Looking for comedy in the gentile world
Regular readers will likely roll their eyes if I kick off yet one more post with “Back in my stand up days…” So anyway, back in my stand up days, I developed a “hook” for the act based on being a Jew from Alaska. “Feast your eyes,” I would tell the stone-faced crowd by way of introduction, “You’re looking at an actual Jew from Alaska. We’re a rarity. We call ourselves ‘Jewskimos’.” Sporadic chuckles. Wait a beat. “God’s Frozen People.” HUGE laughs (usually). Okay, you’ve got ‘em. Don’t lose momentum. “In fact…and I have to say I don’t share this with every audience,” I would confide, “My Jewskimo name is ‘Kvetches With Wolves’. That was given to me by my rabbi…Rabbi Iceberg.” Hearty guffaws, occasionally light applause. If I didn’t have them by then, I knew I was fucked.
I never really stopped to analyze why I made a conscious decision to play up my “Jewishness” to milk laughs/approval from a roomful of drunken strangers night after night. After all, my father is a WASP farm boy from rural Ohio, and my mother is a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn, so technically speaking, I’m not 100 per cent Kosher…I could swing either way. Why not play up my WASP-y “half”? Why did I eschew the straw hat for the yarmulke? Is it the Jewish half (DNA?) that makes me “ha-ha” funny?
It so happens that there is a new documentary called When Comedy Went to School, in which co-directors Ron Frank and Mevlut Akaaya tackle the age-old question: Why are there so many Jewish comedians? Apparently, back in 1970, a survey found that while Jews only comprised 3% of the total U.S. population, they accounted for 80% of the professional comics working at the time. Who better to ask than some Jewish comedians? Robert Klein narrates, providing some historical context (my Jewish grandfather emigrated from Russia to escape Tsar Nicholas’ pogroms, so I wasn’t too surprised by the filmmaker’s revelation that it can all be traced back to the shtetls of Eastern Europe).
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