Jewish comedy, p.12
Jewish Comedy, page 12
Several decades later, this autobiographical-anthropological approach shows up clearly in some of the most influential works of American Jewish satire in the twenty-first century. Perhaps most prominently in the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (2009), which—among the many other things it does—holds a certain kind of Conservative Judaism up to scrutiny in a way that takes on American Jewish consumerism, acculturation, ignorance, and questionable quest for spirituality. David Wain and Michael Showalter’s Wet Hot American Summer (2001), and subsequently its Netflix 2015 miniseries sequel, has become a touchstone of contemporary American Jewish comic nostalgia. It takes an American Jewish adolescent rite of passage that in itself contains more Jewish identity and sensibility than content and invests it with meaning by calling attention to its pervasive, if superficial, Jewishness. There’s an extended riff on the Jewish last names of campers; Wain’s portrayal of an Israeli counselor, Yaron; and a “shofar dick sword fight” that chains adolescent male behavior with Jewish ritual in a manner that would have made Lenny Bruce proud.
But before we leave the 1970s behind entirely, we might revisit the blurring that lies at the heart of the personal-as-political approach through the work of one of the great American satirists, who created a set of indelible characters who demonstrated an American society in social upheaval by Americanizing the Jewish milieu of his upbringing. Norman Lear—arguably the most important figure in the history of the sitcom—would, in shows like All in the Family and Maude, take on the issues of the day and place them in the mouths of extraordinary ordinary Americans. Though Lear’s characters weren’t explicitly Jewish (and All in the Family and Sanford and Son were based on British shows), Lear insisted that many of the interactions and situations in his sitcoms were influenced by ones he had heard and experienced in his own home. If Jews were becoming American, then Americans—and for some, there were no more archetypal Americans than Archie and Edith Bunker, love them or hate them—were also, in their own disguised way, Jewish.
Lear wasn’t the only one working in satiric masquerade. As the seventies gave way to the eighties and nineties, director Paul Mazursky would do the same thing in a smaller vein on a bigger screen, with his 1986 film Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler, playing characters named the Whitemans, is as close to explicitly putting a gentile mask on Jewish social satire as you can get) and the more explicitly Jewish 1991 film Scenes From a Mall (Woody Allen and Bette Midler taking the leads, and the mall taking the role of Nick Nolte).
But, overall, the American Jewish satirist was, largely speaking, an American satirist who happened to be Jewish. There were Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner on the radical left; and Art Buchwald, the noted columnist, in the center; but Hoffman was more of a performance artist, Krassner would deny his Jewishness, and Buchwald was interested in reaching a mainstream audience with a mainstream approach. And America’s most unquestionably influential venue for political satire of the last four decades—Saturday Night Live, the show originally described by its Canadian-Jewish founder as “Monty Python Meets Sixty Minutes”—isn’t particularly Jewish, as that one-line statement of its influences showed. (Most of SNL’s political sketches were overseen, and often written, by the non-Jewish Jim Downey; perhaps the most direct influence Michaels ever had on Jewish satire—and almost certainly on US elected politics—was hiring future Jewish senator Al Franken to his writing staff.) And in America, at least, the role of political satire has become less and less intertwined with Jewish life and fate, as that life and fate becomes more and more American.
This had consequences for the personal-as-autobiographical satire, too, of course: as the American Jewish experience became more acculturated, less pronounced, the Jewish part of the comedian’s biography frequently became less resonant, offered less grist for the comedic mill. There were significant exceptions, of course: but they tended, more and more, to cluster in the area known as “American Jewish literature,” which, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, flourished primarily as a kind of niche, narrowcast literature, which, though in English, was written largely by and for members of the American Jewish community with high levels of affiliation. The satire, then, subjects that community to withering scrutiny by writers who, almost by definition, are intimately involved with its doings and whose satires are well-known within the Jewish community and little-known out of it.
There’s Tova Reich’s take on the American obsession with Holocaust remembrance (2007’s My Holocaust); Tova Mirvis’s gimlet skewering of the close and occasionally suffocating circles of American Jewish sisterhood, in all senses of that word (2000’s The Ladies’ Auxiliary); and Shalom Auslander’s arguments with the religious world he left behind (2005’s Beware of God), among many others. These satires are steeped in a level of literary sophistication, textual familiarity, and anthropological intimacy that would have shocked a previous generation, which would have assumed American acculturation would have rendered the next generation incapable of the privileged position of the satirist’s knowledge. But they attract a limited audience: whether they’re preaching to, or castigating, the choir, the pews are increasingly empty. One exception that may prove the rule: Gary Shteyngart, whose rollicking satiric novels—particularly for our purposes his 2002 debut, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook—have achieved wider crossover success, but lack most of the identifying features above; focusing, as it does, on a post-Soviet Russian-Jewish immigrant milieu in which the constitutive features of Jewish identity are somewhat different.
THE SITUATION is very different in Israel, where by definition the satire of the politics and culture of the world’s only Jewish state is significantly more suffused with Jewish identity and determination. To speak broadly, one major approach within Israeli satire is to focus on continuities with a previous Jewish politics. Take, for example, the famous joke about when President Eisenhower met with the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Eisenhower confessed it was extremely difficult to be the president of 170 million people, to which Ben-Gurion responded, “It’s harder to be the prime minster of two million prime ministers.” Jews, the joke suggests, all talk and kibitz in the same way they did in Mendele’s bathhouse or in Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke; even in the Jewish state, Jewish politics is largely shtetl politics. This perhaps helped explain the focus on the comic sensibilities of Israel’s third prime minister, Levi Eshkol, who was famous for his sense of humor, and particularly his Yiddish-inflected speech and sensibility. (American Jewish humor about Israel strikes an analogous tack, reframing Israel as an outpost of American Jewish sensibility. Two illustrative jokes: one where, during the Six-Day War, Syrians broke into the Bank of Tel Aviv, escaping with over a million dollars in pledges. And then there was the one Milton Berle told about Israel’s unknown soldier, whose tomb reads HYMAN GOLDFARB, FURRIER: “As a soldier, he was unknown; but as a furrier he was famous!”)
But there are two counterpoints to this approach. The first is that that wasn’t—according to Zionist thinking—the way that it was supposed to be. The new Jewish state, in the transformative dreams of its founders, was supposed to lead to a new Jewish culture, associated, logically, with a new Jewish humor (as a certain conception of “Jewish humor” itself was seen as an example of problematic, accommodationist or quietist, diaspora culture); and the attempts to fulfill those revolutionary dreams were themselves viewed satirically. Take, for example, the chizbat jokes of the Palmach, the predecessor of the IDF. The jokes themselves—essentially, tall tales, shaggy dog stories, or joke riffs concerning things Palmach members did—were often adaptations of general joke forms to the new landscape; but occasionally they were about the “humorlessness” of the soldiers, the constant attentiveness to the serious matters at hand that was the hallmark of the new, empowered Jew. In the Palmach’s case, of course, these were military matters, and so there was often a focus on the rifle. Here’s one famous example:
They came to one of the instructors, I don’t remember the name, and said, “Listen. It’s not possible that you teach only rifle, rifle, rifle. You need a little history, a little culture, a little sociology. You can’t do only rifle. Greenhorns come to you and you start with the rifle. Start with something from the Bible. Get to the rifle afterwards.” He said “O.K.” When the greenhorns came he said, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. After that he created the rifle. Now this is the rifle.”
Talk about a rupture from the past.
Except, of course, that Israeli history wasn’t discontinuous from the past—and they knew that. Some of the most biting satirical moments of Israeli comedy focus on a propensity to over-remember, to see Jewish history as overlaying too much on contemporary Israeli life. A skit from the 1990s Israeli satirical troupe Hahamishia Hakamerit (“The Chamber Quintet”) called “Ghetto,” for example, depicts a young man getting directions to a Tel Aviv party: “Take Warsaw Ghetto Street, then a U-turn onto Concentration Camp Avenue, then park in Dachau Square.” “Is it nearby?” “Dachau? Dachau is right here, just around the corner.”
And what’s more, this sort of talk of continuity obscured a second counterpoint: the fact that Israel’s Jewish population (to say nothing of its non-Jewish population) is increasingly diverse, its culture more multivariegated, and is increasingly dissociated in one way or other from the history of Israel’s founding Ashkenazic elite. Some of the most important Israeli humor comes precisely from those marginalized communities, starting with the “bourekas films” of the sixties and seventies which, though generally directed by Askhenazim, trafficked, with popular comic success, in stereotypes of Yemenite, Moroccan, and other Sefardi and Mizrahi Jews.
Although the portraits were stereotypical, they at least rendered these minorities visible, taking on questions of their place within Israeli culture. Those movies often featured Romeo-and-Juliet romance plots, but with a happy marriage at the end often accompanied by the repeated slogan “we’re all Jews.” They accentuated a wish for unity, a sentiment shared by the trio known as Hagashash Hahiver (“The Pale Trackers”), Sephardic Israelis whose speeches of truth to Ashkenazic power were less about class conflict than a hoped-for integration. Even the popular series of jokes in the late 1990s about Israeli foreign minister and deputy prime minister David Levi, an immigrant from Morocco, show off his Mizrahi identity as evidence of sameness to, not difference from, his fellow Israelis.
More recent iterations of the bourekas movies, though, have focused more on fissures rather than joins, satirizing the dream of unity rather than the specter of difference. And a newer immigrant community, the emigrants from the former Soviet Union (who’ve created their own brand of “pierogi films”), also tend to cast a more skeptical eye at Israeli society and its promise, not always achieved, of integration. Authors like Igor Guberman and Dina Rubina satirize their community, Israeli practice, and their position in it by juggling multiple languages and often using the humor honed by their community under Soviet oppression to frame the challenges of their new society. (“Soviet Jews!” went one joke in Beseder [All Right], a humor supplement aimed at Russian emigrants from the early 1990s. “Immigrate to Israel! Only here your long-cherished dream of becoming Russians can come true!”)
What does it say, in the end, if you can make the same jokes about the Israelis as the Soviets, that the names change, but not the jokes? Maybe something about the continuity of satiric consciousness; maybe something about the continuity of Jewish experience. And maybe, just maybe, something about the incompleteness of the satiric effect: that not only is the satirist generally never satisfied, but that such a goal is as impossible as is the ultimate correction of human nature.
ONE FINAL EXAMPLE, returning to the American context, to speak for all of them.
From 1999 to 2015, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show was one of the most lauded, most noticed, most respected shows on television. As Stewart would yell “Welcome to the Daily Show!” over the roaring cheers of the studio audience, as the camera dollied in on him, leaning forward, messing with those iconic blue sheets of paper, his voice almost seemed to carry the strain of bearing the outrage of his constituency, over and over again: a bemused, weary, outrage, seasoned with just enough resignation and irony to remind you that he did the best fake news on television, just enough fire to let you know that he honestly cared—deeply—that what he had to report actually matters, and that he hoped to change some minds along the way.
On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart frequently injected a Yiddish word, or acquired a Jewish vocal inflection or inserted a reference to his Jewishness. Probably the defining moment of Jewishness on The Daily Show, though, took place, as it were, off the show’s set—at the Emmy Awards, in 2003, where Stewart brought his writers onstage to accept the second of their nine Emmys in the category for best writing for a comedy or variety show. As the line of white men stretched out behind him, Stewart made fun of their demographic unanimity. “I’ve always felt that diversity is the most important part of a writing staff,” he said, to the broad laughter of the audience. “I don’t know if you can tell, but Steve has a beard, and J. R. isn’t Jewish.”
A great line; and its implications matter. Was there something Jewish about The Daily Show’s satire during Stewart’s run? And if so, precisely what might it have been? Certainly the vast majority of Stewart’s viewers didn’t focus on his evident and unselfconscious Jewish identity; at most, it was a shtick, it helped to sell the general-interest material. But the long tradition of Jewish—and American Jewish—satire leaves open the question of precisely what kind of Jewishness Jon Stewart’s Jewish satire demonstrated.
One that it certainly seemed to, alas, was its questionable success. As comedy, absolutely; as insightful and clarifying comedy, of course. But was he able to, in the partial title of his popular one-time rally on the Washington Mall, restore sanity? Or even (though you got the sense that he clearly felt it was a symptom rather than the disease) muzzle the outrages and idiocies of cable news?
Jeremiah couldn’t do it; so the best we can do, probably, is thank Stewart for trying.
3
The Wit of the Jews
FOR ALL THE TALK OF THE JEWS AS INTELLECTUAL, BOOKISH, clever, or people of the book, there’s little talk of this in the Book of Books itself. For most of biblical literature, books come in for fairly little respect. Moses breaks the tablets. A king, notably, throws a scroll of prophecy into the fire. Moses’ law is lost for a while, and has to be discovered in the course of some temple renovations. (And you get the sense that no one’s missed it very much; plus, the discovery was probably a “discovery”—the latest monarchists finding something to legitimate the current rulers.) Before the destruction of the Temple, the kind of intellectualism that comes from mastery of reading (and writing) texts mattered a lot less than war-leadership or direct access to the Lord.
Maybe this isn’t surprising, given the largely oral nature of biblical society; especially when we consider that some analogous skills—like the verbal sophistication and manipulation of knowledge and reference known as wit—find champions likely and unlikely throughout the Bible. Take, for example, one of the first extended displays of biblical wit: the riddle game in Judges 14. Riddle games are perfect mechanisms to show off the clever display of creative intelligence and the facile and flexible use of language. But the riddler here is hardly known for his wit—it’s Samson, the strongman par excellence—and he tells his riddle not to participate in the gracious and harmonious sense of a shared community of text and language, but to express his annoyance with his wife’s family (non-Jewish, though of course that has a different valence in the biblical period).
We know that because Samson’s riddle, “Out of the strong came forth sweet,” is unsolvable unless you happened to be present when Samson, as the Bible has earlier related, accomplished his remarkable feat of slaying a lion with the jawbone of an ass. The lion in question then became a hive for bees that produced honey. You can say that this riddle’s failure to obey the conventions of its genre serves as a nice metaphor for the lack of effective communication between Jews and other peoples, or between Samson and his wives. But it’s certainly not wit, perhaps even anti-wit: it may not even, strictly speaking, be a riddle, as biblical commentators intent on justifying Samson’s behavior nervously noted. And the story’s outcome, in which Samson’s wife provides her family the answer, and his response is to kill them all, is hardly a shining example of wit itself.
Even the paradigmatic example of intelligence and wit in the Bible—King Solomon—is more complicated than it first appears. In the most famous biblical story of Solomon’s wit, two mothers, each with newborn sons, one living, one dead, come to the king for justice. Each claims the surviving child to be their own. Solomon’s ruling: cut the living baby in half, and present half to each mother. Equity is served. At which point one mother acquiesces to the idea—fair is fair, after all—and the second protests, offering the child to the first rather than seeing it harmed. Solomon, in what seems presented as a show of intelligence, then presents the child to the mother willing to give it up rather than see it harmed, as she has been proven to display the requisite qualities of maternity.
