If Jewish notions of sex and sexual roles and marriage are in flux—and surely no one would argue this not to be the case—many of the changes that have occurred or are occurring are mirrored in Jewish jokes. You could almost feel nostalgic to recall a gender joke like one from the great Jewish comedian Myron Cohen, who said, back when China was still referred to as “Red” China: while Jewish husbands solve world problems such as what to do about Red China, Jewish wives discuss how well red china goes with different-color tablecloths.
But let me bring this section on sex and marriage to a close by recalling a story that takes us back to “the decade of foreplay,” as comedian Lily Tomlin called the pre-1960s sexual era. This is another one of those stories where joke and anecdote seem to converge. It concerns a lifetime friend of my dad’s, perhaps his best friend, an amiable Jewish insurance salesman named Frank.
When he was young, Frank was known as “a nice Jewish boy,” not an uncommon designation even up to the present day. But the story is clearly of another era.
Frank was visiting, I suppose you could say he was courting, at the home of the girl he would eventually marry. There was a torrential downpour, which prompted the girl’s parents to invite Frank to stay the night at their home rather than head back. Frank thanked them politely and agreed to spend the night. Then he left and ran into the rainstorm. He returned nearly an hour later totally drenched and carrying a paper bag. He had raced home to get his pajamas.
III.
Schlemiels & Schmucks
“You’re a schmuck”
A bear manages to get into a cave and has a schlemiel cornered in it. The schlemiel cannot escape. Realizing this, he begins reciting the shema, the traditional Hebrew prayer praising Adonai, the one God Jews have worshiped for centuries. Suddenly, miraculously, he realizes that the bear is reciting the shema along with him, and he rapidly thinks to himself that the bear, incredibly enough, must be a Jewish bear. Then he hears the bear, in its deep bear voice, utter the prayer before eating: “Ha motzi lechem min ha’aretz.”
An awful Jewish man, a real schmuck, dies. A ruthless man who had been unkind to his employees and even to his wife and children, he was a man of low character. But despite all his dark traits, he gave money to his synagogue, though largely for show. When he dies, the rabbi of his synagogue is approached by the schmuck’s younger brother, who makes an offer. If the rabbi agrees to say that the deceased was a mensch at the funeral service, the younger brother will donate a million dollars to the synagogue’s capital campaign.
The rabbi agonizes. The night before the funeral service he despairs to his wife, “A million dollars! You realize what that would do for our capital campaign? It would boost us right to what we need. But how can I say that mamzer was a mensch? He was a schmuck, a terrible, bad, dreadful human being. How can I possibly, in good conscience, call him a mensch?”
The next day, at the well-attended funeral service, the rabbi begins and intones: “I cannot lie before all of you here today. I don’t even understand why so many have come to pay respects for such a man. He was ruthless and incorrigible and unkind. Frankly, he was cruel and dreadful. BUT COMPARED TO HIS BROTHER HE WAS A MENSCH.”
The figure of the schlemiel has taken on many identities from its folkloric and archetyal character in the Ashkenazi Yiddishkeit (Yiddish culture) world of the shtetl to the world of the present day. Schlemiels are usually hapless bungling characters often barely able to make their way through life. A schlemiel can be lovable but he (never a she) is usually a dope or loser who frequently finds himself in absurd or troubled situations. Think Charlie Chaplin or the early Woody Allen. Or Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool—a character in a classic Yiddish short story. Singer told me many people confused Gimpel with Gimbel, the name of the famous American department store—which made him consider, he said, writing a sequel to “Gimpel the Fool” titled “Macy the Idiot.”
The schlemiel, above all, is indeed a fool, but one who needs to be distinguished from his Yiddish counterpart, the schlimazel. Someone no less than the great Jewish pitcher Sandy Koufax, after calling himself a schlemiel (hardly an apt self-description!) for refusing to pitch in a World Series game scheduled on Yom Kippur, gave the standard distinction to broadcaster Joe Garagiola. (In Cleveland, where I grew up, we pronounced the “Kippur” in Yom Kippur as if it were a fish). The standard distinction between the two famous characters is that the schlemiel is the guy who clumsily knocks over a bowl of soup; the schlimazel, meaning literally a person with bad luck, is the one the soup spills on. My dad, who was bald, returned one day from a ball game calling himself a schlimazel because, of all the people at Cleveland’s municipal stadium, the bird, as he put it, “did its business on my head.”
The schlimazel became a recognized figure in the United States with a character invented by Al Capp (née Caplin), the cartoonist who created Li’l Abner. The cartoon featured a poor soul named Joe Btfsplk, who had a constant cloud over his head and, though well-meaning and a loyal friend, was a jinx who had constant bad luck and brought it on others. The schlimazel, like the schlemiel, can be likable, even lovable, and one can feel tenderness toward him. But both characters, especially the schlizmazel, are losers; more successful men typically do not want to hang out or do business with them. When I think of schlimazels in that vein, I think of the so-called coolers who are said to bring bad luck to gamblers if they are anywhere near where gambling is going on. I sometimes also think, though his tragedies and losses are God’s doing, that Job, in the Bible, may be the Ur-schlimazel.
Schlemiel and schlimazel became distinct in American popular culture with the lyrics to the theme of the sitcom Laverne & Shirley, which aired from 1976 to 1983: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, schlemiel, schlimazel, hasenpfeffer incorporated.” Sung by a group of kids, the lyrics were from a hopscotch song that Penny Marshall, who played Laverne, had learned as a girl growing up in the Bronx. Her brother Garry created the show, as well as Happy Days, Mork and Mindy, and a number of major movies such as Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride, Beaches, and The Princess Diaries. He also cast the comic George Burns, who was Jewish (née Nathan Birnbaum), as God in the film Dear God. Marshall himself played a number of Jewish characters, including Stan Lansing on Murphy Brown, which ended its ten-year run in 1998. Nearly everyone, including me, thought Marshall was Jewish, but he was born Garry Masciarelli, baptized Presbyterian, and raised Lutheran, which sounds a bit like the setup for a joke.
When I think of schlemiels, I think about the writer who was often called the Yiddish Mark Twain, Sholem Aleichem, who created schlemiels in his fiction and remains most famous for the Tevye stories, which were the basis for Fiddler on the Roof. When that world-famous musical first came to Broadway, the lines were long enough for Norman Mailer to comment wryly to me about all the fascist Jews looking for shtetl nostalgia. Why fascist Jews? Because, for Mailer—who also once told me that the last thing in life he ever wanted to be called when he was young was a nice Jewish boy—“fascist Jews” referred to the bourgeois and well-heeled Jews who could now afford a Broadway show, many of whom were likely supporters of the war in Vietnam, and had clearly become (to use a great H. L. Mencken word) “bourgeoisossified.” The irony was that wealthy Jews were paying to see a show focused on their poor and persecuted ancestors. Yet his comment was, to me, also a yardstick by which to measure how far many Jews had come from the penury of the shtetl. It brought to my mind a gold-laden bowl I saw once when visiting the Hamptons. Inside the bowl, inscribed in gold: “Nouveau is better than no riche at all.”
One of Sholem Aleichem’s best-known stories, “On Account of a Hat,” is instructive about schlemiels. The protagonist is a poor Jew on his way home for Passover. Sholem Shachnah accidentally picks up a hat belonging to a Russian official and puts it on his head. He soon finds himself being treated with great respect and deference, being put in a first-class train compartment, and repeatedly being called “your excellency.” The entire J
ewish community of Kasrilevke discovers this story and feasts on the humor for days and weeks, especially the children.
A folktale similar to the Sholem Aleichem one is about the schlemiel in czarist Russia who desperately needs a bed one night and is surreptitiously brought in by a fellow-schlemiel hotel operator to sleep in a bed next to a sleeping Russian general. By mistake, the schlemiel puts the general’s uniform on the next morning, quietly sneaks out of the room, and thinks at first, when he is outside the hotel and sees nothing but sycophantic and obsequious salutes and fawning deference, that something must have rubbed off on him from sleeping next to the general. That is, until he sees his reflection in a mirror, clad in the general’s uniform. He is such a loser, dummy schlemiel that he believes it must be the general in the mirror while he must still be oversleeping in the hotel bed.
Schlemiel folk humor is embedded in the stories of the so-called wise men of Chelm. They sold books about how to read. By the same token—if schlimazels sold umbrellas, we are told, the sky would cease raining. If they sold shrouds, people would stop dying.
Most Jews, given the choice, would likely identify themselves or their loved ones as being schlemiels, or even schlimazels, rather than schmucks. Schmucks are not lovable, or usually even likable, though they can be appealing, even charismatic. They are everywhere. Look at the success of movie portraits of greedy schmucks or schmuck con men who happen also to be Jewish. They are no longer hidden from plain view, especially after the true characters of Irving Rosenfeld and Jason Belford were brought to life by Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio (neither one a Jew) in the major motion pictures American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street. Philologists will continue to argue over what the word “schmuck” really means—the Yiddish word actually, literally, means penis, and it is as pejorative in its original meaning to call a man a schmuck as it is to call a woman “the C word.” But a less successful film called Dinner with Schmucks tried to ally the word to idiots or hapless tools. It has long been a word connected more to men of low character, deserving of contempt.
You pretty much have to be Jewish to be labeled a schlemiel. But nowadays anyone can be called a schmuck. The unlikely team of comedian Jackie Mason and famed divorce lawyer Raoul Felder wrote a book called Schmucks! about “fakes, frauds, lowlifes, and liars,” which includes in it a schmuck hit list, a targeted selection of those the politically biased co-authors deemed worthy of this Yiddish S word, ranging from Mel Gibson, the Clintons, Al Sharpton, Al Gore, Barbara Streisand, Madonna, and Katie Couric to the country of France. But, like so many words, “schmuck” has evolved and come to have manifold meanings. It still can mean a prick, but it has become more identifiable with someone who acts like a jerk, someone worthy of disdain. Young people today would call the guy a dick.
Lenny Bruce once claimed his infamous arrest for profanity was the result of having been heard using the word “schmuck” by a Yiddish-speaking undercover cop. The word was vulgar and profane then, but later on morphed into a kind of all-purpose pejorative. A slew of Yiddish words beginning with the “schm” sound are pejorative (as are many English words that begin with the “sn” phonetic sound). Think schmendrick (the one who cleans up the soup that was spilled by the schlemiel onto the schlimazel); schmegegge (often used to describe a lowlife or a person who is full of hot air or B.S.); shmata (a lousy or unflattering piece of clothing). Initially, calling someone a schmuck was simply, in effect, calling the person a prick. It was, in that sense, comparable to the word “putz,” which also has come more to mean a fool or would-be big shot but originally meant a penis (as in the old question: How do you play bedroom golf? The answer: You sink your putz.)
Despite all of the semantic confusion over schmuck, Mel Brooks tried defining it by saying, “You can be a poor schmuck, a lazy schmuck, a dumb schmuck, or just a plain old schmuck. A group of people can be collectively referred to as schmucks. You can call someone a schmuck, and you can be called a schmuck. You can even call yourself a schmuck.” In 2007, Brooks claimed he was starting a nonprofit foundation to save the word from obsolescence or extinction, plaintively confessing that he did not want to live in a world in which “schmuck” would be replaced by words such as “prick,” “jerk,” or “douchebag.” He made a point of urging people to call up their friends and loved ones and tell them, “You are a bunch of schmucks.” He also said, near tears, that he had never before revealed it to anyone, but his father was a schmuck.
A down-and-out actor, a schlemiel named Moishe, reluctantly takes a job he finds in a classified ad as an ape impersonator. It turns out that the job is at New York’s Central Park Zoo and has come about because of budget cuts that prohibit the zoo from buying another ape to replace one that has just died. So Moishe is hired and his job is to act like a real ape inside a cage during all of the zoo’s open hours. Initially, he feels uncomfortable in the role he must play and guilty about deceiving the public. But soon he takes to it with gusto and hangs each day from the bar in his cage, swinging on vines, devouring bananas, and roaring and beating on his chest like King Kong. He begins to draw crowds until, one day, while swinging on the vines, he loses his grip and sails over the fence into the lions’ cage right next door. Staring the lion right in the eyes, face-to-face, he recites the shema in mortal dread, “Hear, O Israel. The Lord our God. The Lord is one.” The lion roars back, “Blessed be his glorious name forever and ever.” Whereupon, from a nearby cage, a panda shouts, “Will you two schlemiels shut up? You’ll get us all fired.”
It turns out man-eating Jewish bears, and even schlemiels dressed as animals, can all recite the shema.
Generally, schlemiels are afflicted by circumstances in which they are helpless or made to look like fools. They populate more Jewish jokes and tales than probably any other figure from Jewish folklore and they usually stand for or are identified with the hapless Jew of the shtetl. But in this joke they are simply contemporary actors out of work, obliged to pose and behave as animals to make a living wage.
Morris and Becky live above their small grocery store.
They are in bed, asleep, and Morris is fitfully tossing and turning. He bumps into his wife and wakes her up.
“What?” she asks.
“Oy,” Morris says, “I’m so worried. I don’t know how I’m going to pay Horowitz the ten dollars I owe him.”
“Go back to sleep,” says Becky.
Fifteen minutes later, Morris is again tossing and turning, and accidentally kicks Becky, waking her up.
“What now?” she asks.
“Oy, I’m so worried. I don’t know how I’m going to pay Horowitz the ten dollars I owe him.”
“Go back to sleep.”
Another fifteen minutes go by and again Morris is tossing around, now catching Becky in the ribs with his elbow.
“What?”
“Oy. I’m so worried. I don’t know how I’m going to pay Horowitz the ten dollars I owe him.”
Becky leaps out of bed, stomps over to the window, and throws it open. Outside, it is the middle of the night, everything is dark and still. Becky shouts at the top of her lungs,
“HERSCHEL, HERSCHEL HOROWITZ! HERSCHEL HOROWITZ!”
Finally, on the other side of the street, a window goes up and a sleepy head appears. “Nu, so who wants me?”
Becky yells in a clear voice, “MORRIS GOLDFARB IS NOT GOING TO PAY YOU THE TEN DOLLARS HE OWES YOU.”
She slams the window shut, stomps back to bed, and says, “Now let him worry. You get some sleep!”
Morris Goldfarb appears ethical, literally losing sleep over an unpaid debt. The joke is about a side of Jewish character—the overriding (and guilt-ridden) need to settle a monetary debt, an anxiety joke that reveals a man who obviously has a conscience. But Morris is also a schlemiel. He is a schlemiel because he seems totally lost and without a clue about how to handle paying off his debt and he, like many schlemiels, is woebegone. His wife, Becky, has to intercede and take charge to save the night’s sleep for b
oth of them. She is the one with agency, who can act while Morris can only fret. Morris is also taught an important lesson about ridding oneself of anxiety. It is worth noting that a psychiatrist friend, Owen Renick, first told this joke to me and prefaced it by telling me he would on occasion use it as a teaching tool with patients.
It sometimes seems to me that jokes with lessons in them are either about relationships between Jews and books (scholarship and learning) or Jews and money. Public radio’s Ira Glass of This American Life once told me that Jews can be divided into “book Jews” and “money Jews.” Certain Jews Ira might call “money Jews” surely look at book Jews, like Morris Goldfarb, who are barely able to eke out a living, as schlemiels. That is how my wife’s businessman uncle looked at me. But before I go into that, let me offer a joke about book Jews and money Jews set in Israel, where a visitor attends a recital and concert at the Moskowitz Auditorium. He is impressed with the architecture and the acoustics. He inquires of the tour guide, “Is this magnificent auditorium named after Chaim Moskowitz, the famous Talmudic scholar?”
“No,” replies the guide. “It is named after Sam Moskowitz, the writer.”
“Never heard of him,” says the visitor. “What did he write?”
“A check,” says the guide.
Money Jews, who earn grand sums outside the professions, often have the good fortune of being blessed with what I call a financial saichel, the Yiddish word meaning common sense, but a word most often applied to a special kind of intelligence about money or business. I remember, as a kid, reading Stephen Birmingham’s book Our Crowd, about the superwealthy New York banking Jews who lit cigars with hundred-dollar bills. Who, I wondered, were these Jews? Why wasn’t I one of them? I was always a book Jew. Jews of an older generation than mine, even the off-the-scale moneymaking Jews, generally showed a modicum of respect for learning and erudition. But my then fiancée, now my wife, had an uncle who, other than loving opera, was a full-fledged money Jew. While I was at work on my Ph.D. in literature, he would frequently lecture, even hector, me on how I needed to stop being a schlemiel and wise up to making a more substantial income than I would as a scholar and professor—-especially since he knew his niece and I were planning to marry and eventually have a family. He once turned to me in the middle of a dinner with his wife and the girl I was soon to wed, and exclaimed, apropos of nothing, “Why do you want to be a melamed [teacher]? WHY DON’T YOU BECOME A REAL DOCTOR?”
Let There Be Laughter Page 7