The variety act’s core trick is betraying time by making waiting the whole event

Evidence

Every variety act, especially that of the clown and the juggler, is really a kind of expectation. It subsequently transpires that waiting for the thing in question, which takes place as long as the juggler manages to keep the balls going, is precisely the thing itself. In variety the applause always comes a fraction too late, namely when the viewer perceives that what was initially imagined to be a preparation for something else was just the event of which he has been cheated as it were. The trick of the variety act consists in this betrayal of the temporal order, just as the event when it finally comes always displays a tendency to assume the character of a frozen pose or tableau, a symbolic suspension of the action to the accompaniment of the drum roll while all other music is stilled. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 119

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the variety act’s structure — expectation as the event itself, applause arriving too late, the frozen tableau — as a paradigmatic model of mass culture’s handling of time.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘variety’ model Adorno draws on, and to later theories of suspense and deferred gratification; also resonates with the notion of the happy ending as pre-determined ritual.