Jewish comedy, p.19
Jewish Comedy, page 19
It would be far easier to list the people who didn’t play the mountains in those war and postwar years than those who did: Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, Joey Adams, Danny Kaye, Jackie Mason, and Jerry Lewis appeared there among many, many others. (My favorite unexpected cameo in Borscht Belt history: Wilt Chamberlain, who worked as a bellhop at Kutsher’s in the early 1950s while in high school.) So many entertainers worked the mountains then that a kind of natural comedic myopia resulted, a sense that the Catskills were the world. As dialect comedian Sam Levenson put it in a joke:
RENTER: Is there a pleasant view from the bungalow?
ANGENT: Well. . . . from the front porch there is an exquisite view of Grossinger’s. . . . Otherwise there is nothing but blue lakes and snow-capped mountain peaks.
Those entertainers didn’t have it easy, though. The constant necessity for new material—which required endless ferment of creativity, putting on a new near Broadway-caliber show every Saturday night, a schedule that would prove so similar to that of the early days of television—demanded instant rapport with the paying audiences, who were brutal: experienced, possessors of sky-high expectations, and willing to let their displeasure immediately be known. As the comedian Joey Adams, a veteran, bluntly put it: “The roughest thing in the whole world is to lay an egg at a show in the Catskills . . . when you bomb in the mountains, it’s like a concentration camp with sour cream.” One of the best ways to achieve that rapport was through parody, whether it be “bowdlerized versions of current Broadway shows” or Yiddished-up versions of current hits of the day. In that master-class training ground of the Borscht Belt (or, alternatively, the Sour Cream Sierras, or the Derma Road), at a time where Jewish experience in all its gustatory, sexual, and bodily versions came out, the comedy was—and I mean this in the best way—parodic.
To trace this path in its most profound incarnation, let’s narrow our focus to one undistinguished Borscht Belt saxophone player whose comedic shows at the Avon Lodge attracted so much demand that people would leave the other hotels to see him, standing on the outside porch and peering through the windows of the casino to try to get a glimpse of his act. Sid Caesar’s partnership with resort impresario Max Liebman—which had begun when the former’s comedy bits in a wartime revue attracted the notice of the latter, who was directing—continued back in the Catskills, then in nightclubs around the country, and then back in Manhattan at the Roxy and the Broadhurst, and, finally and most famously, on television. The Admiral Broadway Revue and Your Show of Shows were packed with resort alums, most notably Lucille Kallen and Mel Tolkin from the Tamiment. Liebman would brag to the New York World-Telegram: “Whereas it takes months and months to put on a two-hour revue on Broadway, we do an original one-hour show, with singing, dancing, and comedy—in one week. Theatre die-hards speak of the thrill of opening night. Hell, we have one every night.” This sounded a lot more like Borscht Belt than Broadway.
Befitting his Borscht Belt heritage, Caesar’s most prodigious gift—what, in many ways, he remains most famous for—was his spirit of parody, of mock imitation. Caesar’s comedy was like music—he’d picked up the sax when a tenant of some rooms his father rented out skipped out and left one behind—parodying language and speech; he caricatured action heroes and classical conductors. Caesar’s parodic language, his famed double-talk, born of the ethnic mishmash of his surroundings (before the Great Depression wiped them out, his parents owned luncheonettes and he was exposed to a wide variety of nationalities and languages among the clientele), probably first flowered in a routine he did during the war depicting a conversation between Adolf Hitler and Donald Duck where he played both sides. The actual words were meaningless; the intonations and rhythms hilarious and uncanny.
Caesar’s later parodies on Your Show of Shows, fraught with the decorum of tiptoeing into the new medium of television and the respect of a group of Jewish American writers concerned about mainstream cultural acceptance, are enormously entertaining but rather tame. Mixed with the fairly antiseptic surroundings, to say nothing of Caesar’s nonspecific good looks and (unchanged, beyond all reason) gentile name, it was hard to imagine this breakthrough sitcom as being deeply Jewish. Still, many of its parodies, befitting the show’s creators’ backgrounds, rely, in small or large part, on the intrusion of an ethnic dimension into avowedly nonethnic material. (Said Larry Gelbart, one of Caesar’s writers who would go on to craft M*A*S*H: “We were a bunch of very gifted neurotic young Jews punching our brains out.”)
Caesar’s double-talk featured a good deal of the Yiddish about it, like in the famous sketch “The German General”—and Yiddish snuck its way into some other linguistic parodies. A Japanese film parody, for example, rendered by the cast entirely in mock-Japanese, featured characters with names like shmate, gantze mishpokhe, and gehakte leber. When, in a parody of the Western Shane (“Strange”), Caesar plays on the typical cowboy’s stereotypical thirst by explaining that he’d had herring for breakfast, audiences—and the early days of television, for reasons related to the demographic disposition and location of television set owners, yielded a more cosmopolitan and sophisticated audience than any audience until arguably the days of pay cable and “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO”—roared at the in-joke of a cowboy eating this most typically Jewish of food.
Caesar’s parodic approach was enormously influential on the history of American comedy. His own writers’ rooms boasted, among many other luminaries, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, and (later) Woody Allen. It’s worth remembering that Reiner and Brooks’s iconic “2000 Year Old Man” series of routines begins, explicitly, as a parody—a parody, according to Reiner, of a “news” show he saw that attempted to present a “you were there” approach to historical events. News parodies weren’t, well, news. One of Brooks’s earliest regular contributions to Caesar’s show, “Nonentities in the News,” featured a reporter intervewing strange characters played by Caesar and others. And Lenny Bruce, who was arguably as influential a parodist as he was a satirist, was doing show business interview parodies, too, including one in which the variety show host and bandleader Lawrence Welk attempts vainly to interview a fifties hipster. It was the Judaizing element—the presentation of Brooks, ad-libbing wildly and so brilliantly he was putting off sparks—that made Brooks and Reiner famously unwilling to present the 2000 Year Old Man to the world, simply preferring to play the bit at parties, until (in various iterations of the story) George Burns threatened to steal the material if they didn’t put it to record. What’s more, upon producing a limited, private set of records, thanks in part to the efforts and encouragement of Steve Allen, Cary Grant borrowed one to play for no less a gentile than the Queen Mother of England. If Archibald Leach and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother could enjoy it, Reiner and Brooks figured, who were they to stand in its way.
Brooks and Reiner’s “2000 Year Old Man” skits are possibly the fullest demonstration of the thesis posed by Mad, Katz, Sherman, and others that parodying something was presenting its Jewish version (although contemporary reports, it should be noted, have Brooks’s original 1960 recording not nearly as popular as Sherman’s, or perhaps even Katz’s), since they bend all of human time and space to their Jewish American middle-class tags and punch lines. The 2000 Year Old Man has 25,000 children . . . and not a single one of them writes; he mishears Paul Revere, the anti-Semite, insisting that the Yiddish are coming; he backed Shakespeare’s failed play “Queen Alexandra and Murray.” This approach would serve Brooks equally well in medieval times (his rabbi in Robin Hood: Men in Tights) and in outer space (too many characters in Spaceballs to count, and the Jews in space who are going to protect the Hebrew race in the trailer for History of the World Part II).
Considering Jews and space leads us back to Woody Allen, another Caesar alumnus, and his often-overlapping parodic sensibility. Allen’s early stand-up piece “A Science Fiction Film,” suggests, perhaps improbably, that the rampaging and hostile aliens bent on conquering the earth from the days of H. G. Wells are really interested in our skills as dry cleaners. The corollary—the triumph of the human race—comes in the punch line: “That they traveled twenty million light years to get here and they forgot their ticket.” The point here, beyond an absurdist parody of a standard of popular culture, is the intervention of the Jewish ethnic element into it; of course the same man who joked that his parents’ values were God and carpeting would turn the aliens into middle-class mid-twentieth-century Jews obsessed with getting the stains out. And there are plenty of other examples—the Jewish robot tailors in Sleeper, the Borscht Belt jester in the medieval scene in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Virgil Starkweather’s transformation into a rabbi in Take the Money and Run—that show how well Allen internalized that equation of Jewishness and parody.
But it was Brooks who truly wore the crown as Caesar’s parodic heir. He’d come by it honestly: his own Borscht Belt debut was as a pool tummler—in Brooks’s own definition, “resident offstage entertainers at Jewish mountain resorts, mostly after lunch”; Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis both got their start as tummlers—is famously a parody in itself. Brooks dressed up in a suit, carried a briefcase, walked up to the diving board, and said, in a precise reflection of the businessmen who came up on Fridays, “Business is terrible! I can’t go on!” and dropped off the diving board. The fact that he couldn’t swim, and had to be pulled out on regular occasion, showed he took his craft seriously indeed.
Brooks and Caesar would have a famously close relationship, Caesar being responsible for bringing Brooks into the television business. (Perhaps more accurately, Caesar enjoyed having Brooks around, and Brooks scrambled and, in Caesar’s words, “push[ed] his way into the writers’ room through a combination of raw talent, inertia, and sheer chutzpah,” despite Max Liebman’s dismissal of him as a “meshuggener.”) But it was more than just gratitude, or personal influence: Brooks understood the intimate connection between parody and live performance in a way that Allen, who wrote plays and playlets more frequently, never did, putting theater first and foremost, even in film. (“I never leave show business,” he once said. “It’s in everything I do.”)
It’s on display as early as the end of Blazing Saddles, which ends in a brawl that breaks through soundstages and onto other shows, but it hits its height, of course, in yet another parody (though it’s not often considered as such): a parody of the “let’s put on a show” movies that were such a staple of his childhood. Here, though, another conventional Judaizing shpritz occurs, by focusing less on the apple-eyed gentile ingénues at the front of house, but the nebbishy, schlocky backers behind. The Producers combines everything in this stream of Jewish humor: theater, parody, vulgarity, and “bad taste.” That last, of course, is a charge that hangs over Mel Brooks’s career; but of all the vulgarity and puerility that constitutes the charge—vulgarity and puerility that, as I think we’ve demonstrated, has a remarkably long history in Jewish comedy—the most powerful and profound version of it, the one that really hits a nerve, is the material that has to do with Jewish life, fate, and history. And of course by taking on the Holocaust, 1968’s The Producers does that in its darkest moments.
Two important facts to know about The Producers right up front. First, no matter how influential and popular it is now (and the success of its stage version, thirty-odd years after its film version saw theatrical release, is ample testament to that influence and popularity), it was a commercial failure at the time, nothing even close to what Brooks would accomplish just a few years later. But if it wasn’t a commercial success, at least, as Brooks might have put it, it was also a critical failure. Renata Adler in the New York Times called it “shoddy and gross and cruel” (although also “funny in an entirely unexpected way”) and opined that “I never thought black comedy of this dilute order could be made with the word or idea of Hitler in it anywhere. . . . I suppose we will have cancer, Hiroshima, and malformity musicals next.” Pauline Kael opined, for her part: “The Producers isn’t basically unconventional, it only seems so because it’s so amateurishly crude, and because it revels in the kind of show-business Jewish humor that used to be considered too specialized for movies.”
It wasn’t rejected in every way. In fact, it won Brooks his second Oscar, for best original screenplay, at a time when the Academy was probably even more conservative than it is now. (To be fair, the other nominees—2001, The Battle of Algiers, Faces, and Hot Millions—were, with the exception of the last, a pretty radical bunch of possibilities, too. It’s not impossible to suggest, given his history and industry connections, that Brooks was actually an insider candidate for this one.) But The Producers, as a film and a script, was always really about the question of how one might go about accepting The Producers, and the new, edgy comedy it represented.
Take, for example, the film’s culminating scene, where the curtain goes up on the opening number, “Springtime for Hitler.” Notably, this was Brooks’s original title, his first conception of the idea; theater-iness and silliness all baked into one. Which leads to my favorite anecdote about The Producers. When Brooks started pitching it, it was turned down all over town; but Universal’s uber-executive Lew Wasserman agreed to take it on—as long as Hitler was replaced by the less-controversial Mussolini. Brooks, wisely considering that “Springtime for Mussolini” wouldn’t pack the same comic punch, declined.
The performance is funny enough—dancing girls with stereotypical pretzels and steins of beer—and it’s certainly button-pushing (for me, the swastika kickline is probably the most suggestive). Brooks, wisely, trains the camera regularly on the very proper Broadway audience for the show—rich, white, middle-aged, elegantly dressed—who are, in a static shot, horrified into paralysis. One person stands up and applauds, and is roundly browbeaten—literally—by the other audience members. They begin to walk out in droves, one member saying, “Talk about bad taste!” And there it hangs, momentarily, and then the play’s action begins, and we hear Hitler’s ridiculous dialogue. “It’s funny!” someone in the audience says, and then, licensed to laugh and mock rather than treat the show as a sober object of contemplation, the audience loves it—with the concomitant tragic results for Messrs. Bialystock and Bloom.
In the many, many interviews he’s done, Brooks suggests fairly consistently that The Producers was part of a strong, aggressive strategy of getting revenge on Hitler and Nazism by reducing it to ridicule. And it’s true that Springtime’s playwright’s absurdist claims for Adolf Hitler’s own magnificence, his frustrated drives to reveal the real Hitler—“Not many people know it, but the Fuhrer was a terrific dancer”; “Hitler . . . there was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in an afternoon! Two coats!”—do their job at assaulting a little bit of the dictator’s presence. But a large part of the (comparative) comfort the movie offers comes from its comfortable, affectionate frame of parody: its attraction to the conventions of theater movies even as the content is disturbingly unconventional.
Another sign of this radical movie’s conservative comic frame—that push-pull between love and distance, incorporating majority attitudes while simultaneously kicking against them, is its attitude toward, well, the time’s cultural radicalism. The things that date most in The Producers are the jabs at the drug culture, like the casting of the flower child Lorenzo St. Dubois, or LSD—jabs that not coincidentally position Brooks, if sides must be taken, as a member of the Establishment. Brooks is rarely, if ever, included in the established canon of seventies countercultural film rebels; some of this may be critical bias against his form of comedy, but it’s probably in no small part born of the recognition that Brooks’s reliance and affection for old conventions, necessary for parody, put him on the Establishment’s side in certain fundamental respects.
IF A SWASTIKA kickline doesn’t raise hackles or activate a bad taste meter, consider this joke, from a few decades later: “Had there been black people in Germany, the Holocaust would have never happened—at least, not to Jews.”
That’s the stand-up comic and actress Sarah Silverman, one of Brooks’s most direct heirs: in her dedication to offend, in her wrapping that offensiveness in a kind of who-doesn’t-love-me stereotypical Jewish persona (in Silverman’s case, the sweet Jewish girl rather than the nice Jewish boy). Of course, that joke isn’t really about the Holocaust; it’s about the persistence of hatred, and the complex racial hierarchy of persecution, and about turning the phrasing of liberal pieties on its head—all specialties of Silverman, who spent most of one episode of her titular sitcom, a sitcom generally obsessed with bodily humor, going around in blackface. Similarly, Amy Schumer’s sketch on “The Museum of Boyfriend Wardrobe Atrocities,” on her show Inside Amy Schumer, is less about the Holocaust (though the set, dialogue and character reactions are brilliant caricatures of the current state of Holocaust memorialization, by institutions and their visitors alike), but about the state of American manhood (or lack of same), and the horror it invites in the women who observe it. Late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Holocaust, while by no means having lost its power to shock, has far less visceral effect on American viewers than comedy that puts Jews in an uncomfortable position vis a vis race, or gender. (Parodies like the 2003 Jewsploitation comedy The Hebrew Hammer, which recasts black power as black-hat ultra-orthodoxy, tread similar territory.)
Part of this is just a matter of the Holocaust receding into history: what was deeply controversial when Brooks released it in 1968 thrilled Broadway audiences in the twenty-first century. Holocaust humor is everywhere (along with Holocaust comparisons: see the 1990 invention of Godwin’s Law, which states that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one”), and, like anything that’s everywhere, is increasingly diluted in its effect. This comes at a time where Jewish claims and concerns of anti-Semitism in America are at previously unimaginably low rates (although recent trends, and political events, may give troubling reason to reconsider this assessment). But what was vibrantly discomfiting when The Producers premiered a half century ago and still has the capacity to shock, may have begun—and this is said without any denial of the enormity, terror, and importance of the lessons of the Holocaust—to lose some of its comedic edge.
