Jewish comedy, p.29
Jewish Comedy, page 29
This nods back to Freud, obviously, whose idea that we’re mostly the sum and substance of irrational drives that we paper over with talk about reason (I’m simplifying outrageously, of course) and that humor comes in no small part of our dawning, if partial, awareness that the knowledge and certainty we have about our lives is highly illusory. All of these mirror situations—which reveal the monstrously misunderstood distortions peeking out, in a way so horrible that you just have to laugh—undergird so much of the argument that has been made for the Jewishness hidden in Kafka’s work. (Hidden in his fiction, that is; it’s there, manifest, in the letters and diaries.)
That is, these stories seem so clearly to be allegories that it’s easy to spot questions of Jewishness in them. “A Report to an Academy” (1917), which appeared in the Max Brod–edited Zionist journal Der Jude, is about the dubious welcome of the Jew to the European family; The Metamorphosis is the same, but in reverse; and so on. If we’re suggesting that disguise, and the question of whether change is really just a disguise, is a central theme of the non-Jewish Jewish comedy, who better to explore that than the author of The Metamorphosis?
Not Proust, I think, Kafka’s almost precise contemporary; despite the brilliant sense of the comédie humaine and the nervous comic energy that bristles around disguised Jewishness, and gayness, in Proust’s work—especially the joke, one, as we’ve seen, of long standing, that the disguise isn’t particularly good. On one occasion, for example, Albert Bloch, a Jewish friend of the narrator’s, is embroiled in a socially charged conversation concerning the Dreyfus Affair. When his Jewishness is snidely alluded to, Bloch’s reaction—how could they have known?—is presented as not-so-simple self-deception: “given his name, which had not exactly a Christian sound, and his face, his surprise argued a certain naivete,” the narrator notes.
But to simply cast Kafka in Proust’s model of acculturative anxiety is, I think, selling him short. The weirdness in his fiction suggests, in its blunt thereness, that life isn’t just stranger than we can imagine but that, pace Freud, we are stranger than we do imagine. A lot of it is sexual, of course—those two balls haunting an elderly bachelor aren’t really Einsteinian (or Rutherfordian) particles, are they? They’re really balls, genitalia, taunting him with his own impotence. And, given the connection between anxiety over Jewish disguise and Jewish masculinity in this strand, it’s hardly insignificant that many of the protagonists are, in their varying ways, unmanned (as ape and as vermin, to name just two).
But it’s not so much the fact of the uncanny itself that places Kafka in the ranks of the comic; it’s the way that his protagonists react to that uncanniness. The natural first response of readers of The Metamorphosis is to focus on the horror of Gregor Samsa’s situation: How did he get that way? What’s going to happen to him? Can he change back? What’s the explanation? The fact that there is no explanation, and no hope of escape or transformation, naturally tends to lead to a focus on the horror of the story. This has led to a portrait of Gregor Samsa (or Blumfeld, or Joseph K.) as the victim of a terrifying and terrible world, a world that’s either metaphysically unfair or politically totalitarian. It’s not coincidental that Kafka’s reputation really gains traction in the West during the Cold War: the fact that he was writing under a monarchy notwithstanding, it’s pretty easy to see how anti-Communists saw Kafka as expressing their precise concerns with the terrors of their hated regimes.
What all that overlooks is that mostly Kafka focuses on the protagonists’ reactions to the uncanny event. He doesn’t seem to care very much about the whys and wherefores. He cares about reactions and situations. In effect, what Kafka has created is a pool of stone-faced straight men negotiating the absurd world they suddenly find themselves in. Gregor Samsa is the classic example: When he discovers that he has been turned into a monstrous vermin, his reaction is not, as I suspect many of ours would be, “Oh my god oh my god oh my god what is happening to me?” Rather, it is simply a long aria about being late for work. And then, as time goes on, and everyone who he knows, including someone from his office, shows up outside his door, we realize we’re in the province of something resembling an anxiety dream, but one which is actually happening (the truth status, so to speak, of Samsa’s experiences are never in doubt). The elderly bachelor Blumfeld acts similarly; his response to the floating balls is not to question the overturning of everything science and society knows about gravity, but simply to display asperity and annoyance.
If Kafka’s jokes are Jewish, which I think in many ways that they are, then their Jewishness had to be quite strictly and scrupulously stripped from the work in order for it to achieve the aesthetic effects that it did. Because those aesthetic effects—those comic effects—are about studied attempts at normality in the face of weirdness: the precise situation, I think Kafka felt, that Jews have in acculturated modernity, where they don’t have the luxury of acting weird or acting out or acting big, whatever the provocation. Even if it’s floating balls.
It may be that the closest moments in literature to Gregor Samsa’s excruciating, emasculating embarrassment and discomfort are (and you’ll forgive the blasphemy, but I think it fits) the opening moments of the 1998 movie There’s Something About Mary, where a young Ben Stiller has accidentally had a horrible accident involving his genitalia and everyone in the world is parked outside the bathroom door. Samsa—and “Stiller”—are fairly normal (if neurotic) individuals caught in extraordinary circumstances. Which is another way of saying that Kafka’s comedy has strong resemblances to film comedy, especially slapstick.
The great theorist of comedy in Kafka’s day, the French Jew Henri Bergson, suggested, in the shadow of industrialization, that the essence of comedy was the reduction of the human being to a machine. The iconic image is Chaplin caught inside the gears of the machine in Modern Times. But the robotic reactions of Buster Keaton and the frantic smile of Harold Lloyd were all part of the same piece. None of these three masters of American physical comedy were Jews. The gold medal for “most influential Jewish slapstick comedian or comedians” probably belongs to the Three Stooges, with the silver to Jerry Lewis and the bronze to Soupy Sales. But the Stooges—despite titling a powder puff Schlemiel No. 8 in their 1949 movie Hokus Pokus, an occasional foray into Yiddish in their shorts, and even producing an anti-Nazi film—had little interest or evocation of the themes related to identity in the world around them, and Sales even less.
Compare this to the Marx Brothers, two of whom find each other, in 1933’s Duck Soup, in the third of our triptych of mirror scenes. Moving in unison, siblings in sensibility as well as of course in real life, the brothers would, as Philip Roth suggested, work wondrously in a film version of Kafka’s The Castle (Groucho as K., and Harpo and Chico as his two assistants). But their comedy—which, in a manner not dissimilar to Kafka’s, at times traded on how to portray ethnic difference, and Jewishness in particular, in a medium studiously opposed to that presentation—set the course for a century of a kind of Jewish mass entertainment.
Sons of Jewish immigrants to America, the Marx Brothers made their bones in vaudeville; in part on the success of their lightning-quick wits, in part on the power of their knockabout physical comedy, and in part on their ability and willingness to trade on the then-pervasive humor of ethnic stereotypes. Chico was the comic Italian, Harpo the comic Irishman, and Groucho the comic “German,” which, as we’ve seen, was often vaudeville for “Jew”: in an early notice, he was described as “Master Marx, a juvenile soprano singer and impersonator of the Yiddischer.”
What made the Marx Brothers so successful was their ability to serve as the blast of anarchy into the stuffed-shirt world that, after the First World War and during the Depression, needed shaking up. (“Whatever it is,” Groucho sings in 1932’s Horse Feathers, long before Brando and James Dean, “I’m against it.”) Whether it was the university, the mansions of the rich, the opera, or even the halls of government, the Marx Brothers came in and upended everything. But they did so as the mustachioed, hatted, bewigged and trench-coated assistants of classical comedy. Understanding a Marx Brothers movie is really in part about understanding how the traditional conventions are maintained: the young lovers still end up together; the hypocrites are unmasked and banished; and the spectators (in the movie, not just watching it) get a good show into the bargain. Groucho, when asked to replace his greasepaint mustache for a more realistic one so that the audience would believe in it more, replied, “The audience doesn’t believe in us anyhow.” But this isn’t quite true: they believe implicitly in the Brothers’ good hearts and good graces and good aims. Groucho may have advocated anarchy and disbelief, but in the service of higher causes.
This is ultimately why Philip Roth was wrong: none of the Marx Brothers would really have been right to play K. (though admittedly Groucho would have been closest). Kafka’s characters are the straight men to the world that the Marx Brothers seem to create, and then uncreate by the movie’s end. Kafka’s characters or worlds are, largely speaking, changed forever or destroyed by the events which take place around them; the Marx Brothers simply move on to the next movie. Looked at this way, Kafka’s the one that champions a comedy unmoored from all verities, that strives for the universal; whereas the Marx Brothers—as we’ll see—are, in their particular anxieties, willing to embrace ethnic details, including the circumstances of their Jewishness.
Take one scene from 1930’s Animal Crackers, a classic set piece of comedy: the unmasking of the hypocrite. In this scene, Roscoe W. Chandler, a villain of the film, is recognized by Chico, who tries to place him, though Chandler huffily claims never to have seen him before. Chico and Harpo finally hit on it: he’s Abie the fish peddler from the old country: that is, a Jew. (The name Abie, for Abraham, and the peddler job are dead giveaways; more subtly, they discover a birthmark that identifies him as “Abie”—shades of circumcision, another bodily change that marks off Jews.) Abie confesses, using a turn of Jewish voice: “I vas! I vas Abie the Fish Peddler!” he says, using that v instead of a w, the bête noire of all Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Chico then asks him how he got to be Roscoe W. Chandler: to which Chandler, without missing a beat, asks him how he got to be Italian.
Chico replies that it’s none of his business, but it’s our business very much indeed. There’s a lot of ethnic masking and changing and unmasking going on here; in the same way that in the same movie, during the song “Hurray for Captain Spaulding,” Groucho nervously asks: “Did someone call me schnorrer”? Of course, Spaulding is a schnorrer, as are Otis Driftwood, Rufus Firefly, Hugo Hackenbush, and so many other characters in Groucho’s oeuvre. What are those names if not the efforts of someone trying to pass, fearful he won’t, and knowing he doesn’t? But if he’s pretending not to be a Jew, the movie is making it clear that they’re also interested in us finding them out. (Although maybe not all that interested. When one critic “anointed him the ‘symbolic embodiment of all persecuted Jews for 2000 years,’ Groucho carped, ‘What sort of goddamned review is that?’ ”) That anxiety—about being in and out—is at the root of this kind of Jewish comedy.
Actors were hardly the only ones anxious about their Jewish identity in the film industry, and committed to disguise as a result. The studio executives were, famously, a lot less playful about it. Though they probably weren’t regular readers of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, they certainly heard its 1921 shot across the bow: “As soon as the Jews gained control of the ‘movies’ . . . we had a movie problem, the consequences of which are not yet visible. It is the genius of that race to create problems of a moral character in whatever business they achieve a majority.” And those problems were expressed precisely phrased in terms of the possibility, or rather impossibility, of Jews being like other Americans: “It is not that producers of Semitic origin have deliberately set out to be bad according to their own standards, but they know that their whole taste and temper are different from the prevailing standards of the American people. . . . Many of these producers don’t know how filthy their stuff is—it is so natural to them.” And they were aware of the flourishing of certain negative Jewish stereotypes in vaudeville-to-film comedies like the Cohen shorts, such as the Edison Company’s Cohen’s Fire Sale (1907), which trades on the popular impression, often disseminated in joke form, of Jews burning down stores to recoup insurance money. My favorite of these jokes:
A man approaches Cohen. “I’m so sorry, Cohen, I heard about your store burning down yesterday.”
“Sh! Tomorrow!”
Or take the earlier Edison 1904 film Cohen’s Advertising Scheme, where the enterprising, not to say unscrupulous, Cohen turns a client’s coat into a billboard advertising his wares.
The results were a doubling down on disguise: not everyone had the autonomy, or anarchic take-it-or-leave-it sense, of the Marx Brothers. Take the case of the well-known actor Max Davidson, a “maestro of reaction shots,” who played an “unmistakably Jewish” character in a number of two-reel shorts he did for the Hal Roach Studios in the 1920s (including Jewish Prudence, Should Second Husbands Come First, and Why Girls Say No). His contract ended in 1928; the reason might have been that Nicholas Schenck and Louis B. Mayer, who ran MGM (which distributed Hal Roach), were embarrassed by the ethnic stereotyping. George Jessel, known on the vaudeville stage for his telephone comedy (telephoning his Jewish mother on stage, he learns she’s cooked a bird he bought her that spoke five languages), had the title of a projected 1927 movie Schlemiel changed to Mamma’s Boy. After his first screen test for MGM, Danny Kaye was pressured by Sam Goldwyn to get his nose fixed (they settled on bleaching his hair); Carl Reiner’s show about his experiences writing television comedy was “de-Judaized” with his replacement by Dick Van Dyke (who, to be fair, added his own inestimable comic gifts to the mix—they were just different comic gifts); among many other examples.
But the Marx Brothers’ exploration of the cracks and fissures in the American Jewish disguise—and playing that exploration for nervous laughs—was picked up over the next decades nonetheless. There’s Jerry Lewis and his 1963 movie The Nutty Professor: in the transformation of Julius Kelp (and is it a coincidence, that we hear the word “Jew” in that not atypically for the time Jewish first name?) to Buddy Love, the crooner and sex object of everyone’s desire, we see Lewis’s suggestion that giving up one’s identity for conventional success isn’t what it’s cracked up to be—and the resulting dissonance when most of the audience didn’t feel they necessarily agreed with the movie’s moral. Or Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), in which Allen invites no less eminent a personage than Irving Howe to pontificate on the case study of the eponymous human chameleon, with the explanation that Zelig was a living metaphor for the American Jewish experience—“he just wanted to assimilate like crazy.” Zelig, who is all disguise, all protective coloration, in the movie’s climax finds questionable solace in the arms of a group where everyone is exactly like everyone else—the Nazi party. The Jew so turned around by his unmooring from firm identity that he becomes its diametrical opposite: now that’s dark comedy, and sound allegory. But all too often the disguise was of the Jessel type, from Schlemiel to Mamma’s Boy; that is to say, not a very good one. The explicit representation was gone, but it was simply replaced by a slightly more complex stereotyping.
Alternatively, Jews donned other disguises to play similar games of peekaboo Judaism, dressing up as other ethnicities, other genders, other others. Jews were performing in blackface on the vaudeville stages from its inception, for example. And Eddie Cantor, in his 1930 movie Whoopee, pretends to be a Native American. When a Native American insists to Cantor he’s white—“I’ve gone to your schools,” he says, Cantor replies: “An Indian in a Hebrew school?” This particular disguise had a long tradition even before Cantor. There was Fanny Brice’s “Yiddishe Squaw” Rosie Rosenstein; or, more esoterically, the 1908 song “I’m a Yiddish Cowboy (Tough Guy Levi),” along with 1909 and 1911 silent movies of similar title; and Milt Gross had turned his dialectal attentions to the situation by producing a Longfellow parody, 1926’s Hiawatta witt no odder poems. And of course Cantor would have his successors, most famously Mel Brooks’s casting Native Americans as Yiddish speakers; and several years later, on the other side, 1981’s The Frisco Kid would present Brooks’s favorite actor, Gene Wilder, as the unlikeliest cowboy in the world. After all, as Leslie Fiedler once wrote about the Bernard Malamud novel, A New Life, which he called the author’s “travesty Western”: “The very notion of the Western Jew is, like that of the Irish Jew, a joke in itself.” Replace “Western” or “Cowboy” with “knight” and we have the Bovo-bukh all over again.
Notions of sexual orientation and manhood, Jewish and otherwise, have had a long history in comedy, and it’s not surprising that an aspect of identity long revolving around disguise and revelation, closeting and coming out, had a role in American Jewish comedy as well. Milton Berle’s drag peformances as Carmen Miranda were a central part of the early history of television; and, on one 1949 show, when his wig slipped, he said, “my sheytl is falling,” connecting the traditional Jewish married woman’s wig to his own gender-bending theatrics. In the late eighties and early nineties, Paul Rudnick took up the masquerade via his occasional female Jewish alter ego, assistant buyer of juniors activewear and film columnist Libby Gelman-Waxner; and a more sustained effort, one that focused on comic character rather than comic caricature, came in 1992 from William Finn. Falsettos was one of the few Broadway shows to include a treatment of a bar mitzvah—and one of the fewer to include the bar mitvah boy’s gay father and his lesbian kosher caterer. The musical, which encompasses AIDS and adolescent anxiety along with its more comic stings, took remarkable strides in presenting a different kind of Jewish family to American audiences; that progress has been built upon by the Amazon show Transparent, which premiered in 2014. Transparent (which, in Jimmy Kimmel’s words at the 2016 Emmy Awards, “was born a drama, but . . . identifies as a comedy”) has been called, by New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum, “the most Jewish show I’ve seen on TV”; and it’s a show which sometimes neatly, sometimes with the messiness the best art uses to capture life, weaves together the revelations Jeffrey Tambor’s Maura (formerly Mort) Pfefferman comes to and shares with others about his own personal identity with those Jill Soloway, the show’s creator, articulates about Jewishness. Not only Jewishness in the lives of modern American Jews, but the ones presented—now more boldly than ever before—on American laptops and television screens by entertainment media.
