.  It points no moral, draws no conclusion, and sometimes it might end quite as effectively anywhere before the place in the action at which it does terminate.  It is built for entertainment purposes only, and furthermore, for entertainment purposes that end the moment the sketch ends.  When you see a sketch you carry away no definite impression, save that of entertainment, and usually you cannot remember what it was that entertained you.  Often a sketch might be incorporated into a burlesque show or a musical comedy and serve for part of an act, without suffering, itself, in effect. [1] And yet, without the sketch of yesterday there would be no playlet today.

[1] Not so many years ago, a considerable number of vaudeville sketches were used in burlesque; and vice versa, many sketches were produced in burlesque that afterward had successful runs in vaudeville.  Yet they were more than successful twenty-minute “bits,” taken out of burlesque shows.  They had a certain completeness of form which did not lose in effect by being transplanted.

(a) The Character Sketch.  Some sketches, like Tom Nawn’s “Pat and the Geni,” and his other “Pat” offerings, so long a famous vaudeville feature, are merely character sketches.  Like the near-short-story character-sketch, the vaudeville sketch often gives an admirable exposition of character, without showing any change in the character’s heart effected by the incidents of the story.  “Pat” went through all sorts of funny and startling adventures when he opened the brass bottle and the Geni came forth, but he was the very same Pat when he woke up and found it all a dream. [1]

[1] The Ryan and Richfield acts that have to do with Haggerty and his society-climbing daughter Mag, may be remembered.  For longer than my memory runs, Mag Haggerty has been trying to get her father into society, but the Irish brick-layer will never “arrive.”  The humor lies in Haggerty’s rich Irishness and the funny mistakes he always makes.  The “Haggerty” series of sketches and the “Pat” series show, perhaps better than any others, the closeness of the character-sketch short-story that is often mistaken for the true short-story, to the vaudeville sketch that is so often considered a playlet.

Indeed, the vaudeville sketch was for years the natural vehicle and “artistic reward” for clever actors who made a marked success in impersonating some particular character in burlesque or in the legitimate.  The vaudeville sketch was written around the personality of the character with which success had been won and hence was constructed to give the actor opportunity to show to the best advantage his acting in the character.  And in the degree that it succeeded it was and still is a success—­and a valuable entertainment form for vaudeville.

(b) The Narrative Sketch.  Precisely as the character sketch is not a playlet, the merely narrative sketch is not a true playlet.  No matter how interesting and momentarily amusing or thrilling may be the twenty-minute vaudeville offering that depends upon incident only, it does not enlist the attention, hold the sympathy, or linger in the memory, as does the playlet.