Let’s start with a couple of jokes. The first: “I wear my grandfather’s watch with great pride. He sold it to me on his deathbed.” The second: “If a book about failure doesn’t sell, is it a success?” What do they have in common, beyond playing with the absurd and paradox for comic effect? In both cases their authors are New York Jews, they began in the world of stand-up comedy and later triumphed on the screen. The first joke is from Woody Allen; the second, by Jerry Seinfeld. Now the memoirs of another heavyweight of New York Jewish humor, Mel Brooks, are published in Spanish. All about me! (Libros del Kultrum) is a very entertaining book full of anecdotes, which also helps to understand what Jewish humor is, why it has developed so strongly in New York throughout the 20th century and from there it has conquered the world .
Let’s go back to the origins: between the great migratory flow that came from Europe to the US in the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, one of the largest groups were Jews from the center and east of the continent, who fled of pogroms and famine. Most of them were Ashkenazi and brought with them a language – Yiddish – a religion, customs, gastronomy and also their own sense of humour. One of its main characteristics is self-parody and when this is mixed with the neuroses of the big city, characters like the one Woody Allen has outlined in his films or the one Jerry Seinfeld chiseled in his television series emerge. I point out some other significant elements of this particular comedy: the character of the possessive mother with a lot of character, families that are not always well-matched, religious doubts, vital insecurities, the combination of irony with highly intellectual and even metaphysical overtones with the fat salt typical of the popular joke…
One of the sectors in which this community left its mark is that of entertainment and variety, from where they jumped to cinema and television. There is a very relevant pioneer, Fanny Brice, an actress and singer with a Jewish mother who triumphed from the 1910s on in the musical revues of businessman Florenz Ziegfeld, the Ziegfeld Follies, which are one of the antecedents of a genuinely American genre: the Broadway musical. Precisely one of those musicals, Funny Girl, immortalized her, interpreted on the stage and later on the screen by Barbra Streisand, who took up her character in Funny Lady.
The Marx brothers also started on stage, whose success on Broadway came in the twenties and at the end of that decade they made the leap to movies. Around the same time, another group with beginnings in vaudeville and a later career in the cinema was formed: The Three Stooges, less known outside the US and with less sophisticated comedy than that of the Marxes. Both cases exemplify how this humor conquered Hollywood, whose first moguls, by the way, were also mostly descendants of Jews from eastern and central European immigration.
In the postwar period, practically all of the New York Jewish comedians followed an identical journey of initiation. They took their first steps in the so-called Borscht Belt (the Borscht belt) in the Catskill Mountains, also known as the Jewish Alps. In a few years when this community was not welcome in many hotels, that area concentrated summer resorts for wealthy Jewish families from New York. And they had, as part of their leisure offer, performances by comedians (this world is very well portrayed in the second season of the delicious Amazon series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel).
Future legends such as Sid Caesar, George Burns, Milton Berle, Don Rickles, Danny Kaye, Red Buttons, Rodney Dangerfield, Joan Rivers, Jean Carroll, Phyllis Diller, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Jerry Lewis, Lenny Bruce, were trained in the Catskills. Woody Allen… These summer resorts fell into decline from the sixties, when on the one hand anti-Semitism was tempered and on the other commercial aviation became popular, allowing more distant destinations to be chosen.
After proving that they were capable of provoking the laughter of the vacationers, the comedians made the leap to the comedy clubs of the city and from there to the medium that was then expanding throughout the country: television. There is a particularly relevant gag show from the early 1950s: Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, in which he was paired with Imogene Coca. The writing department was a breeding ground for Jewish humorists from New York. There they met, with Mel Tolkin in charge, Carl Reiner (who also acted), Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and his brother Danny, and in the last stage a very young Woody Allen. This legendary writer’s room inspired Neil Simon to one of his late comedies, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, whose characters are thinly veiled portraits of real figures.
Many of Caesar’s competitors were also Jewish: George Burns and Gracie Allen on the one hand and Jack Benny on the other had their television gag show. And in 1955 came The Phil Silvers Show, commanded by a bawdy comedian from vaudeville who was called The King of Chutzpah, a word of Yiddish origin that means cheeky, insolent.
One of Caesar’s screenwriters, Neil Simon, became the king of Broadway comedies and his most popular pieces had successful film adaptations: Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, The Nutty Couple, The Prisoner of Second Avenue … Sometimes looked down on as a mere author of commercial theater, Simon effectively handled the springs of comedy. He also addressed his Jewish roots in autobiographical works such as Memoirs from Brighton Beach or Biloxi Blues.
Two other writers on the team, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, hit it off and had fun performing together for friends. From those humorous improvisations, The 2000-Year-Old Man was born. Brooks played a guy who had lived all this time and Reiner gave him the answer. In 1961 they recorded an album –which would be followed by two others– that sold more than a million copies. Another legendary comedy duo emerged in the early 1960s, consisting of Mike Nichols (future director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate) and Elaine May (who got her start in Yiddish traveling theater).
Mel Brooks triumphed on television as co-creator with Buck Henry of Super Agent 86 (the one with the famous shoe phone) and made his film debut in 1967 with a true milestone: The Producers, with two superb Jewish comedians: Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. Mostel was already a Broadway legend by then. He had had work problems when he was investigated by the Committee on Un-American Activities for his communist sympathies. He was reborn in a big way in 1957 playing Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in Nighttown and later in the landmark musical Fiddler on the Roof. Wilder was a fledgling aspiring dramatic actor in whom Brooks discovered a sweeping comedic streak. An unapologetic blend of sophistication and swagger, The Producers had the audacity to prank a wacky Nazi playwright and his musical about Hitler, for which he received criticism and pressure. Brooks continued on a roll in his subsequent films and had another smash hit with Young Frankenstein. In his memoirs he tells the anecdote that he had to buy handkerchiefs so that the whole team could put them in their mouths and thus avoid the laughter on the set because they annoyed the takes.
Less known by the general public than Brooks, Carl Reiner was another very relevant figure of American humor: as an actor he starred in the great comedy The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! and he achieved late fame with his appearances in the series Ocean ’s Eleven. As a director he has a remarkable film about a fading comedian, The Comedian, with Dick Van Dyke. His son Rob Reiner was the director of one of the great comedies of the eighties: When Harry Met Sally, written by Norah Ephron. The daughter of New York Jewish screenwriters, she was born in New York but grew up in Los Angeles because her parents went to work in Hollywood. She later returned to the East Coast and became a figure in journalism. The lead actor was Billy Crystal, a Jewish comedian raised in the Bronx. And a curiosity, if I may: the lady who in the famous scene of Meg Ryan’s simulated orgasm tells the waiter that she wants them to serve her the same thing she is drinking, was the actress and singer Estelle Lebost, Rob’s mother and wife. from Carl.
Two great subversive comedians who based their performances on provocation moved in a less commercial and comfortable environment. On the one hand, we are talking about Lenny Bruce, whose mother, Sally Marr, was a relevant stand-up comedian who had a huge influence on her son. Bruce, whose career spanned the 1950s and 1960s, played tricks on audiences, made inappropriate jokes about Jews and blacks, and was arrested on several occasions for obscenity. The other, Andy Kaufman, arrived a little later, in the seventies, and took humor to the limit more as a performer than as a simple comedian. He sought to disconcert the viewer, who often did not know if what he was seeing was part of the show or something was going wrong. One of the characters he created was the dandy and repulsive singer Tony Clifton, who chained inappropriate comments until he provoked an outraged reaction from the public.
Both artists have had their biopic: Bob Fosse’s Lenny in the case of the former and Milos Forman’s Man in the Moon the latter. Bruce, by the way, appears as a character in The Marvelous Miss Maisel, which is a very faithful portrayal of the world of New York stand-up comedy. The creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, knows him well because his father, Don Sherman, was a comedian raised in the Bronx who later had a long career performing on cruise ships.
If there is a character that represents the paradigm of the theme of this article, it is Woody Allen. His films are riddled with possessive mothers, orthodox sisters, histrionic family reunions, nightmares with rabbis, details about community customs… Some works are especially significant: Annie Hall was the first to explicitly address her Jewish identity, Days of radio is an emotional family portrait drawn from their memories, on Broadway Danny Rose plays an inept variety agent, in his episode of New York Stories he drew the definitive portrait of the domineering Jewish mother, and films like Hannah and her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Taking Harry Down are brimming with references.
At the same level, but in the field of television, we should place Seinfeld, which in the 1990s revolutionized the classic and perhaps mundane approaches to television sitcoms. In the words of its creators, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, it was “a show about nothing”, which started from the most anodyne everyday situations to turn them into pure nonsense. The protagonist, from stand-up comedy, played himself and the proposal was New York to the core and contained abundant references to the Jewish identity of most of the characters. In this regard, the parents of Seinfeld and George Constanza, attributed to great historical comedians, were especially relevant: Liz Sheridan, Estelle Harris, Barney Martin and, in the case of Constanza’s father, none other than Jerry Stiller, father of Ben Stiller. .
Larry David later created and starred in Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO), in which a neurotic and bloody character who is an exaggerated version of him moves to Los Angeles, where he develops situations with provocative humor, which can make the viewer uncomfortable. New York Jews are also the creators of two other landmark sitcoms: Friends’ Martha Kauffman and Daniel Crane and The Big Bang Theory’s Chuck Lorre, although the latter is set on the West Coast.
Without leaving the field of television, the aforementioned The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (the fifth and final season has just been released) portrays this New York world in the postwar period and again the parents of the protagonist and her husband are very juicy characters, played by veterans Tony Shalhoub, Marin Hinkle, Caroline Aaron, Kevin Pollak. The crossing of both couples allows to show two very different layers of the New York Jewish community. For its part, the recently released tragicomedy Fleishman Is in Trouble (Disney), starring Jesse Eisenberg, shows that the humor we’ve talked about here is still in full force. Finally. It is worth mentioning that the current king of comedy, Judd Apatow, also comes from these origins, although he moved to Los Angeles as a young man, where he succeeded first as a stand-up comedian and later as a television and film director and producer. We’ll end with a quote from Mel Brooks’ memoir: “As absurd, idiotic, and crazy as it may seem, comedy says a lot about the human condition. Because if you can laugh, you can survive.”
