Comic book legends Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner have been friends for 70 years. They met while writing jokes for Sid Caesar in 1950, created the famous 2,000-year-old routines together, and then made some really funny movies together. Brooks has had success with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, Reiner has teamed up with Steve Martin to create the 80s classics The Jerk and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.
Last week, in a heartwarming interview with the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman, they were asked why Jews had so dominated 20th century American comedy. “Back when we started,†Brooks explained, “there weren’t a lot of jobs for Jews – it was either tailoring, sports or acting.†Reiner’s response was more philosophical: “The Jews were naturally funny because they were low on the totem pole, so they made fun of people higher on the pole.”
Either way, the ubiquity of the Jewish people in American comedy remains astounding, so much so that you are slightly surprised when a brilliant American film comic like Steve Martin for example is not Jewish. From Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Milton Berle and the Marx Brothers through Luise Rainer, Mort Sahl, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, Joan Rivers, Gene Wilder, Brooks, Reiner, Gilda Radner and Woody Allen to Billy Crystal, Larry David, Sarah Silverman, Roseanne Barr and Jerry Seinfeld, the continued success of Jewish writers and actors is remarkable, and one wonders why they are so, very, very funny.
As Brooks noted, in the first half of the 20th century, persistent anti-Semitism and wasp suspicion meant that many respectable bourgeois career paths were closed to Jews. Like blacks, they were often seen as “other” and forced to exist on the fringes of a thriving and happily materialistic society. This experience produced bitterly philosophical responses.
The Jewish faith is sketchy on the subject of the hereafter: the Messiah will come, finally, but this may not entail eternal stays in paradise. The laws of Torah and the chosen people’s covenant with God must be obeyed, but no one seems quite sure of the reason. The thing to do is shrug your shoulders and comply. You have to endure, but that doesn’t mean you can’t complain.
The tradition of vigorous debate within Judaism has led to a constant questioning of established orders, and in America this has been combined with the classic kvetsh (the Yiddish word for moan) mentality to create a particularly biting and at times comic form. happily anarchic.
The first Jewish comedians to arrive in Hollywood had perfected themselves in the music hall. Born in an apartment building on the Lower East Side of New York to first-generation German Jewish immigrants, the Marx Brothers were taken on stage by their small but very ambitious mother “Minnie” at an early age, and formed a solid number. comedy. They were used to the harshness of vaudeville life, and whenever Groucho, Harpo, and Zeppo saw their brother Chico playing the piano in the orchestra pit, they threw their shoes at him.
Their first films, The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930), were adapted from blockbuster shows and based on the warring characters of Harpo, the silent anarchist who produced musical instruments and fish from of his voluminous overcoat; Chico, the allegedly Italian-American chancellor, who plays cards and noses; and Groucho, a cunning cynic who delivered most of the best jokes. “I can see you right now in the kitchen, leaning over a hot stove,†he told the marx brothers’ tall lady of formidable proportions, Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup, “only I can’t see the stove.”
With the help of witty Jewish writers like George S Kaufman, they made some wonderfully funny films and are said to be a huge influence on Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Woody Allen.
Jack Benny (born Benjamin Kubelsky) also honed his skills in vaudeville before making a name for himself on a radio show. He is mainly remembered in America for his long-running TV series, in which he played a cleverly fictionalized version of himself as a conceited, thin-skinned, parsimonious popinjay, who played the violin poorly, lived in constant fear. to be eclipsed – and was constantly outclassed. He transferred his wonderfully subtle comic skills to the big screen in films like Charley’s Aunt (1941), George Washington Slept Here (1942) and the most memorable To Be or Not to Be (1942), Ernst Lubitsch’s sublime farce in which Benny played a cowardly Polish actor who masquerades as a German officer to escape occupied Warsaw. The Nazis were to become a recurring theme for American Jewish comedians, but not yet.
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Because for Benny, the Marx Brothers, and even 1950s comics like Jerry Lewis (born Joseph Levitch), their Jewishness was not said: it was the elephant in the room, but could only be approached slantwise. Lewis made 17 films with Dean Martin between 1949 and 1956, but it was burlesque affairs that became an American classic of the 1950s.
As we have already noted, after the war the Holocaust was a taboo subject in Hollywood for many years, and the Nazis only appeared as cartoonish villains in action movies. But in the 1960s, Jewish comics like Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, and Woody Allen decided the best thing to do with the Nazis was to make fun of them.
Mel Brooks took on the Third Reich head-on in The Producers, his wonderfully dizzying 1967 comedy starring Gene Wilder (Jerome Silberman) and Zero Mostel as two unscrupulous impresarios who decide you can shoot more than one flop. of Broadway than a success in cooking the books. To this end, they launch Springtime for Hitler, a so-called “love letter to the Führer†written in all sincerity by an unbalanced Nazi lover.
Unfortunately, it is taken for a comedy and becomes a huge success. So was the film, which exposed the Nazi tropes to ridicule and included these immortal song lyrics: “Spring for Hitler and Germany, winter for Poland and France”.
By the way, all of these name changes were based on the depressing reality that a person with an overtly Jewish name had little or no chance of success in showbiz in the early mid-20th century in America. Allen Stewart Konigsberg certainly thought so, because when he started writing comic book jokes in the 1950s, he took on the stage name of Woody Allen.
The name is now problematic, on foot of persistent allegations about his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow. But he’s made some great movies, is a brilliant comic book writer, and certainly deepened the broader understanding of the Judeo-American experience.
Allen’s mid-period semi-autobiographical films explored the plight of a New York Jewish artist caught between shady modernity and the harshly practical virtues of his working-class Brooklyn parents. Bullying Jewish mothers and angry fathers abounded in films like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters. In the latter film, Allen’s character Mickey targeted his father’s unconditional faith: If a righteous God exists, why were there Nazis? “How do I know why there were Nazis,†his father replied. “I don’t know how the can opener works.”
Allen expanded the traditional Kvetch mentality into a larger neurotic character intimidated by existential terror. But there was also a dumber, lighter, and more subtly subversive side to late 20th-century Jewish comedy, as witnessed by Billy Crystal, with his weary observations of the world, and the situational absurdism of Larry David and Jerry. Seinfeld.
Jewishness has been at the heart of their hit TV shows Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, but it’s no longer the terrible weight of their comedic predecessors. A more confident and visible Jewishness emerged, something the late Joan Rivers played a big part in creating. But when Larry David isn’t offending all creeds and races on Curb Your Enthusiasm, he has to deliver a fair amount of racial abuse himself. Anti-Semitism is never quite out of fashion.