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    Jewish Comedy Stars: Classic to Cutting Edge
    Jewish Comedy Stars: Classic to Cutting Edge
    Jewish Comedy Stars: Classic to Cutting Edge
    Ebook165 pages1 hour

    Jewish Comedy Stars: Classic to Cutting Edge

    By Norman H. Finkelstein

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    About this ebook

    From vaudeville to viral comedy on the web, here are more than 40 short biographies of Jewish comedians who heavily influenced the entertainment industry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Sorted chronologically into chapters like "On Stage," "On Air," "On Fire," and "Comedy 2.0," this book profiles Jewish comedians from George Jessel to Sarah Silverman.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLerner Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781512490299
    Jewish Comedy Stars: Classic to Cutting Edge

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      Book preview

      Jewish Comedy Stars - Norman H. Finkelstein

      Acknowledgments

      Introduction

      Humor has been an integral part of Jewish tradition since biblical times. When Isaac was born to aging parents—his father was more than one hundred years old and his mother in her nineties—he was named Yitzhak, the Hebrew word for laughter. God has brought me laughter; everyone who hears will laugh with me! his mother, Sarah, exclaimed. Since then humor has sustained Jews by helping them cope with times of joy or adversity.

      The joyous holiday of Purim celebrates the saving of the Jewish population in ancient Persia. It is observed with shpiels—humorous plays based on the biblical book of Esther. In eastern Europe, a tradition of humorous self-mocking folktales developed.

      When Jews in large numbers began coming to the United States in the last part of the nineteenth century, they brought not only the Chelm stories with them but also a rich legacy of humor that became the foundation of American popular comedy. They also brought a rich tradition of using humorous language to express their feelings as well as self-mocking jokes to deflect the anti-Semitism they frequently experienced. The comedian Lenny Bruce once said that being Jewish is not only a religion but a state of mind, a condition, a way of looking at the world. It is this humor, some say, that helped Jews survive years of suffering.

      Why so many Jewish men and women have played important roles in the world of American comedy has been debated for years. Whether on the stage, on the radio and television, in film, or behind the scenes as writers, they have been strongly represented. Some think that humor evolved as a hereditary antidote to the centuries of hardship Jews faced around the world. They used humor to lighten their own lives.

      In America, the children of Jewish immigrants, seeking ways to escape poverty, reworked their parent’s Yiddish humor to fit the American experience and became America’s most popular entertainers. In 1979 Time magazine estimated that although Jews made up only 3 percent of the American population, fully 80 percent of professional comedians are Jewish. Today, the Jewish influence on American comedy continues. Moshe Waldoks, coauthor of The Big Book of Jewish Humor, observed, There has been a certain acceptance of Jewish-style humor into American culture, akin to how black-generated jazz is now considered American.

      How did this happen? Read on.

      ACT I:

      On Stage

      At the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century, more than two million Jewish immigrants arrived in the United States from eastern Europe. Their dreams of a land where the streets were paved with gold quickly evaporated into bleak reality. The Lower East Side of New York City, where large numbers of Jewish immigrants settled, was among the most densely populated places on Earth. Where could they find shelter? How could they support their families?

      Unskilled and uncertain of the English language, they desperately searched for jobs to keep their families alive. Working conditions were terrible—many toiled long hours for low pay in garment industry sweatshops. There was little opportunity for fun. In a time without radio, television, and movies, an important escape from the drudgery of everyday life was the Yiddish theater.

      Yiddish was the language of the street that united Jewish immigrants of all classes and backgrounds. The first generation of any immigrant group is by nature divided—one foot still in the Old Country and the other trying to gain a foothold in a strange society with unfamiliar language and customs. The Jewish newcomers were comforted by the familiarity of Yiddish culture that surrounded them. Yiddish newspapers and especially the theaters offered welcome relief. Jews from Russia, Poland, or Lithuania could laugh together at the antics on the stage. But while they laughed, they saw their difficult lives mirrored in the comic scenes and jokes. What they saw on the stage made them realize their own shortcomings while motivating them to succeed in the New World.

      In the Yiddish theaters of New York and other major U.S. cities, audiences could see translated Shakespeare plays, melodramatic love stories, and biblical tales. But the favorite of Yiddish theatergoers was the vaudeville format. Yiddish vaudeville, like American vaudeville theater, featured exaggerated mannerisms, ill-fitting clothing, and accented language. The humor revolved around comedians dressed in funny costumes and speaking with exaggerated Yiddish accents. To deflect that their accents were indeed Jewish, the vaudeville comedians began calling themselves Dutch acts. It seemed more polite. But the effect was the same.

      Molly Picon, shown standing on a chair in the title role of Schmendrick, was a star of the Yiddish stage as well as a vaudeville favorite.

      Vaudeville theaters could be found throughout the country—in large cities and small towns. The shows were made up of a dozen or more different acts ranging from musicians, magicians, acrobats and, of course, the ever popular comics. The weakest acts came first, and the shows built up to the most talented. Vaudevillians worked at perfecting their acts as they repeated them from city to city.

      Many of the early Jewish performers were the children of eastern European, Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Anxious to make their way in the United States, these young people often had little patience for the free public school education that was offered. Their families were poor and needed the extra pennies young children could earn by selling newspapers or singing and dancing for pennies on street corners. It was a short distance from the streets to the hurly-burly of the vaudeville stage where the best of them could succeed beyond their wildest dreams. And only the best could survive the audiences who provided their own unwelcome comments, jeers, and tossed tomatoes. Eddie Cantor, later to become one of America’s best-known comedians, once said that he pranced around the stage while singing and telling jokes to avoid being hit by rotten produce.

      Yiddish theater in America was not a lasting phenomenon and began to disappear in the 1920s as the children of immigrants further assimilated into American culture. They threw off Yiddish culture and developed new ways of expressing themselves as Jewish entertainers in English-speaking, multicultural America. While their parents had been content to view comedy acts that depicted themselves—Yiddish-speaking newcomers trying to make

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