Imagine that, I have to point out to the self-promoted expert on all such things the history of comic Jewish stereotyping by American Jewish comedians that preceded the 1950s by quite a number of decades. I'm challenged by the guy who slanders me most days to prove that the kind of humor based in references to Yiddish and Hebrew words was on TV in the 1950s. But the ground needs to be laid before I get to that. Here, from an article excerpted at My Jewish Learning.
“With the collapse of vaudeville, new talent has no place to stink.” –George Burns
Which is such a great line they used to introduce the article I'm including it. When George Burns admits to the fact that much of alleged comedy and show biz acts stink, well, he saw it all.
Before World War II, the Jewish presence in the comedic entertainment world was marked by humiliating self-caricature. Jews such as Jack Pearl, who played radio’s Baron Munchausen, and Al Shean [an uncle of the Marx Brothers] of the comedy team “Gallagher and Shean” performed on the radio and in vaudeville, often wearing the accoutrements of the baggy-pants clown.
Which may have been how the habit of finding the mere reference to things Jewish as an instruction to laugh may have started. And that continued through and well past the 1950s. In the case of the famous Gallagher and Shean it was based in both Jewish and Irish stereotypes, though Gallagher was mostly the straight man in the act.
“There were comedians called ‘Jew Comics,'” explains legendary comedian and filmmaker Carl Reiner. “They wore derbies and talked with a thick accent.” Such self-caricature was acceptable “until Hitler came along,” Reiner explains, “and then all of the Jewish accents disappeared, because we realized we were giving fodder to the enemy.”
This fear of being laughable spread to the forefront of the Borscht Belt itself, explains writer and historian Moshe Waldoks, co-author with William Novak of The Big Book of Jewish Humor. “In 1947, there was a debate in The Contemporary Record [the magazine that preceded Commentary] between [comedians] Myron Cohen and Sam Levenson on the subject of dialects. Sam Levenson thought the Jewish dialect was demeaning, particularly after what had just happened in Europe. Myron Cohen’s retort was basically, ‘It’s only demeaning if you’re trying to demean,’ which he never did, with his use of accents.”
As apprehension over the use of accents persisted, dialect comedians such as Myron Cohen became an increasingly rare breed.
It was this fear that kept Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks from recording “The Two Thousand Year Old Man,” who had a strong Yiddish accent. For 10 years the two had been performing the act privately at friends’ houses.
Reiner and Brooks turned down numerous offers from fellow Jewish performers to make it a more permanent work. Finally, in 1960, Steve Allen, a non-Jew, convinced Reiner and Brooks to record the routine. “He offered to pay for the recording session,” Reiner remembers, “saying, ‘You guys listen to it; if you don’t like it, burn it or throw it away. But at least put it down.’ And the next thing you know, it’s up for a Grammy!”
Which I include because it's interesting to note that those two real comic geniuses understood that such stuff would have a different meaning outside of the group than in it. That it had the potential to be dangerous. And they are right. It was Steve Allen who was wrong about that, though not universally throughout the audience, with a dangerously large minority of it.
Since the challenge made to me was to name a TV show of the 1950s that made Yiddish references, I'll post this part of the very interesting article because it cites the very greatest of all the 1950s comedy shows as an example.
Bolstered by a powerhouse group of writers (including Mel Brooks and Neil Simon) who will go down in history as the Round Table to Caesar’s King Arthur, Your Show of Shows featured everything from sly social commentary to parodies of highbrow culture, such as opera and foreign art films. It remains the standard by which all other sketch comedy shows are measured.
While Your Show of Shows never directly addressed Jewish issues or topics (very few television shows did at the time), the sketches often contained Jewish references. “Caesar did a Japanese character named ‘Taka Meshuga,'” Waldoks says, “which in Yiddish means ‘Really Crazy.’ Of course people in Iowa had no idea what Taka Meshuga meant. It sounds Japanese. So it was a wink, a way of coming out every week and saying, ‘We know you’re out there. And we’re here.'”
Only Waldoks shouldn't be so confident that "people in Iowa" had no idea what Yiddish terms meant. To start with, I'm sure there must have been Yiddish speakers in Iowa. Looking up the oldest synagogue in Iowa, I find there is a congregation that dates to 1861. I don't know if he's as unaware of the role that Jews played in American history in every region of the country, especially in the industrial mid-west. Though I suspect he would know about that, as I mentioned last week. so many are totally ignorant of it.
But that's not important for my point that by the early 1960s a large number of people, including people who knew not a word of Yiddish or Hebrew, knew that a comedian using a Yiddish or Hebrew word in a comedy routine was a signal to laugh. And they were laughing AT Jewish identity, not with it. They didn't have to know what the term meant. I remember sitting in what was almost certainly a nearly totally gentile audience to see Annie Hall and when Alvy Singer's grade school school class mates stand up and say what they became later in life,
1ST BOY
I'm president of the Pinkus Plumbing Company.
2ND BOY
I sell tallises.
3RD BOY
I used to be a heroin addict. Now I'm a methadone addict.
2ND GIRL
I'm into leather.
though probably few to none of us in that audience knew what tallises (Jewish fringed prayer shawls) were, we knew we were supposed to find it funny. Maybe even as funny as "I'm into leather," sado-masochism or the seriously unfunny line, "Now I'm a methadone addict". I don't recall, specifically if we laughed at "the Pinkus Plumbing Company," though I imagine we suspected we were supposed to find the name funny. Why just the word or name should get a laugh is kind of interesting. Now that I have opioid addicts in my family, I don't find the line 3rd Boy said funny in the least. I'm ashamed I ever may have. And the rest of it. The scene with Marshall McLuhan was pretty funny as was much of the movie. I used to really look forward to Woody Allen's movies. Though it centered on the Jewish stereotype that Woody Allen so often played, and other stereotypes, including those of gentiles from the mid-west.
Any control that even a Woody Allen believed he had over the effect of stereotype humor on his audience was illusory, who knows what it really produced. That it developed into the shock jock humor that wafted like a stink of fascism in the Reagan era and into today with the revival of fascism and neo-Nazism proves it didn't damage what should have been the target. The role it played in making the expression of racism, sexism and, yes, antisemitism mainstream isn't nugatory. That happens when anything goes. Modernism's connections to fascism and Nazism and the red-fascism of Marxism couldn't be clearer in the writings and documented fascism, etc. of many of modernism's central figures. It is no accident that the foremost proponents of "freedom of speech" "freedom of expression" right now are fascists and neo-Nazis who are happy that pandora's box was opened.
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