Ladies and gentlemen is a
salutation
A salutation is a greeting used in a letter or other communication. Salutations can be formal or informal. The most common form of salutation in an English letter is wed by the recipient's given name or title. For each style of salutation there i ...
used in the field of
entertainment
Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousa ...
,
sports
Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Sports can, th ...
and
theater
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actor, actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The p ...
since the mid-19th century
vaudeville
Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition ...
era. It is intended to raise the audience's expectations of a good performance and, to this end, is often followed by an announcement of the names of the performers, a description of what sort of act they are to perform, or an often
hyperbolic
Hyperbolic is an adjective describing something that resembles or pertains to a hyperbola (a curve), to hyperbole (an overstatement or exaggeration), or to hyperbolic geometry.
The following phenomena are described as ''hyperbolic'' because they ...
series of accolades accorded to the act.
The motivation behind the term is to make the audience feel as if they have paid a substantial amount for the privilege of witnessing the event in question, and thus raise their expectations for what is to come.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ladies And Gentlemen (Salutation)
19th-century introductions
Greeting words and phrases
Vaudeville tropes