Cabaret, restaurant that serves liquor and offers a variety of musical entertainment. The cabaret probably originated in France in the 1880s as a small club in which the audience was grouped around a platform. The entertainment at first consisted of a series of amateur acts linked together by a master of ceremonies; its coarse humour was usually directed against the conventions of bourgeois society. The typical program, which first flourished in the Montmartre district of Paris at the tiny Chat Noir in 1881, listed poetry readings, shadow plays, songs, and comic skits.
