Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.)

by Andrew Hankinson

  CHAPTER 8

  Author: What was it that your dad liked about debating?

  Noam: Say again?

  Author: Just if you could explain why did he want to debate with people? What was it that he valued about debate? Was it a sport thing to him? Or was he trying to get to the truth? What was it?

  Noam: Yeah, it’s just interesting to him. You know, when it came to Israel it was the most important thing to him. But on other matters, it’s just a very, you know, he was like a public intellectual type.

  Author: And how did that kind of evolve at the Cellar, at the Olive Tree? Did he do it a little bit at the start? Did he ever talk about it?

  Noam: He’s always been like that. He’s just been like that since I was born. It’s just who he always was.

  Author: Did he ever talk to you about it? About how much he enjoyed it?

  Noam: No.

  Author: So it’s just something that he did and it wasn’t something he talked about?

  Noam: Andrew, you sound like such a Gentile. I’m trying to realise how to explain this stuff to you, because it’s just so, like, not unusual in a Jewish atmosphere. It’s like I’m trying to understand why … I know it’s my fault. I’m making assumptions that … I really have to understand I’m making assumptions. This is just the way Jewish people are. You heard me quoting that verse from Fiddler on the Roof?

  Author: Yeah. Well, what is it?

  Noam: In the song, ‘If I Were a Rich Man’, he has a whole song about it, ‘If I were rich I’d have this and I’d have one staircase going up and one staircase …’ All these material things. But that’s not really the point of the song, and in the last verse he says, you can look it up, ‘If I were rich I’d have the time that I lack to sit in the synagogue and pray, and maybe have a seat by the Eastern Wall, and I’d discuss the holy books with the learned men several hours every day, that would be the sweetest thing of all.’ Meaning that the true pleasure of being rich would be to sit around and discuss the holy books, to debate, because that’s … Like, a Talmudic debate is, ‘What about this? What about that? This rabbi thinks it’s this way. This rabbi interprets it this way.’ So this is like the highest … This would be the goal of being wealthy and just traditional Jewish culture would be to have that leisure time to do precisely what it is that we’re talking about, to discuss the current day version of holy books with the learned men. So when you’re discussing the law and civil liberties with Alan Dershowitz, it’s a very American version of discussing the holy books with the learned men, that’s what it is.

  CHAPTER 7

  Noam: You don’t know what a Fuller Brush man is do you? A door-to-door brush salesman. He was a cab driver, he was a merchant seaman, he taught English at a foreign language school at Berlitz. He did a lot of these types of jobs and I guess the last one, he was a cab driver. He opened a little tiny coffee shop on Seventh Avenue called the Feenjon.

  Author: So he earned enough driving a cab to put capital down?

  Noam: Yeah, you know, I think he got some financial help from his father maybe, but his father was a pauper, so it was … In those days you could open a business from scratch with almost nothing, and he had nothing, a few hundred dollars here and a few hundred dollars there. You can’t do that anymore and that’s terrible, but in any case, that’s how he started, and it wasn’t a nightclub, it was a coffee shop.

  Author: How do you spell it?

  Noam: F-E-E-N-J-O-N.

  Author: What does it mean?

  Noam: It’s the Turkish coffee pots with a long handle, that’s called a Feenjon, but it’s also somehow symbolic of, you know, peace and friendship.

  Author: It was on Seventh Avenue?

  Noam: Yeah, Seventh Avenue and Commerce Street I think.

  Author: In Greenwich Village?

  Noam: Yeah, it’s in the Village, but it’s like, the outskirts of the popular parts of the Village. It’s a little bit out of the way.

  Author: Selling coffee and Danishes?

  Noam: Coffee and who knows. I wasn’t even born, but what made this place special was he and his friends used to play music there informally at the tables, and very quickly all kinds of musicians were coming down there all the time.

  Author: In the 1950s?

  Noam: This is 1960.

  Author: 1960 he opened it?

  Noam: Yeah, my father had a lot of Middle Eastern and Israeli musicians, they would all come down, but also Dylan would come down and José Feliciano performed there, and it became very, very popular, very, very quickly.

  Author: Bob Dylan?

  Noam: Yeah, Bob Dylan. My father knew Dylan.

  Author: Really? Okay. That’s quite a big deal isn’t it?

  Noam: I guess. You know, it’s hard for me to have perspective about it, because it’s always been that way. I remember much later in, like, the mid-Seventies, Dylan came into the Olive Tree and he said, ‘Manny, you’re still king.’ Like that. It made him feel good.

  CHAPTER 6

  Manny Dworman,

  Informality was the rule. Very often I would sit down among the coffee drinkers and chess players with my guitar and mandolin to accompany one or another of the many musicians who wandered in. Gradually, more and more musicians came to look upon the Feenjon as their second home.

  CHAPTER 5

  Author: So your dad was kind of, I’m not sure if this is the right word, but a beatnik?

  Noam: No, not at all. Exactly the opposite actually. He’s contradictions, because he smoked pot every day of his life. He always smoked pot. On the other hand he was a totally conservative guy. He always hated the Sixties. He always hated the hippie culture. He really did. He always, always felt it was a phoney thing.

  CHAPTER 4

  Manny,

  Though I was born in Israel, I was raised in Brooklyn, New York. Israeli music was always a part of my life as was Russian music, since both my parents were born in Russia. My musical career began at the age of twelve with the ocarina, or ‘sweet potato’, (an instrument I like to think of as native to Brooklyn), and later went to the mandolin, the guitar, and then, the oud. During my college days, I shared a room with a Greek-American by the name of Bill Bouris. He introduced me to Greek music but also opened up for me the whole world of Middle Eastern music.

  CHAPTER 3

  Author: You said that stuff about Louis CK, that it’s so small, like, there are hundreds of millions of people around the world so interested in this thing, they think it’s such a big deal, but actually it’s really, really small. And you said that thing about, you know, you’ve got a microscope and you just keep zooming in and zooming in until the problems become bigger and bigger. So I’m trying to reflect … This is something that Estee talked about, her grandparents she said were shot in the Holocaust. I know your dad was in Israel during the Holocaust but I didn’t know …

  Noam: No, he was in America during the Holocaust.

  Author: In America sorry. I didn’t know if he had any relatives who were killed in the Holocaust?

  Noam: Not to my knowledge. Not to my knowledge.

  Author: So the Holocaust didn’t affect you guys in a direct way?

  Noam: Well I think you’re putting too much emphasis on what it meant to be a Jew in the Forties regardless of whether somebody you knew had died or not. They killed six million Jews. I think everybody was directly affected by it. I doubt there’s much difference in the way people were affected by the … I mean, if someone lost their mother, that’s a thing, but this was … I wouldn’t put too much stock in that distinction.

  Author: Sure, okay. So did he ever talk to you about that? Did he ever talk about how he felt about it?

  Noam: About the Holocaust?

  Author: Yes.

  Noam: He was against it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Author: You talked abo
ut how some of your family was killed in the Holocaust.

  Estee: Most of my family. Most of my family. My mother and her two brothers survived. Everybody else … My mother had another brother, her parents, and extended family. I never met my grandparents. So most of them were lost in the Holocaust. The Holocaust is an extremely sensitive point with me. A lot of people move on. And I don’t. I don’t think I am allowed to. Somebody has to remember. You know what I mean? And I am the next generation and so I am a very close witness to what the Holocaust did to people, and just the way my mother was … My step-father … My step-father was a married man with a son, with brothers, sisters. That guy was left alone. Not a cousin on the planet. Everybody was exterminated. So it does something to your personality. It makes you sensitive and it makes you angry and it makes you … That was watching them, you know … What is the word I’m trying to … like, inferiority complex. All of those emotions together create a certain type of individual, and so that’s where I came from.

  Author: Was your father killed in the Holocaust?

  Estee: No. My mother was hiding with him during the Holocaust with the partisans in the forest and the farmlands. They were moving for three years in Poland. The winters are so extreme, I can’t tell you, and they were just on the move. They were in a concentration camp for a very short time. They escaped.

  Author: Your mother was?

  Estee: Yeah, they escaped. It wasn’t one of the major ones. So they did all of that. The partisans and the hiding with the farmers, paying off farmers, and there was a hole and they were inside that hole. I mean, I cannot imagine how you survive that. I can’t, because my mother, if she had a hangnail, it was like, ’Ow, ow, ow.’ I said, ‘Ma, you went through the Holocaust, I don’t get it,’ but yeah, it’s a time that I was blessed that I was born after, but the after-effect of it I felt because I lived with my mother and the night terrors, when she would wake up in the middle of the night and stuff like that, you know. Her brother, who is her junior, he was thirteen I think during the war, and it’s funny how both of them, they remember the same events differently. He says she’s wrong and she says, ‘Well, he was a child, what does he know?’ Their parents got executed right away.

  Author: Do you know where?

  Estee: Poland.

  Author: In a camp? Or shot in the street?

  Estee: I’m Jewish and my grandparents were orthodox, so it was visible who they were. They were known also. And they were executed in the town square.

  CHAPTER 1

  Estee: I’m not offended by much. I don’t mind dirty jokes. What I do mind is hurtful, and without benefit. There’s nobody benefits from a Holocaust joke, unless it’s somebody that has no idea what the Holocaust is all about. If you’re a younger man and don’t have a relationship to the Holocaust, you didn’t lose anybody, you know it from a book, so you are emotionally disconnected. And for you that’s okay. For me it’s not because I am emotionally connected.

  Author: Do you ever say anything to any of the comedians?

  Estee: No.

  EPILOGUE

  Author: You said on the phone the other day you were worried about something I’d asked you about, which was cancel culture, where I said, or implied in one of my questions, that you might be more forgiving of what someone said because you were worried it might happen to you.

  Noam: Yeah, I remember that. No, it’s not because of that. I’ve always been that way.

  Author: You’ve always been that way?

  Noam: I remember very clearly, when Mel Gibson was in trouble for making that movie…

  Author: Which movie?

  Noam: Passion of the Christ, which had some blatant anti-Semitic images. As a matter of fact I even wrote a letter that was published in the Weekly Standard discussing the blatant anti-Semitism. Also, he had some things on tape, or he said some things about Jews, I don’t even remember all the things. It was pretty clear. And I remember thinking that they should let him keep making movies and you can see them or not. I’ve always been reluctant to embrace the idea of a mob retaliation for something somebody said.

  Author: Is that because you think he’s going to learn and improve?

  Noam: No, I just think it spins out of control and it’s arbitrary. It’s the … It’s quite often unfair. Quite often facts come out a year later that were unknown, and I just don’t believe in putting that kind of blood in the water. I think the cure is much worse than the disease, which is not to say that anybody who gets cancelled is necessarily not deserving of being cancelled. It’s to say that when you encourage this kind of retaliation, very, very quickly it’s going to become unfair. As I said, the cure will become much worse than the disease, and I think we’ve seen that already.

  Author: A lot of people are fearful of … Particular comedians are fearful now of that kind of culture, where you say the wrong thing so you’re branded forever. My agent was over at the Cellar a few weeks ago, he went to see a show, and he said he kind of felt, and he might be wrong, but he felt some of the male comedians were self-censoring. Have you noticed that at all?

  Noam: I haven’t really. I have to say, I haven’t.

  Author: So you think people are getting up on the Cellar stage still and saying what they want?

  Noam: I mean, I don’t want to sound naive, but yeah, I think they are.

  Author: Are you still doing that thing with the phones where people have their phones taken off them now? Or is it just for certain shows?

  Noam: Yeah we’re still doing it.

  Author: For all the shows or just some shows?

  Noam: All the shows.

  Author: You think that’s helped, because there’s a much smaller chance that anybody in the audience is going to film it and put it online? Do the comedians feel freer to do what they want to do because of that?

  Noam: Probably. Probably they do.

  Author: Is it not something you’ve discussed with any of them?

  Noam: I haven’t heard that from the comedians. I hear that going around. I haven’t heard it directly from anybody. But what I have heard from the comedians is they feel the audience is much more in the moment and paying attention. I mean, look at what happened with this guy Shane Gillis and these Legion of Skanks comedians. They’re not censoring themselves.

  Author: Yeah, but it seems like those guys have really had to develop their own audience and, you know, they sacrifice …

  Noam: That’s what happens. I think that the comedians who are fuelled by the kind of in-your-face controversial presentation, they don’t know any other way of being, so they just do it and they … Look, and you’re right, they develop their own audience, like Andrew Schulz, a comedian I think is terrific, he just takes it directly on YouTube, he has a million followers, he sells out all over the country, and nobody can really touch him.

  Author: Okay.

  Noam: Look, even Louis … Louis could still sell out Madison Square Garden. Maybe even … The issue would be that people would attack Madison Square Garden for allowing him to perform there, and that is where we really cross the line into a bad situation, you know, where … And the hypocrisy is obvious. A university can invite virtually any leader in the world. China has a million Muslims in concentration camps. Does anybody object if the leader of China comes to speak somewhere? But Louis CK, who has never even been accused of breaking the law, who’s done something he should be ashamed of, is now not permitted to work at venues which leant themselves to the general showbiz industry. It’s … I don’t see any … It’s just a very seat-of-the-pants, make-it-up-as-you-go-along type of procedure.

  Author: And at the start, when Louis first came back, you were under pressure, and I remember you had a couple of protestors outside, but you kept allowing him on anyway. Did you have any protestors after that?

  Noam: No. Just the two women that one night.

  Author: The pressure
just dissipated, did it?

  Noam: Well, to be accurate, that was the only night that we listed his name on the line-up, a lot of people had criticised me for not listing his name on the line-up so I gave it a shot, suspecting it would blow up in my face, and it didn’t work out, so we didn’t list him on the line-up anymore. We just did the swim-at-your-own-risk policy. So that was that, and yeah, it dissipated. He hasn’t been at the Cellar in a year, but he’s touring all over the country and he’s selling out everywhere.

  Author: Yeah. You had to cancel a debate recently as well? Can you explain that?

  Noam: And by the way, Mike Tyson, I’ve said this a million times, Bill Clinton and Mike Tyson, who’ve also been accused or even convicted of things worse than Louis was accused of … Bill Clinton, he’s welcome everywhere. Yeah, we cancelled the debate because there was a lot of rumbling on Twitter that people were going to come to disrupt it.

  Author: Because of the subject of it?

  Noam: Because of the subject matter, yeah.

  Author: Which was?

  Noam: It was about reparations.

  Author: Okay.

  Noam: And I just didn’t want to put my staff in that kind of risky situation, you know.

  Author: You said on the phone a few calls ago, when we talked about the book, that you might not have agreed to do it if I started doing it now, you know, since things have changed. I wondered what’s changed? Is it you that’s changed? Has the world changed? What’s different now?

  Noam: Yeah, I just have a whole … Suddenly … The book started before Louis, correct?

  Author: Yeah, yeah.

  Noam: Because this was going to be a nice book about the history of the Comedy Cellar, and now it’s a book about, you know, about a confrontation in a sense, and I have a whole PTSD from that whole chapter, you know. I never really recovered from it. It was horrible. So I just don’t want anything that could open that wound again.