No Joke (17 page)

It therefore was not unreasonable for Jewish comedy to be directed inward, if not at the situation itself, then at reflected hints of it in habits of conspicuous consumption, overhasty Americanization, and men who could or would not manifest their masculinity. Henpecked husbands, sad sacks, and what Jews called nebbishes, schlimazels, and schlemiels emerged as trademarks of American Jewish comedy. In a later routine, Jackie Mason (Maza), scion of rabbis and himself an ordained rabbi, twits Jewish husbands who cannot order food without
permission from their wives. “Do I like this? … I thought I did…. I don't? It's up to you.” They can't walk around in the house for which they've paid a half-million dollars or drink from a glass because it is always the wrong one. They have to get permission from their wives even to laugh. Mason taunts the males who in their domestic arrangements replicate the stereotype of the homeless Jew. Joan Rivers (Molinsky Sanger Rosenberg) is equally caustic on the subject of the (Jewish) woman who does not satisfy her husband: heavy breathing from his side of the bed signals an attack of asthma. Woody Allen's take on the weak Jewish male would be contrastingly seductive, ridiculing Gentiles—American, Russian, and Christian—for their brawn and Western culture for its ideal of the bellicose hero; but his is the exception that underlines the rule.

From among the hundreds of professional Jewish comedians, there is no way of choosing the routines or personae that had the greatest or most lasting impact—whether the Three Stooges on absurdist theory, Gertrude Berg's Molly Goldberg as the cheerful good neighbor waving from her window, the exaggerated parsimony of Jack Benny (Benjamin Kubelsky), the exaggerated innocence of Danny Kaye (David Daniel Kaminsky), Lenny Bruce challenging the legal limits of profanity, Sid Caesar dominating
Your Show of Shows
, or Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David playing sharply contrasting versions of themselves. It does seem, however, that the socioeconomics of the Borscht Belt created the opportunity for a Jewish-style comedy less eager for Gentile approval than for exploring some of the mysteries of what Mason called the “Ultimate Jew.”

The most cultic line in American Jewish comedy may have been uttered in the Coen Brothers' 1998 film
The Big Lebowski
. John Goodman plays Walter Sobchak, a convert to Judaism, formerly a Polish Catholic, who won't participate in the bowling league tournament because he is “shomer shabbos.” “Saturday, Donny, is Shabbos, the Jewish day of rest. That means that I don't work, I don't drive a car, I don't fucking ride in a car, I don't handle money, I don't turn on the oven, and I sure as shit don't fucking roll!” This fiercely obscene and obscenely fierce defense of halachic observance draws a laugh all the louder because such words had never before been uttered in U.S. entertainment by any born Jew. Humor is all about incongruity, and integration in the United States had gone so far that a Polish Catholic—once a paradigm of the anti-Semite—could be portrayed as the conscience of his adopted religion. In this scene, it would be hard to separate laughing
at
the dysfunctional team of Jewish losers, improbable convert, and demands of Jewish observance from laughing
with
the same dysfunctional team of losers, improbable convert, and demands of Jewish observance. Yet Jews are the unquestionable insiders of this humor, and in humor it's the insider's edge that counts.

One or another version of the challenged Jewish male whom Allen tries to turn into a matinee idol has dominated not just stand-up comedy but also some of the best American Jewish writing, which also turns out to be—how surprising is that?—some of its funniest. A seemingly exasperated Bellow once referred to himself, Bernard Malamud, and Roth as the
“Hart Schaffner & Marx” of U.S. fiction. The allusion was to the Chicago Jewish firm that produced an upscale brand of men's suits, so that Bellow was staking a claim to a label of distinction while professedly complaining about being unfairly labeled. In Wallace Markfield's darkly hilarious
To an Early Grave
(1964), four Jewish writers end up at the wrong funeral. Jewish shopkeepers are the
Criers and Kibitzers
,
Kibitzers and Criers
of Stanley Elkin's comic stories (1966). A junior professor shows up with an open fly in Malamud's
A New Life
(1961). Bellow's Moses Herzog arranges a job for the best friend who is cuckolding him (1964). Bruce Jay Friedman's eponymous hero in
Stern
(1962), seeking calm in the suburbs, cultivates an ulcer instead. While one should not exaggerate the function of comedy in a body of literature that also features the tortured writing of Henry Roth in
Call It Sleep
(1934) or replicate the offense to Yiddish by turning literature into an “essentially comic” medium, neither can we ignore the fact that Joseph Heller's comic novel
Catch-22
(1961) gave American English its synonym for Kafkaesque. The decade ushered in by Heller's “Armenian” captain John Joseph Yossarian would end with Philip Roth's funniest novel,
Portnoy's Complaint
(1969).

Roth spoofs familiar and new constituencies in a
shpritz
so manic it might have been fueled by drugs, except that there has seldom been a writer as soberly concentrated as Roth on mastering the craft of fiction.
Portnoy's Complaint
was a breakthrough in the way that
The Adventures of Augie March
freed Bellow to write in a distinctively Jewish voice, but Roth was the first to use the style of stand-up comedy for a high-brow U.S. novel. Interviewed by George Plimpton at the height
of the controversy around this book, Roth skirted questions about its content in an attempt to emphasize its formal, literary qualities. He described his attraction to “prose that has the turns, vibrations, intonations, and cadences, the spontaneity and ease, of spoken language, at the same time that it is solidly grounded on the page, weighted with the irony, precision, and ambiguity associated with a more traditional rhetoric.”

The conception is really nothing, you know, beside the delivery. My point is that until my “ideas”—about sex, guilt, childhood, about Jewish men and their Gentile women—were absorbed by an overall fictional strategy and goal, they were ideas not unlike anybody else's. Everybody has “ideas” for novels; the subway is jammed with people hanging from the straps, their heads full of ideas for novels they cannot begin to
write
. I am often one of them.
¹⁹

One may take Roth at his word, since this, his third novel, was the first in a comic mode, and his later ideas for comic novels could result in very poor ones (
The Breast
and
Our Gang
). Unquestionably, it was the “delivery” of
Portnoy's Complaint
that drew attention to its targets, first among them the Freudian legacy of psychoanalysis, a therapeutic process that overcame repression through speech and was now obliged to put the genie (repression
and
speech) back into the bottle. Cast as Alexander Portnoy's presumably private revelations to his analyst, the monologues that comprise this novel are violated through public disclosure, playing on every patient's suspicion that the whole exercise is just a way of titillating the doctor and prolonging dependency. In literary
terms, the “plot”—a series of sexual exploits with obsessively pursued and conquered Gentile women—traces the development of a Jewish boy from Newark, New Jersey, into a lonely thirty-three-year-old adolescent. In comic terms, it sends up the device that it exploits: “[Since] my return from Europe I have been putting myself to sleep each night in the solitary confinement of my womanless bed with a volume of Freud in my hand. Sometimes Freud in hand, sometimes Alex in hand, frequently both.”
²⁰

Freud is the prism through which Roth spoofs the Jewish mother—another great foil of American Jewish postwar comedy. The narrator sets himself up as an archetype of what Freud called the oedipal complex, consisting of being in love with one and hating the other part of the parental pair, and describes how his mother showered him with the kind of affection she ought to have reserved for her mate. (Allen's take on this subject: “I hear that their women don't sleep with their husbands after marriage.”)
²¹
So affected is the boy by his mother's seductive power over him that when he tries to prove his manhood in the Land of Israel, he is physically overpowered by a woman who reminds him of pictures of his mother as a young girl. “Doctor, maybe other patients dream—with me,
everything happens
. I have a life
without
latent content. The dream thing
happens
! Doctor:
I couldn't get it up in the State of Israel!
How's that for symbolism,
bubi
?”
²²
Suffocating mother love does not prevent Alex from acting out his sexual fantasies with Gentile women or vividly describing their consummation, merely from assuming the responsibilities of Jewish manhood.

As opposed to the scruffy image of the Jew in comedy of the immigrant years, Roth represents Jews as the embodiments of bourgeois respectability. Dutiful fathers play neighborhood baseball on weekends; mothers keep peaches afloat in recipe-perfect Jello. Portnoy attributes his training in the discontents of civilization to the laws of kashruth: “What else, I ask you, were all those prohibitive dietary rules and regulations all about to begin with, what else but to give us little Jewish children practice in being repressed?”
²³
Emblem of a U.S.-born generation that discovers the enlarged opportunities of personal freedom, Portnoy refuses to assume the parental burden.

A contemporary joke went like this. “I had dinner with my father last night, and I made a Freudian slip. I meant to say, ‘Please pass the salt,' but it came out, ‘You putz, you ruined my childhood.' ” Another one went like this: “My parents gave me so much guilt when I was a kid. They had a bumper sticker on their car that said, ‘If my son worked just a little harder, I, too, would have an honor-roll student at Jefferson High School.' ”
²⁴
Roth drew on humor in a similar vein. In the wake of
Portnoy's Complaint
, Jewish comediennes, too, announced their liberation from the role of competent wives and mothers.

True, the older generation was not inclined to laugh at Roth's comedy, and some of
Portnoy's Complaint
's most distinguished critics were truly frightened by his send-up. “[Under] the cartoon of the Jewish joke leers the anti-Jewish stereotype,” wrote the Zionist intellectual Marie Syrkin, who likened Roth's apologia for Portnoy, the predator
of Gentile women, to Nazi propaganda. In Roth as in the work of Joseph Goebbels, she wrote, “the Jewish male is not drawn to a particular girl who is Gentile, but by a Gentile ‘background' which he must violate sexually.” No less apprehensive, Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism, reviewing the book for the Hebrew daily
Haaretz
, pointed out that anti-Semites have always looked for ways of proving the degeneracy of the Jews, and here was a brash young Jew who did their work for them. Scholem, who had immigrated to Palestine from Germany in 1922, asked what price the world Jewish community was going to pay for this book.
²⁵

These European-generated concerns seemed widely off the mark to Roth's generation, which by 1969 was launched on a sexual revolution, women's liberation, open marriage,
Playboy
promiscuity, contraception through chemistry, gay rights, letting it all hang out, and “getting high.” In many respects, therefore,
Portnoy's Complaint
may have seemed less provocation than a product of its time.

But not in all respects. In some ways, indeed, the sexual daring of
Portnoy's Complaint
was its least “offensive” quality. Just as black comedians like Richard Pryor had begun introducing profanity in acts that were more aggressive and unsettling than almost anything that had gone before—and less accommodating of “white” sensibilities—Roth through Portnoy was venturing takeoffs on Christianity that violated still-standing taboos of polite Jewish discourse. Here, for example, is Portnoy outrageously topping Allen on the subject of Gentile license and “manliness”:

Let
them
(if you know who I mean) gorge themselves upon anything and everything that moves, no matter how odious and abject the animal, no matter how grotesque or
shmutzig
or dumb the creature in question happens to be. Let them eat eels and frogs and pigs and crabs and lobsters; let them eat vulture, let them eat ape meat and skunk if they like—a diet of abominable creatures well befits a breed of mankind so hopelessly shallow and empty-headed as to drink, to divorce, and to fight with their fists. All they know, these imbecilic eaters of the execrable, is to swagger, to insult, to sneer, and sooner or later to hit…. You stupid
goyim
! Reeking of beer and empty of ammunition, home you head, a dead animal (formerly
alive
) strapped to each fender, so that all the motorists along the way can see how strong and manly you are.
²⁶