Comedian Richard Pryor made his first television appearance in 1964. “You probably don’t know me,” he says at the beginning of his set. “I’m not a New Yorker. My home is in Peoria, Illinois.” He pauses as a few people in the audience laugh. His smile falters, and his face falls slack. Finally, a few people applaud. “Thank you,” he says before going on with his act.
In the clip it’s not entirely clear why Peoria, a city of around 112,000 located along the Illinois River about 165 miles southwest of Chicago, drew the sparse yet pointed laughter. Is it that Peoria isn’t well-known? Is there humor in its obscurity? Do people in the crowd know of Peoria and find some latent joke within their own associations with the city? Or is it Pryor’s own response to his hometown, the immediate physical registration of the juxtaposition between New York City and Peoria his introduction set up? No matter the reason for the laughter, the takeaway is that the simple invocation of Peoria, Illinois, is a punch line.
This has been true for close to—if not over—a century. During the days of vaudeville, Peoria landed on the receiving end of jokes that framed the river city, in all its simplistic, dull glory, as a stand-in for some mythical yet nonexistent all-American town. “Do you know Peoria?” a performer asks in one popular and oft-quoted bit. Their partner would respond, “Peoria? Oh, yes—I spent four years there one night!” The city also acquired a reputation as a testing ground that stays with the city to this day. “Will it play in Peoria?” has, since the question was first posed in a novel by Horatio Alger Jr. in 1890, been perhaps the greatest cultural touchstone the city has outside of its own state.
There is some disagreement about what the question means. Growing up in nearby Bureau County, Illinois, I always heard that the phrase hearkened back to a lost time when Peoria was an arts hub through which the best shows of the day passed. “Playing in Peoria” was shorthand for a show being good. It wasn’t until I was in college that I heard the alternative interpretation, that a show playing in Peoria meant it was milquetoast and anodyne enough to pass muster with a less urbane audience—and thus liable to bring in profits. These dichotomous visions of Peoria’s influence always seemed to say something about the area itself—that those of us who live in the vicinity of Peoria had given ourselves undue credit, while the rest of the country saw less, if anything, to talk about.