“Mama, how do you like the lovebird I bought for the front room? … You cooked it? … You cooked a South American bird? A bird that speaks three languages?—Oh, you didn’t know[?] … He should have said something!”
Mining this motif for comedy, Adams complains that the social director at a certain hotel had lifted the original gags that Adams himself had bought from his fellow comic Lou Saxon, who had stolen the jokes from the “gag fence” Eddie Davis, who had received them from Leon Fields, who had gotten them from Buddy Walker, who had copied them down from Berle “at Loew’s State [theater] when they were still warm.”17
A good joke became worth its weight in gold. Although a comedian could not make the big time without developing a distinctive stage personality, the profession itself became more streamlined, with teams of writers stockpiling and market-testing material, agents packaging performers for emerging markets, and union protection securing the comedians’ old age. The sociology of the Borscht Belt ensured that most of the humorists, like most of the guests, would be Jewish. When the emerging medium of radio went looking for entertainers, it took those who had mastered timing and delivery. Movies and television picked off talent from the stage and radio. Jews developed comedy the way Chinese restaurants taught the United States to eat with chopsticks.
In a “roast” of Frank Sinatra—the lampooning of a fellow comedian in the company of other comedians having become itself a strategy for promoting the profession—Buttons observed that in the entertainment industry, most singers were Italians and most comedians Jewish, “which is ridiculous: very little difference between the Jews and Italians. One year of high school.”18 But the phenomenon does raise the question, How come Jewish hotelkeepers in the Catskills turned comedy into a main attraction?
Gentile hotels in the Adirondacks advertised no such specialty; nor did the first Jewish resorts in the period before and immediately after the First World War. In one such hotel described by Abraham Cahan in his 1917 novel The Rise of David Levinsky, the entertainment consists of high-minded patriotic fare. Summer colonies for Jewish socialists and union workers offered lectures by prominent Yiddish writers, poets, and thinkers, who sought to enlighten more than to amuse. Even Nadir, one of the best Yiddish humorists (as we saw in the previous chapter), did not make comedy a main attraction at the summer resort he ran in the 1920s. It wasn’t until Jews began to feel a touch more comfortable in the United States that they adopted laughter as their main collective pursuit, along with the fund-raising that was sometimes its accompaniment. “A man is hit by a car. A paramedic on the scene asks, ‘Are you comfortable?’ The Jew answers [with a Yiddish accent], ‘I make a living.’ ” What funnier to a crowd of by-now middle-income vacationers than a joke by a fellow Jew with a Yiddish, Yinglish, or Yiddish-accented punch line that confirms how far they have come, both economically and linguistically? What more reassuring than the collective laughter at a joke that “no one but a Jew” could understand?
For a time, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Yiddish theater had served as a quasisynagogue—a spiritual sanctuary and cultural gathering place. Although secular in nature, performed on Friday nights, and often dramatizing the defiance of religious norms, the typical Yiddish play featured one or more ritual scenes—celebrations of a holiday, engagement, or wedding, circumcision, or sabbath—as though to make up for the ceremonial occasions that the audience was no longer observing at home. Yiddish theater was intensely interactive, like performances in the Elizabethan theater, eliciting tears and laughter along with outbursts of approval or displeasure. Habits of collective participation did not carry over, however, to the English-language stage. Meshulim Meier Weisenfreund might find personal fame as the actor Paul Muni, and some Jewish stories might transport well to Broad-way and Hollywood, but at non-Jewish performances, Jewish audiences behaved decorously.
Appropriate in this connection is the joke, originating in Yiddish and already related in the previous chapter, about the Jewish widow who conscientiously studies proper Gentile dress, speech, and demeanor, and when she feels ready to “pass,” registers at a restricted hotel. She is doing well until the waiter who is bringing the “dry martini” she has ordered accidentally spills it into her lap, causing her to yelp, “Oy vey!—whatever that means!” In its U.S. (as opposed to European) context, the joke implies: Why go to a Gentile hotel when you can laugh with us here in the Catskills?!
In brief, the kind of participatory audience reaction once elicited by the Yiddish theater found its home in the comedy shows of Jewish hotels. The Borsht Belt became to stand-up comedy what New Orleans was to jazz—an incubator of a new form of entertainment that gradually emerged from its formative center into the U.S. mainstream and beyond.
Not that this comparison of Jewish comedy with jazz should obscure the contributions of Jews to the development of jazz itself, or black Americans to the growth of native comedy. The two forms of entertainment were similarly informal and improvisational. But the value placed by each community on its special cultural pastime dictated the opportunities for talented individuals within that community. Comedy and jazz depend on patronage, which rewards what it craves. Jews wanted to laugh at their failings, and they rewarded the comics who mocked their flaws just as they had once prized the authorities and rabbinic tradition that had tried to make them more perfect. Jewish stand-up comedians took over from the maggidim—the preachers who punished and promised redemption—the function of reprimand, without which Jews would cease to be Jews.
In some crucial respects, Catskills comedy differed profoundly from New Orleans jazz: while southern blacks were still suffering exclusion, the vacationing Jews were anxiously protecting their advancement in U.S. society. Though much can be made of the anti-Semitism that was on the rise in the United States during the 1930s—instituting restrictions and quotas even where none had been present before—Jews were creating clubs of their own with patrons who valued their intimacy. The majority of Jews would have reversed Groucho’s dictum to read, “I would never join a club that didn’t want me for a member.”
Yet the good fortune that now allowed them to vacation in the Catskills was as incongruous as the punch lines of some of the jokes. More than anti-Semitism directed at Jews, U.S. isolationism threatened to abandon the Jewish people elsewhere to their fate at the hands of determined enemies. A growing disparity separated American Jews, whose security was increasing in every meaningful respect, from the Jews of Europe and Palestine, the former threatened by Hitler and Stalin, and the latter sustaining increased Arab violence under British rule. The Yiddish press agitated on behalf of these fellow Jews, but most English-language media discouraged intervention. For their part, resort hotels were expected to insulate vacationers from their worries.What, then, are we to make of the fantastic spurt of Jewish laughter in the very years when American Jews ought, perhaps, to have been laughing less and doing more?
As it happens, my experience at a Catskill resort in winter 1974 enlarged my sympathy for the apparently inappropriate causes and effects of comedy. My beloved older brother Benjamin, before his death on November 25 of that year, had arranged for an elaborate winter holiday with his wife and three children. We did not know what to do with ourselves after the week of shivah, much less how to console his widow and children. Our closest friend, a rabbi’s daughter, suggested that after the month of mourning we all go to Grossinger’s, queen of the Catskill hotels: she with her husband and their four children, we with our three, and my widowed sister-in-law with hers. Basing herself on her kibbutz experience, our friend laid out the advantages of being together at this sprawling resort with meals and activities provided, abler to attend to the children and our grief.
Evenings proved harder than days. Though it seemed a desecration, the older children and we attended the comedy shows that were the resort’s prime distraction, and the comedy began to suit our mood. There was the routine about a bar mitzvah party that keeps getting more and more elaborate unti
l the candles on the cake set off the sprinkler system that floods the place. The nervously pacing stand-up comic was not unlike my brother, which made me laugh, which was not that different from crying. Laughter brought on tears that became independent of the comedy triggering them, and left me purged in their aftermath. Comedy complicated the physiological and psychological relation between shaking and shuddering in ways that I could not have anticipated.
Stand-up comedy is all about nerve—a battle between aggressor and victims with wit as the weapon and laughter as the prize. Different from prizefights that pit people against one another in the presence of paying spectators, comedy pits the fighter against the paying customers, with silence as the killer, and the detonation of laughter as the victory. As in any pitched battle, tension is at the heart of the matter, and the pent-up tension in those rooms full of Jews must have driven the value of comedy to record heights. In the 1930s, the political threat to Jews elsewhere belied the incremental prosperity of Jews in the United States, though the United States was itself still jeopardized by social and economic handicaps that were contrary to the promise of equality. Strength and helplessness, promise and danger, advantage and liability all had seldom, if ever, converged as incongruously as in the years when Jewish comedians were “makin’ whoopee” (lyrics by Gus Kahn) in the mountains.
It therefore was not unreasonable for Jewish comedy to be directed inward, if not at the situation itself, then at reflected hints of it in habits of conspicuous consumption, overhasty Americanization, and men who could or would not manifest their masculinity. Henpecked husbands, sad sacks, and what Jews called nebbishes, schlimazels, and schlemiels emerged as trademarks of American Jewish comedy. In a later routine, Jackie Mason (Maza), scion of rabbis and himself an ordained rabbi, twits Jewish husbands who cannot order food without permission from their wives. “Do I like this? … I thought I did…. I don’t? It’s up to you.” They can’t walk around in the house for which they’ve paid a half-million dollars or drink from a glass because it is always the wrong one. They have to get permission from their wives even to laugh. Mason taunts the males who in their domestic arrangements replicate the stereotype of the homeless Jew. Joan Rivers (Molinsky Sanger Rosenberg) is equally caustic on the subject of the (Jewish) woman who does not satisfy her husband: heavy breathing from his side of the bed signals an attack of asthma. Woody Allen’s take on the weak Jewish male would be contrastingly seductive, ridiculing Gentiles—American, Russian, and Christian—for their brawn and Western culture for its ideal of the bellicose hero; but his is the exception that underlines the rule.
From among the hundreds of professional Jewish comedians, there is no way of choosing the routines or personae that had the greatest or most lasting impact—whether the Three Stooges on absurdist theory, Gertrude Berg’s Molly Goldberg as the cheerful good neighbor waving from her window, the exaggerated parsimony of Jack Benny (Benjamin Kubelsky), the exaggerated innocence of Danny Kaye (David Daniel Kaminsky), Lenny Bruce challenging the legal limits of profanity, Sid Caesar dominating Your Show of Shows, or Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David playing sharply contrasting versions of themselves. It does seem, however, that the socioeconomics of the Borscht Belt created the opportunity for a Jewish-style comedy less eager for Gentile approval than for exploring some of the mysteries of what Mason called the “Ultimate Jew.”
The most cultic line in American Jewish comedy may have been uttered in the Coen Brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski. John Goodman plays Walter Sobchak, a convert to Judaism, formerly a Polish Catholic, who won’t participate in the bowling league tournament because he is “shomer shabbos.” “Saturday, Donny, is Shabbos, the Jewish day of rest. That means that I don’t work, I don’t drive a car, I don’t fucking ride in a car, I don’t handle money, I don’t turn on the oven, and I sure as shit don’t fucking roll!” This fiercely obscene and obscenely fierce defense of halachic observance draws a laugh all the louder because such words had never before been uttered in U.S. entertainment by any born Jew. Humor is all about incongruity, and integration in the United States had gone so far that a Polish Catholic—once a paradigm of the anti-Semite—could be portrayed as the conscience of his adopted religion. In this scene, it would be hard to separate laughing at the dysfunctional team of Jewish losers, improbable convert, and demands of Jewish observance from laughing with the same dysfunctional team of losers, improbable convert, and demands of Jewish observance. Yet Jews are the unquestionable insiders of this humor, and in humor it’s the insider’s edge that counts.
One or another version of the challenged Jewish male whom Allen tries to turn into a matinee idol has dominated not just stand-up comedy but also some of the best American Jewish writing, which also turns out to be—how surprising is that?—some of its funniest. A seemingly exasperated Bellow once referred to himself, Bernard Malamud, and Roth as the “Hart Schaffner & Marx” of U.S. fiction. The allusion was to the Chicago Jewish firm that produced an upscale brand of men’s suits, so that Bellow was staking a claim to a label of distinction while professedly complaining about being unfairly labeled. In Wallace Markfield’s darkly hilarious To an Early Grave (1964), four Jewish writers end up at the wrong funeral. Jewish shopkeepers are the Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers of Stanley Elkin’s comic stories (1966). A junior professor shows up with an open fly in Malamud’s A New Life (1961). Bellow’s Moses Herzog arranges a job for the best friend who is cuckolding him (1964). Bruce Jay Friedman’s eponymous hero in Stern (1962), seeking calm in the suburbs, cultivates an ulcer instead. While one should not exaggerate the function of comedy in a body of literature that also features the tortured writing of Henry Roth in Call It Sleep (1934) or replicate the offense to Yiddish by turning literature into an “essentially comic” medium, neither can we ignore the fact that Joseph Heller’s comic novel Catch-22 (1961) gave American English its synonym for Kafkaesque. The decade ushered in by Heller’s “Armenian” captain John Joseph Yossarian would end with Philip Roth’s funniest novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969).
Roth spoofs familiar and new constituencies in a shpritz so manic it might have been fueled by drugs, except that there has seldom been a writer as soberly concentrated as Roth on mastering the craft of fiction. Portnoy’s Complaint was a breakthrough in the way that The Adventures of Augie March freed Bellow to write in a distinctively Jewish voice, but Roth was the first to use the style of stand-up comedy for a high-brow U.S. novel. Interviewed by George Plimpton at the height of the controversy around this book, Roth skirted questions about its content in an attempt to emphasize its formal, literary qualities. He described his attraction to “prose that has the turns, vibrations, intonations, and cadences, the spontaneity and ease, of spoken language, at the same time that it is solidly grounded on the page, weighted with the irony, precision, and ambiguity associated with a more traditional rhetoric.”
The conception is really nothing, you know, beside the delivery. My point is that until my “ideas”—about sex, guilt, childhood, about Jewish men and their Gentile women—were absorbed by an overall fictional strategy and goal, they were ideas not unlike anybody else’s. Everybody has “ideas” for novels; the subway is jammed with people hanging from the straps, their heads full of ideas for novels they cannot begin to write. I am often one of them.19
One may take Roth at his word, since this, his third novel, was the first in a comic mode, and his later ideas for comic novels could result in very poor ones (The Breast and Our Gang). Unquestionably, it was the “delivery” of Portnoy’s Complaint that drew attention to its targets, first among them the Freudian legacy of psychoanalysis, a therapeutic process that overcame repression through speech and was now obliged to put the genie (repression and speech) back into the bottle. Cast as Alexander Portnoy’s presumably private revelations to his analyst, the monologues that comprise this novel are violated through public disclosure, playing on every patient’s suspicion that the whole exercise is just a way of titillating the doctor and prol
onging dependency. In literary terms, the “plot”—a series of sexual exploits with obsessively pursued and conquered Gentile women—traces the development of a Jewish boy from Newark, New Jersey, into a lonely thirty-three-year-old adolescent. In comic terms, it sends up the device that it exploits: “[Since] my return from Europe I have been putting myself to sleep each night in the solitary confinement of my womanless bed with a volume of Freud in my hand. Sometimes Freud in hand, sometimes Alex in hand, frequently both.”20
Freud is the prism through which Roth spoofs the Jewish mother—another great foil of American Jewish postwar comedy. The narrator sets himself up as an archetype of what Freud called the oedipal complex, consisting of being in love with one and hating the other part of the parental pair, and describes how his mother showered him with the kind of affection she ought to have reserved for her mate. (Allen’s take on this subject: “I hear that their women don’t sleep with their husbands after marriage.”)21 So affected is the boy by his mother’s seductive power over him that when he tries to prove his manhood in the Land of Israel, he is physically overpowered by a woman who reminds him of pictures of his mother as a young girl. “Doctor, maybe other patients dream—with me, everything happens. I have a life without latent content. The dream thing happens! Doctor: I couldn’t get it up in the State of Israel! How’s that for symbolism, bubi?”22 Suffocating mother love does not prevent Alex from acting out his sexual fantasies with Gentile women or vividly describing their consummation, merely from assuming the responsibilities of Jewish manhood.
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