No Joke (16 page)

The most important single factor in the professionalization of Jewish humor in the United States would have to be the Borscht Belt. Named for the beet soup that was popular among Jews (and other eastern Europeans), the string of Jewish-owned hotels in the Catskill Mountains of New York State provided comedy as one of the main attractions. In their heyday, these hotels employed most of the Jewish comedians in the country, performing (in the estimation of one historian) over six hundred shows on a typical Saturday night.
¹⁶

Freddy Roman (Kirschenbaum), lifetime “dean” of the New York Friars' Club, got his start as emcee in the Crystal Spring Hotel owned by his uncle and grandfather. As he has described the Borscht Belt's culture of comedy, the hotel staff, including the waiters, waiters' assistants, and pool attendants, were expected to amuse the guests as part of their service. Comic games of “Simon says” took precedence over nature walks, as did the “social director” over the swimming instructor.
Tummlers
, from the Yiddish
tuml
for “noise,” were expected to keep guests' minds off their troubles, and deflect complaints over food and accommodations. The term tummler recalls the antics of the comedian Jerry Lewis (Joseph Levitch), who developed a routine featuring a bumptious waiter always spilling the trays—an act that reportedly originated while Lewis was a waiter in a Jewish hotel.

One-liners were standard fare:

What are the three words a woman doesn't want to hear when she's making love?

“Honey, I'm home.”

A recent Wikipedia list of those who got their start in these hotels includes (under “B” alone) Milton Berle (Berlinger), Joey Bishop (Joseph Abraham Gottlieb), Mel Brooks (Melvin Kaminsky), Lenny Bruce (Schneider), George Burns (Nathan Birnbaum), and Red Buttons (Aaron Chwatt). Economic incentive brought together hotelkeepers who were trying to retain a skittish clientele, entrepreneurial young men trying to earn some “easy” money (easier than running a hotel), and Jews looking for escape from the cities where making a living was synonymous with living. But once the new business got under way, it was as competitive as any other, with would-be comedians stealing lines from other performers who sold exclusive rights to their repertoires to as many as would buy them. Joey Adams (Joseph Abramowitz) describes spending “three days without food or water” transcribing George Jessel's trademark telephone routine with his “mother”:

“Mama, how do you like the lovebird I bought for the front room? … You cooked it? … You cooked a South American bird? A bird that speaks three languages?—Oh, you didn't know[?] … He should have said something!”

Mining this motif for comedy, Adams complains that the social director at a certain hotel had lifted the original gags that Adams himself had bought from his fellow comic Lou Saxon, who had stolen the jokes from the “gag fence” Eddie Davis, who had received them from Leon Fields, who had gotten them from Buddy Walker, who had copied them down from Berle “at Loew's State [theater] when they were still warm.”
¹⁷

A good joke became worth its weight in gold. Although a comedian could not make the big time without developing a distinctive stage personality, the profession itself became more streamlined, with teams of writers stockpiling and market-testing material, agents packaging performers for emerging markets, and union protection securing the comedians' old age. The sociology of the Borscht Belt ensured that most of the humorists, like most of the guests, would be Jewish. When the emerging medium of radio went looking for entertainers, it took those who had mastered timing and delivery. Movies and television picked off talent from the stage and radio. Jews developed comedy the way Chinese restaurants taught the United States to eat with chopsticks.

In a “roast” of Frank Sinatra—the lampooning of a fellow comedian in the company of other comedians having become itself a strategy for promoting the profession—Buttons observed that in the entertainment industry, most singers were Italians and most comedians Jewish, “which is ridiculous: very little difference between the Jews and Italians. One year of high school.”
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But the phenomenon does raise the question, How come Jewish hotelkeepers in the Catskills turned comedy into a main attraction?

Gentile hotels in the Adirondacks advertised no such specialty; nor did the first Jewish resorts in the period before and immediately after the First World War. In one such hotel described by Abraham Cahan in his 1917 novel
The Rise of David Levinsky
, the entertainment consists of high-minded patriotic fare. Summer colonies for Jewish socialists and union workers offered lectures by prominent Yiddish writers, poets, and
thinkers, who sought to enlighten more than to amuse. Even Nadir, one of the best Yiddish humorists (as we saw in the previous chapter), did not make comedy a main attraction at the summer resort he ran in the 1920s. It wasn't until Jews began to feel a touch more comfortable in the United States that they adopted laughter as their main collective pursuit, along with the fund-raising that was sometimes its accompaniment. “A man is hit by a car. A paramedic on the scene asks, ‘Are you comfortable?' The Jew answers [with a Yiddish accent], ‘I make a living.' ” What funnier to a crowd of by-now middle-income vacationers than a joke by a fellow Jew with a Yiddish, Yinglish, or Yiddish-accented punch line that confirms how far they have come, both economically and linguistically? What more reassuring than the collective laughter at a joke that “no one but a Jew” could understand?

For a time, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Yiddish theater had served as a quasisynagogue—a spiritual sanctuary and cultural gathering place. Although secular in nature, performed on Friday nights, and often dramatizing the defiance of religious norms, the typical Yiddish play featured one or more ritual scenes—celebrations of a holiday, engagement, or wedding, circumcision, or sabbath—as though to make up for the ceremonial occasions that the audience was no longer observing at home. Yiddish theater was intensely interactive, like performances in the Elizabethan theater, eliciting tears and laughter along with outbursts of approval or displeasure. Habits of collective participation did not carry over, however, to the English-language stage. Meshulim Meier Weisenfreund might find personal fame as the actor Paul
Muni, and some Jewish stories might transport well to Broad-way and Hollywood, but at non-Jewish performances, Jewish audiences behaved decorously.

Appropriate in this connection is the joke, originating in Yiddish and already related in the previous chapter, about the Jewish widow who conscientiously studies proper Gentile dress, speech, and demeanor, and when she feels ready to “pass,” registers at a restricted hotel. She is doing well until the waiter who is bringing the “dry martini” she has ordered accidentally spills it into her lap, causing her to yelp, “Oy vey!—whatever
that
means!” In its U.S. (as opposed to European) context, the joke implies: Why go to a Gentile hotel when you can laugh with us here in the Catskills?!

In brief, the kind of participatory audience reaction once elicited by the Yiddish theater found its home in the comedy shows of Jewish hotels. The Borsht Belt became to stand-up comedy what New Orleans was to jazz—an incubator of a new form of entertainment that gradually emerged from its formative center into the U.S. mainstream and beyond.

Not that this comparison of Jewish comedy with jazz should obscure the contributions of Jews to the development of jazz itself, or black Americans to the growth of native comedy. The two forms of entertainment were similarly informal and improvisational. But the value placed by each community on its special cultural pastime dictated the opportunities for talented individuals within that community. Comedy and jazz depend on patronage, which rewards what it craves. Jews wanted to laugh at their failings, and they rewarded the comics who mocked their flaws just as they had once prized the
authorities and rabbinic tradition that had tried to make them more perfect. Jewish stand-up comedians took over from the
maggidim
—the preachers who punished and promised redemption—the function of reprimand, without which Jews would cease to be Jews.

In some crucial respects, Catskills comedy differed profoundly from New Orleans jazz: while southern blacks were still suffering exclusion, the vacationing Jews were anxiously protecting their advancement in U.S. society. Though much can be made of the anti-Semitism that was on the rise in the United States during the 1930s—instituting restrictions and quotas even where none had been present before—Jews were creating clubs of their own with patrons who valued their intimacy. The majority of Jews would have reversed Groucho's dictum to read, “I would never join a club that didn't want me for a member.”

Yet the good fortune that now allowed them to vacation in the Catskills was as incongruous as the punch lines of some of the jokes. More than anti-Semitism directed at
Jews
, U.S. isolationism threatened to abandon the Jewish people elsewhere to their fate at the hands of determined enemies. A growing disparity separated American Jews, whose security was increasing in every meaningful respect, from the Jews of Europe and Palestine, the former threatened by Hitler and Stalin, and the latter sustaining increased Arab violence under British rule. The Yiddish press agitated on behalf of these fellow Jews, but most English-language media discouraged intervention. For their part, resort hotels were expected to insulate vacationers from their worries.
What, then, are we to make of the fantastic spurt of Jewish laughter in the very years when American Jews ought, perhaps, to have been laughing less and doing more?

As it happens, my experience at a Catskill resort in winter 1974 enlarged my sympathy for the apparently inappropriate causes and effects of comedy. My beloved older brother Benjamin, before his death on November 25 of that year, had arranged for an elaborate winter holiday with his wife and three children. We did not know what to do with ourselves after the week of shivah, much less how to console his widow and children. Our closest friend, a rabbi's daughter, suggested that after the month of mourning we all go to Grossinger's, queen of the Catskill hotels: she with her husband and their four children, we with our three, and my widowed sister-in-law with hers. Basing herself on her kibbutz experience, our friend laid out the advantages of being together at this sprawling resort with meals and activities provided, abler to attend to the children and our grief.

Evenings proved harder than days. Though it seemed a desecration, the older children and we attended the comedy shows that were the resort's prime distraction, and the comedy began to suit our mood. There was the routine about a bar mitzvah party that keeps getting more and more elaborate until the candles on the cake set off the sprinkler system that floods the place. The nervously pacing stand-up comic was not unlike my brother, which made me laugh, which was not that different from crying. Laughter brought on tears that became independent of the comedy triggering them, and
left me purged in their aftermath. Comedy complicated the physiological and psychological relation between shaking and shuddering in ways that I could not have anticipated.

Stand-up comedy is all about nerve—a battle between aggressor and victims with wit as the weapon and laughter as the prize. Different from prizefights that pit people against one another in the presence of paying spectators, comedy pits the fighter against the paying customers, with silence as the killer, and the detonation of laughter as the victory. As in any pitched battle, tension is at the heart of the matter, and the pent-up tension in those rooms full of Jews must have driven the value of comedy to record heights. In the 1930s, the political threat to Jews elsewhere belied the incremental prosperity of Jews in the United States, though the United States was itself still jeopardized by social and economic handicaps that were contrary to the promise of equality. Strength and helplessness, promise and danger, advantage and liability all had seldom, if ever, converged as incongruously as in the years when Jewish comedians were “makin' whoopee” (lyrics by Gus Kahn) in the mountains.