Will It Play in Peoria?

Somewhere in the nineteen tens or twenties, a vaudeville booking agent asked a question that became, over the following century, one of the most durable phrases in the American language. The question was: will it play in Peoria?

Peoria was, at the time, one of the most reliable stops on the national vaudeville circuit. Performers moved between Chicago and St. Louis and Indianapolis and Kansas City, and Peoria sat in the geographic middle of the middle, which made it useful. If a comedian's new bit landed here, in front of an audience that was neither coastal nor small-town, neither especially sophisticated nor easily impressed, the reasoning went that it would land anywhere. Peoria became the test market.

No one can say with certainty who coined the phrase. Historians of vaudeville note it circulating in the trade press without a single clear author. It is often spuriously attributed to Groucho Marx, and by the radio era it had entered the general vernacular, with listeners recalling it on the Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly programs.

The phrase had a second life in nineteen sixty-nine, when Richard Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman told a reporter, "Don't worry, it'll play in Peoria," referring to a presidential decision designed to appeal to Middle American opinion. Ehrlichman meant it as a compliment to ordinary Americans and as a quiet dismissal of eastern elites. The phrase now meant something slightly different, not a test of theatrical quality but a proxy for mainstream political acceptability.

The phrase is still in use. Peoria's inhabitants have long had complicated feelings about being the country's designated average, a city that has been defined by how well other people's ideas land here, rather than by its own.