The oy of comedy

As I reflect on my life, I regret that I wasn’t Mel Brooks. We are both Brooklynites, born during the Coolidge administration to lower middle-class families shattered by the Great Depression. We both bear changed names: his from Kaminsky, mine from Karnofsky. We both hung out at the corner candy store, quaffing egg creams, playing pinball, bantering with our buddies, bragging about how far we got with every girl on the block. We both worked in the Borscht Belt -- he as a tummler, me as a waiter. And we both inherited the trait vital for a comic: Jewishness. Had my karma been different, I might be a character in “Seriously Funny,” a gargantuan, meticulously researched, appropriately titled book. Or I might have written it.

Spanning the 1950s and 1960s, it features as representative of those decades not only Brooks but Mort Sahl, Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Stan Freberg, Joan Rivers, Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols, Elaine May and Woody Allen and, probably for ecumenical purposes, a sprinkling of goys -- among them Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs, Bob Newhart, Tom Lehrer, Dick Gregory and Jonathan Winters as well as Godfrey Cambridge, who in the film “Bye Bye Braverman” plays an impudent, black, Yiddish-speaking cabdriver. Briefly mentioned are Myron Cohen, Alan King, Jackie Mason, Jerry Seinfeld, Zero Mostel, Henny Youngman and the indestructible Milton Berle -- the “Jewish Mafia,” as Gerald Nachman captions them. Had he given them more space, his tome would have ballooned into a megillah.

If I concentrate on Jewish comedians, it is because they have pervaded the entertainment field for more than a century and, in the process, made an immutable contribution to the nation’s pop culture. As early as the 1870s, pioneers like Julian Rose and Joe Welch were touring the boondocks and dazzling bumpkins at carnivals and county fairs. Their shtick was to posture as bearded peddlers in beaver hats and tattered frocks, gesticulating and trading barbs in guttural accents. They were followed by such teams as Smith and Dale, the pseudonyms of Charles Marks and Joe Sultzer, whose constant bickering inspired Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys.” At least half of the silent comic one-reelers released prior to World War I focused on Jews, invariably stereotyping them as unscrupulous Shylocks. But, consistent with the optimistic melting pot mood of the period, there was the “Abie’s Irish Rose” theme: the Jewish boy and Catholic girl whose true love prevails over their religious differences and the strenuous objections of their parents.

As we transcend from burlesque, vaudeville and the legitimate theater into movies, radio and the infancy of television, Jewish comedians have become idols. But it is difficult to classify them. Some, like the beloved Jack Benny, were as American as apple pie. By contrast, the Marx Brothers were subliminally Jewish and the now-forgotten Lou Holtz unequivocally so as the feckless Mr. Lapidus. Yet I concur with Nachman’s observation that it was not until the emergence of such comics as Allan Sherman during the 1960s that the nation was conspicuously Yiddishized. His song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” was a smash hit. He exploited bagels, seltzer, pastrami, gefilte fish, matzo balls, stuffed derma and the garment industry. He also gave a Yiddish twist to folk tunes and the lyrics of “Guys and Dolls” and “My Fair Lady.” Accordingly, it is now common usage to plotz, kibitz, schlep, kvetch and display chutzpah. New York Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato, in his 1998 reelection campaign, assailed his opponent, Charles E. Schumer, as a “putzhead,” a hybrid term that lexicographer Leo Rosten has dubbed “Yinglish” or “Ameriddish.”

It would have been interesting for Nachman to elaborate on what accounted for the extraordinary popularity of Jewish comedians at times when Jews, in the eyes of most Americans, were as peculiar as Martians. My own opinion is that their spunky, dissident gigs struck a chord with mainstream audiences that enjoyed hearing them deflate hypocrisy, deride authority and puncture the pomposity of politicians, lawyers, clergymen, professors and other pillars of propriety. In that sense they resembled such homespun monologuists as Will Rogers. The public was also tickled by that fundamental ingredient of Jewish humor, self-deprecation, as exemplified by Groucho’s classic line: “I wouldn’t belong to a club that would have me as a member.” It is intriguing that Jewish comics thrived at moments when anti-Semitism was rampant. Thus Americans, after laughing at Fanny Brice’s dialect routines on their radios, could listen to the notorious Father Coughlin regurgitate “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Ironically, much of the anti-Jewish sentiment was spurred by the Hollywood moguls, themselves immigrants from the ghettos and shtetls of Eastern Europe. Fearing hostility from rednecks, they forced Danny Kaye to dye his hair blond and Jerry Lewis to dilute his moronic Catskills antics. When Harry Cohn, the petulant boss of Columbia Pictures, was implored to donate to a relief fund for Jewish refugees, he blustered, “Relief for Jews! How about relief from Jews.” But those days of bigotry have vanished, an indication that the country has become cosmopolitan. The whining of minority activists notwithstanding, ethnicity is chic.

The fashion was largely stimulated by Caesar, Brooks, Allen and Bruce. Their appearance coincided with the rise of the Jewish literati: Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth. With Imogene Coca and Carl Reiner as his sidekicks, the deceptively diffident Caesar spawned sketches that mercilessly caricatured stodgy Rotarians, bloated Nazi gauleiters and overweight Wagnerian opera sopranos.

Brooks, formerly one of his writers, was quintessential Borscht Belt. Flamboyant, bawdy and irreverent, he shrieked and spritzed in hysterical riffs that a highbrow critic called “the comedy of exhaustion.” Allen has suffered from overexposure, partly a consequence of his turbulent private life and the monotonous repetition of his tsoris. Yet he remains, as Nachman puts it, a versatile “renaissance” figure who writes, directs, acts and orchestrates the music -- and, despite his schlemiel disguise, finally manages to steer sexy shiksas into the sack. Epitomizing the Beat generation, Bruce deliberately offended bourgeois respectability by spouting language so obscene, so charged with epithets aimed at every race and stripe that it even shocked the beatniks. Nevertheless, he could be remarkably eloquent, as he was in his signature soliloquy, “Jewish and Goyish,” meaning hip versus square:

“If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter even if you’re Catholic. If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re goyish even if you’re Jewish.... Chocolate is Jewish and fudge is goyish .... Instant potatoes are goyish ... macaroons very Jewish.... All Negroes are Jewish....”

Nachman is enthralled by Sahl, who made a quiet debut on Christmas Eve of 1951 at the hungry i, a San Francisco boite, and was soon hailed as a brilliant iconoclast. A commentator rather than a comic, he surfaced during the heyday of conformity, when Eisenhower occupied the White House, the bilious McCarthy had not yet been squelched and the Organization Man was the paradigm. He lambasted the military, academia, feminism and Sunday supplement psychology in voguish argot like “communal guilt,” “group needs” and “standard deviation.” The intellectuals he spoofed canonized him but he gradually gravitated to the right and, as the novelist Herbert Gold has noted, became “almost clinically paranoid, full of hatred for the Kennedys, egomaniacal.” He is currently a relic of a heady epoch, though he will be remembered for what he was at his pinnacle, to quote a nostalgic description of him, “a voice in the wilderness.”

Conjecturing on the future, it seems inevitable that blacks will ultimately eclipse Jews. Bill Cosby underscores the point. Unlike his contemporaries, many of them crusaders for civil rights, he embodies the staunch, old-fashioned WASP virtues -- family, home, children, pluck, marital fidelity -- as if he were a blend of Norman Rockwell and Booth Tarkington in color. From the outset, to evoke Nachman’s portrayal of him, he was “wholesome, happy and sweetly droll, issuing mellow messages rather than ... troubling, crazy, even nihilistic bulletins.... “

Cosby’s subsequent sitcom was as prosaic as “Ozzie and Harriet.” But beneath the bromides, I suspect, he was promoting his racial agenda in his own subtle manner. In 1965 the Saturday Evening Post commissioned me to do an article on him and his co-star, Robert Culp, while they were shooting episodes for the TV series “I Spy,” which proved to be a stupendous success. I trailed them for a couple of weeks, zigzagging between Los Angeles and Hong Kong, perceived from watching them that the script had been crafted to star Cosby and concluded, “His fresh charm and casual humor so overshadow Culp that the show commits the heresy of subordinating the white man to the Negro.”

Nachman’s volume, with its prodigious wealth of detail, is a virtual encyclopedia that cannot possibly be digested in a single sitting. But it is a smorgasbord that will be savored by anyone with an appetite for an endlessly fascinating subject.