Jewish comedy, p.31
Jewish Comedy, page 31
Or, more precisely, interethnic romance. Bridget Loves Bernie, which first aired on CBS in 1972, was never really about matters theological, but rather the question of how an uptown WASP and an outer-borough Jew could ever possibly overcome their differences, codified in whatever classic stereotypes a sitcom writing staff could come up with. (Spoiler alert: love, it turns out.) In the pilot episode, lines like “Now, Bernie, do you take one lump or two in your Jew?” (Bridget’s parents) and “I don’t believe this. I’ve lived with you people all my life. Now why is everyone all of a sudden being so Jewish?” (Bernie, to his parents) told the tale. There’s a little anti-Semitism, a little ethnocentrism, but nothing a good romance can’t get over. This was a message that most Americans seemed to be fine with. Bridget Loves Bernie placed fifth in the ratings in its first, and only, season. It was cancelled nonetheless, the victim of protests, and presumably a victim of studio concern that its Jewishness was too assertive.
There aren’t many opportunities for comparison: from 1954 to 1972 not one leading character on prime time clearly identified as Jewish (Bridget Loves Bernie’s Bernie Steinberg broke the streak), then again a drought from 1978 to 1987. Seventeen years after Bridget, Jackie Mason’s short-lived Chicken Soup (1989) suffered a similar fate: despite high ratings and critical approbation, Jewish opposition to the show (the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles called it “as inappropriate and offensive to Jews as Amos and Andy [sic] would be to blacks today”) helped cancel it after a month. It was the second-highest-rated series in history to be canceled, ranking thirteenth in the ratings. The highest? Bridget Loves Bernie.
There were occasional exceptions that proved the rule—most notably Richard Lewis’s show Anything But Love (1989–1992). As a stand-up comedian, Lewis was “known for being neurotic, obsessive, wired, an essential unhappy man with trust issues; he was famous for pacing restlessly onstage, stooping as he walked, running his hands through his long hair—what one critic called a ‘kvetch ballet.’ ” It was a shtick so character-based that it transferred well to the sitcom format. But the persona he created was such a full embodiment of a certain Jewish stereotype it needed no explanation. (“We went to see Les Miserables. I thought it was going to be like a play about one of my family’s seders.”) But the title itself indicated how complicated the romance in this romantic comedy was going to be, as opposed to the easy attraction displayed by the comic partners in Bridget Loves Bernie or Chicken Soup.
Despite their popular (if short-lived) success with fans at the time, these three sitcoms hardly thrive in syndication and streaming. Paradoxically, it was de-Semitization taken to its extreme that opened the door for a wider variety of explicit Jewish experience in mass culture than ever before. By 1999, there were twelve “Jewish” sitcoms from the 1990s in first-run and syndication available on TV, and thirty-three with Jewish protagonists between 1989 and 2001. And almost all of this could be laid at the feet of one show that specialized in the comedy of Jewish disguise, rather than its opposite: Seinfeld.
JERRY SEINFELD’S first role in sitcomland was as a joke writer for the governor on the 1980–1981 season of Benson; the gag was he wrote jokes no one liked or wanted to hear. One joke he tried out: “Did you hear about the rabbi who bought himself a ranch? Called it the Bar Mitzvah.” After the joke fails, he asks: “Too Jewish? Too Western?” Seinfeld wasn’t the only one to worry about being too Jewish on television; but he obviously didn’t suffer from the problem. By 1981, he appeared on The Tonight Show, that anointed path to bigger and better things if you hit—and boy, did he. He became a fixture there, on Letterman, on Merv Griffin, and toward the end of the 1980s was getting up to twenty-five thousand dollars a weekend to do stand-up and doing 300 performances a year.
It was easy to see why Carson, paradigmatic Midwestern gentile, liked Seinfeld. Sure, Seinfeld had been a kibbutz volunteer; but his observational humor—the discussions of socks, of baseball uniforms—was exactly the kind that removed ethnic specificity. Everybody knew what Seinfeld was talking about; that was the point. And no one would ever be left behind, be alienated, or take offense. If anything, they’d admire the cut-glass precision of the jokes, the rigorous attention to the loops and whirls of language in its specific absurdities. Sure, there was weirdness there, and hostility, and occasional flashes of misanthropy; but it was buried beneath a general impression of professionalism and bonhomie.
Maybe that’s why Brandon Tartikoff, NBC’s president at the time, despite (or because of) being Jewish himself, was so interested in Seinfeld—and so nonplussed by the show that Seinfeld and Larry David, someone who was far more focused on the unlikable, the lack of connection, produced. Tartikoff had said in 1983 that The Goldbergs “would not work today. It worked when television was new, television sets expensive, and the owners were disproportionately Jewish.” It’s not surprising to see how his distaste for exploring explicit Jewish storylines on the network would be connected to his horror at a show whose famed “no hugging, no learning” credo was almost diametrically opposed to the network’s monster Thursday night hits like The Cosby Show and Family Ties.
After seeing the pilot, Tartikoff dismissed it as “too New York Jewish” and gave it the smallest order in television history, four episodes. The way Tartikoff told it, the only reason he was convinced to put it on the air at all was that Rob Reiner told him he was making the biggest mistake of his life. And this was the self-justifying version of the story: success has a thousand fathers, and Tartikoff wanted to at least take some credit for getting the show on the air. More credit for airing Seinfeld goes to NBC’s head of late-night programming, Rick Ludwin, who paid for the order out of his own budget, cancelling a Bob Hope special to come up with the money. Ludwin, a non-Jew, didn’t have Tartikoff’s concerns about the show’s Jewishness. But any explicit mention of Jewishness that could be avoided—unlike, for example, Jerry’s Jewishness, which had been established via his stand-up routines—was changed and coded.
Thus Elaine, a classic example of the Jewish American princess, now possesses a famed “shiksappeal” and crosses herself before entering an apartment to retrieve a misplaced manuscript; and the Costanzas, the avatars of a certain kind of Jewish ethnic zhlubiness, were—as the noted Jewish comic Jerry Stiller, who played Frank Costanza, put it—“a Jewish family living under the witness protection program under the name Costanza.”
Only Kramer seems different, somehow. Kramer began life as “Kessler,” but at Tartikoff’s insistence that only Jerry, whose persona had been established, remain Jewish, his name was changed to Kramer. But something different happened in the nomenclatural transfer than did with Costanza and Benes: Kramer, rather than being a disguised Jew, actually transmutes into a non-Jew, seen through Jewish eyes. As Michael Richards said, not only was he a “hipster doofus,” but, more importantly, “I liked the idea of him being like a fourth element, just coming in from nowhere.” In the increasingly cocooned and internal atmosphere created by the three others, Kramer was something different, something other, something goyish. In this respect, he epitomizes the nature of Jewish-gentile relations—and the humor that this engenders—in America: harmless, largely, but incomprehensible, and, as it turns out, incomprehensibly successful. (George: “Kramer goes to a fantasy camp. His whole life is a fantasy camp. People should plunk down two thousand dollars to live like him for a week. Do nothing, fall ass-backwards into money, mooch food off your neighbors and have sex without dating. That’s a fantasy camp.”)
Maybe the disguise worked, to some extent, for some people; thus, at least, a partial explication of the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman’s comment that “there were no bizarre or eccentric Jews on Seinfeld, which is a development for Jews in America”—technically true, arguably, if you take Elaine and George at face value. And the rare occasions that Seinfeld does deal with Jewishness explicitly are fairly telling. In one episode, Seinfeld’s dentist (played—to perfection—by Bryan Cranston in his pre–Breaking Bad days, when he was still known in the business almost entirely as a comic actor, to the extent he was known at all) converts to Judaism and immediately begins telling Jewish jokes. Seinfeld, immediately seized by the suspicion that he has converted solely to be able to tell such jokes with impunity, begins complaining about this, but finds few if any takers. Kramer, in an inspired verbal run by the show’s writers (in this episode’s case, Peter Mehlman and Jill Franklyn), takes on Seinfeld for his discriminatory tendencies, culminating in calling him an “anti-dentite.”
The way Seinfeld walked the fine line between anti-Semitism and accusations of self-hatred isn’t limited to this episode. (Most famously, I’d suspect, there’s the episode where Jerry is caught making out during Schindler’s List; and a number of episodes float the prospect that Jerry’s obsessive cleanliness and orderly behavior are Nazi-like.) Ultimately, though, this blurring of lines is designed to suggest a higher allegiance, as the episode’s end reveals. Jerry, frustrated in his attempts to find any sympathy for his position, goes to confession to tell a priest his story. It’s actually one of the few times on the show he explicitly identifies himself as Jewish, although it’s not particularly a secret. When the priest asks him if the notion of his dentist’s conversion for the jokes offends him as a Jew, he replies that it doesn’t—it offends him as a comedian. In some sense, this is a capper, a throwaway line, designed to end a scene which has served as the basis for any number of Jewish jokes. But in another sense, it’s key to understanding Seinfeld, and Seinfeld’s, perspective on these matters—Jerry’s other identities come first.
The outsize success of Seinfeld—and the undenied, if not undeniable, Jewishness of its lead protagonist, along with its other characters’ often Jewish or quasi-Jewish sensibilities—led to an increasing comfort with other depictions of Jewishness on television in the 1990s. In terms of explicit Jewishness, these range along the spectrum from Mad About You (where Paul Reiser’s Jamie Buchman displayed almost no sign of ethnic stereotype, outsourcing the Jewish hijinks to Mel Brooks’s Uncle Phil) to The Nanny (arguably, one long riff on Jewish-gentile relations, brilliantly anchored in Fran Drescher’s conscious overperformance) with shows like Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist and Will and Grace somewhere in between.
For the cognoscenti, the harder-core comedy fans, there was the delicate pas de deux of Garry Shandling and Jeffrey Tambor on The Larry Sanders Show on HBO, which treaded in ethnic parody of that (at the time) gentilest of television settings, the late-night talk show. Shandling’s arias of neurosis and the incorporation of backstage and business manipulations into the show brought the behind-the-scenes dynamic into public view in a groundbreaking way that we now all take for granted. Included in that was putting the industry’s “too Jewish” concerns on display: Judd Apatow, who wrote for Sanders, once said that “the Larry Sanders writers had debated behind the scenes about whether Larry was Jewish and had concluded that he was a self-hating Jew”; though Sanders “fastidiously” avoids the subject of his possible Jewishness, his sidekick Hank Kingsley (Tambor) is another story, and his flirtation with explicit Jewishness in the episode “My Name is Asher Kingley” encapsulated the series’ overarching theme: “If you want to survive in the entertainment business, much less in public life, don’t let your kippah—i.e., your Jewishness—show.”
For those without HBO, though, or whose parents wouldn’t let them watch it, or who simply weren’t clued-in enough, the most important moment in the post-Seinfeld revolution also came on NBC, just a little later at night, when an impossibly young dorky-looking man-child took his guitar and, in a warbly voice, created a new Jewish anthem.
From his days as a cameo performer who did bit parts on the bizarrely delightful MTV game show Remote Control, Adam Sandler graduated to creating an indelible set of characters on Saturday Night Live in the early nineties. Sandler’s characters, particularly the ones who appeared on “Weekend Update” (looking at you, Operaman) were mostly—as the audience knew—essentially Sandler mugging and speaking in silly voices. But Sandler’s limited range as a sketch actor made his “Weekend Update” appearances even more important.
Sandler’s introduction to what became an anthem for a certain generation of Jews in the early 1990s—it was performed on December 3, 1994—is, in its own stuttering way, a manifesto against Tartikoff’s, and much of the mainstream cultural media’s, presentation of Jews. “When I was a kid,” he begins, “this time of year always made me feel a little left out because in school there were so many Christmas songs and all us Jewish kids had was the song ‘Dreidel dreidel dreidel.’ So I wrote a brand new Hanukkah song for all you Jewish kids to sing, and I hope you like it!”
The song’s first public appearance was, of course, live; and so Sandler’s reactions to the audience’s rapturous response are unfeigned. He and Norm MacDonald look genuinely surprised at just how well it went over. Sandler might well have considered it just another trifle—after all, it’s got some mildly clever wordplay (particularly focused around the difficulties of finding things to rhyme with “Hanukkah”), but it boiled down to, in the words of the song, “a list of people who are Jewish just like you and me.”
It’s a bit different from its 1990 predecessor, Tom Lehrer’s “Hanukkah in Santa Monica.” That song, while similarly outing its author/performer as a Jew who lights his menorah amid the California flora, doesn’t portray itself as a manifesto, or give a sense of earnestness; it’s touched with the same witty, ironic alienation that pervades so much of Lehrer’s work. Sandler, on the other hand, is explicitly trading on the current Jewish condition: comfortable individually, alienated collectively. In addressing that, the song plays into our dynamic of disguise, “outing” some people who seem unlikely to be Jewish (Arthur Fonzarelli, half of Paul Newman); but doing so in a way that’s equally heir to two generations of desaturated Jewish content on TV. It propounds the equation, “this is Jewish because I say it’s Jewish, and therefore it’s funny.” There’s almost no content whatsoever to “The Hanukkah Song,” except for the assertion of Jewishness and, of course, the celebration of that most American of Jewish holidays, Hanukkah. But that was enough.
If Sandler became the poster boy for a new generation of American Jews, and for a new construction of American Jewish identity, a second, more continuous aspect of that identity was embodied in his one significant character on SNL not on “Weekend Update”: Canteen Boy, the man-child sexual plaything of Alec Baldwin. If a good part of this strand of American Jewish comedy is about a crisis of manhood, about the possibility for a Jewish man to be potent, erotic, and the comic consequences of that potential failure, Sandler puts all that front and center.
He wasn’t the first, of course. Groucho Marx, aided and abetted by his quartet of brothers, constantly resists the temptation to settle down with any Margaret Dumont–type: not when comic anarchy is a possibility. Marx’s descendants include Dustin Hoffman’s character in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate; Eugene in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs; Elliott Gould; Richard Benjamin’s portrayals of various Philip Roth characters on film; Benny, Shandling, Allen, Seinfeld. (“We are not men,” Jerry bemoans to George, sitting across from him at the diner. “No, no, we are not men,” George replies, introducing a bizarre scheme where they both work together to be a single boyfriend to a girl, on the assumption that neither of them could really be satisfactory.) But Sandler goes the other way, both because his manic comedy is given to extroversion rather than introversion, and because the dictates of his sort of film comedy suggest that he must also be the romantic lead—and thus a new kind of Jewish humor is born; one of the current age of success.
There would be others at the same time; perhaps most notably Ben Stiller, whose identifiably Jewish characters in movies like Keeping the Faith and the Meet the Parents movies, would pick up on the theme. (Stiller’s rabbi character’s Yom Kippur sermon in the 2000 romantic comedy Keeping the Faith—“We live in a really complex world in which boundaries and definitions are blurring and bleeding into each other in ways that I think challenge us not just as Jews but as human beings”—could almost be an epigraph for this chapter.) But Sandler opened the floodgates, and, perhaps, provided an absurdist apotheosis in his totally bonkers (I don’t think there’s another technical term for it) 2008 film You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, in which Sandler’s Mossad agent becomes a New York hairdresser, John Turturro plays a member of the PLO, piranha are stuffed down bikini briefs, and hummus is used as a toothpaste and a flame retardant. A Hebraic Shampoo, Sandler comes off as the least and most possible man at the same time. It’s not coincidental, I think, that this film of Sandler’s was co-written by his old friend Judd Apatow, the man who in the first two decades of the twenty-first century became probably the most important impresario in comedy and who has done more to put forth these images than anyone else.
Apatow himself—the noted writer, director, and producer, responsible, in one way or another, for a spate of highly successful features and shows ranging from The Ben Stiller Show to Freaks and Geeks to The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Knocked Up to Bridesmaids to Girls—doesn’t at first glance seem to have much Jewish content in his works, or even much of a Jewish sensibility. Almost all the authors he advises would-be comedy writers to read, for example—Chandler, Carver, Agee, Dubus, Exley, Fitzgerald—aren’t Jewish. But a closer look—starting with comedians he idolized like Seinfeld, Paul Reiser, Robert Klein, and Mel Brooks, and especially the stable of actors he’s surrounded himself with, a regular troupe composed largely if not almost entirely of a Jewish comic generation of actors including Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Jonah Hill, and Jason Schwartzman, sometimes referred to as “the Jew-tang Clan”—may suggest otherwise.
