That’s Entertainment

By Ed Crasnick

THE JEWS OF PRIME TIME
By David Zurawik
256 pages. Brandeis University Press. $29.95.

SERIOUSLY FUNNY
The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s
By Gerald Nachman.
672 pages. Pantheon. $29.95.

If psychotherapy earned frequent flyer miles, I’d be eligible for a free trip to Pluto. Self-censorship has been a central issue in my own life.  It’s the sense that if anyone knows the fullness of your identity and background, you will lose everything. David Zurawik’s new book, The Jews of Prime Time, is like a history lesson whose protagonist is self-censorship; it’s the story of the Jews in Hollywood who, nine times out of ten, refuse to write about or portray Jews. What sounds like a Who’s Who of Television quickly changes channels into a who’s not who.

Zurawik applies his skills as a TV critic and Ph.D. in American Studies to answer a seemingly simple question: In an industry dominated by Jews, why are there so few self-identified Jewish characters on TV? What began as a two year project evolved into a ten year process in which Zurawik conducted over a hundred interviews with Jewish executives, writers, producers, and actors working in TV land. The end result is a clear and sharp picture of the unwritten rules of the tube with the camera pointed at the people behind the screen.

The Jews Of Prime Time takes us back in time, introducing us to the founding fathers of electronic media. Movie pioneers like Louis B. Mayer, Sam Goldwyn and Harry Cohn begat network moguls William S. Paley, David Sarnoff, and Leonard Goldenson. These founding fathers were the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players—many were immigrants who were no strangers to anti-Semitism. They set their sights on assimilation and success.

As Marshall Herskovitz (co-creator of Thirtysomething, My So Called Life and Once and Again) relates: “The Louis B. Mayer’s of the world carefully scrubbed out any ethnicity…They were trying to create a world that America would accept”—a world, the assumption ran, without Jews.

Zurawik takes us behind closed doors to meetings where old phrases like “Write Yiddish, cast British” lassoed many a Jewish writer. And of course, there’s the infamous “CBS research.” Allan Burns and Jim Brooks once met with executives at CBS to pitch The Mary Tyler Moore Show. They were told about the researchwhich clearly showed that American viewers did not want to see people from New York, men with mustaches, and Jews. The executives telling this to Burns and Brooks were Jewish men from New York with mustaches. No such research has ever been documented—but that didn’t stop TV executives, usually Jewish ones, from relying on it for decades.

There were, of course, rare exceptions to the eradication of Jewishness from the airwaves. One example was Gertrude Berg’s popular series The Goldbergs; an unprecedented episode focused entirely on Yom Kippur, complete with a six minute Kol Nidre scene in a synagogue. The year was 1954. America would not see another leading Jewish character in a prime time series for eighteen years.

Bridget Loves Bernie premiered in 1972 and after only one season an outraged Jewish community got the show canceled. They objected to the comic approach to the serious subject of intermarriage, and to the portrayal of the Jewish family characters as inferior to their rich WASP counterparts. The show remains the highest rated program ever canceled, and a powerful example of how different the Jews on TV have often been from the Jews watching it.

Years later, breakthrough characters like Michael Steadman of Thirtysomething and Dr. Joel Fleischman of Northern Exposure began to appear, in part because the founding fathers had sold their networks in the mid-80’s—it turned out that the new non-Jewish owners were less sensitive to Jewish characters. Still, truly Jewish themes remain rare. Notable have been shows like Brooklyn Bridge and State Of Grace, which centered on Jewish family life. Seinfeld was in a class by itself in terms of popularity and the comedian didn’t change his Jewishy name, but the late NBC President Brandon Tartikoff only gave it a four episode commitment and insisted that the Larry David-created character of George Costanza be Italian (at least officially).

While exploring this history of self-repression, Zurawik also turns a spotlight on the familiar categories prime time Jewish characters seem to fall into when they do appear: the funny, yet not so attractive sidekick (see Rhoda Morgenstern, Buddy Sirell, George Costanza); the overbearing crazy mothers (Ida Morgenstern, Sylvia Fine, Mrs. Costanza); and a host of Jewish American Princesses, silent husbands, and many neurotic-obsessives who can’t take care of themselves. Good luck finding a married Jewish couple on TV—if anything, prime time teaches that marrying a Gentile solves everything, as demonstrated by Bridget Loves Bernie, The Nanny, and Mad About You. Of course, sitcom characters are meant to be flawed and eccentric, not models for real life; that’s what makes them funny. Still, though the climate has changed, the above freaks and loudmouths are still the rule when it comes to Jews on TV, rather than the exception.

Why? A friend of mine from New York (not with a mustache) suggested to me that TV shows about Jews will never sell because anti-Semitism is still as strong as ever and America, by and large, hates the Jews. And the Jews who go into TV are there to make money, so they won’t fight the trend. I guess there is no business like show business—at times, everything about it is appalling. I still admire and remain touched by those, many of whom are interviewed and profiled in Prime Time Jews, who try to break the implied rules and create entertainment that will touch people deeply and change the way they think. 

Those who continue to fight the good fight in show biz are only able to do so because of their deep respect for the champions who have come before them. Many of these champions, as inspiring as they are hilarious, are on display in Seriously Funny, Gerald Nachman’s study of the rise of the rebel comedians during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Kings of comedy like Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Nichols and May, Bill Cosby, and Tom Lehrer are just few of the groundbreaking artists profiled. Like Zurawik, Nachman has a tremendous passion for his subject. He opens a treasure chest full of stories, interviews, comic material, and personal histories of the artists who burst onto the scene and influenced America while making us laugh. Nachman offers a fully human view of the people inside the performers; their backgrounds are often as interesting as their work.

American comedy had its beginnings, of course, in vaudeville, and so many of its early practitioners were Jews—their success in comedy being one of the riches of a culture that has been able to turn darkness into light. These earliest comedians were shaped by thousands of hours on stages from coast to coast, mining humor from jokes that were not tied to personal experience or the issues of the day, and often lifted out of joke books. For them, it wasn’t what you said, but how you delivered the material. Take Milton Berle’s nickname, “The Thief of Bad Gag”…please. Nathan Greenberg, Benny Kubelski, and Julius Marx were just three of the Jewish men who became comedy legends during this period, as George Burns, Jack Benny, and Groucho Marx.

During the 50s a new style was born. Comedians like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce started talking politics, offering social and political satire instead of hokey gags. The home of this comedy renaissance was a San Francisco basement brick-walled music club called “the hungry I,” where Sahl would come on stage and produce his act from the pages of a rolled up newspaper he carried. Sahl’s casual storytelling style changed everything.

Lenny Bruce, meanwhile, was “The Elvis Of Stand-Up”: he marshaled the language of comedy to attack American social and sexual hypocrisies that continue to this day. During one of his obscenity trials he is quoted as saying, “Please don’t lock up these words.” He was the last person in the United States to be prosecuted for saying a four-letter word.

Many of the comedians who followed Sahl and Bruce were satirists, a type we hardly see anymore in our culture, and certainly not in popular entertainment. The wit of satire has given way to the cynicism of today. Satire was born out of love—in order to satirize you have to care about what you’re satirizing. One of the kings of satirical music was a witty Harvard math professor, Tom Lehrer, who wrote songs about everything from racism to the elements in the periodic table. Looking back, he says, “Today audiences applaud, hoot and whistle but they don’t laugh…The decline of literacy explains the decline of satire…Irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness.”

While the history in Seriously Funny is compelling, one of the pleasures of Nachman’s book is the opportunity it provides to become the audience again for some of our greatest performers, and to learn their secrets. I never knew, for example, that Nichols and May never wrote out their sketches, nor did the brilliant storyteller Jean Shepherd write his. A flood of images came back to me as I read about a time when comedy was listened to, live and on record albums. Early on, Bob Newhart had a partner and the routines he wrote had two parts. When his partner backed out, Newhart cleverly adapted his routines by using a telephone on stage and letting the audience infer the other end of the conversation.

In the light of FCC rule changes and deregulation, a book like this is the best kind of history lesson and an antidote to the Starbuckization of our entertainment landscape. Stan Freeberg, Woody Allen, Ernie Kovacs, the Smothers Brothers, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Jonathan Winters, Godfrey Cambridge, David Frye, Bob & Ray, Bill Cosby: you’ll meet them and laugh all over again. Seriously Funny is a tribute to self-expression and comedy innovation; entertaining and thoughtful, soulful and witty, it’s a reminder of why so many of us Jews are in this business in the first place.