Variety show Stan Laurel revisited his music hall days when he performed at the "Royal Variety" show. In the United States, former vaudeville performers such as the Marx Brothers, George Burns and Gracie Allen, W. C. Fields, and Jack Benny honed their skills in the Borscht Belt before moving to talkies, to radio shows, and then to television shows, including variety shows. Variety shows were among the first programs to be featured on television during the experimental mechanical television era. Variety shows hosted by Helen Haynes and Harriet Lee are recorded in contemporary newspapers in 1931 and 1932; because of technical limits
Variety show show; in 2015, the academy separated late-night talk shows and sketch comedy series into separate categories. During Johnny Carson's tenure on "The Tonight Show" on NBC from 1962 to 1992, the show dominated late night ratings, and the other networks attempted late-night talk shows only sporadically. This changed with Carson's retirement, and other networks began to air their own talk show competitors, starting with "Late Show with David Letterman" on CBS in 1993. As of 2014, late-night talk shows vary widely on their resemblance to the original variety format, with Jimmy Fallon's incarnation of "The Tonight Show" putting heavy emphasis