Freebase(0.00 / 0 votes)Rate this definition: Burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects.
HFBoards has an incredibly toxic community, but it also has some pretty great parts as well (there's some very in-depth discussion on occasion, as well as some humorous threads). Still, the community (and awful moderators) makes me not want to stick around for the great bits.
It is so called because its ornamental twiddly bits (curlicues) break the continuous line of a word. In German it is usually called the deutsche Schrift (German script). Fraktur was also used for a number of other languages, including Finnish, Czech, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.