An unmissable gift book, A Small Book of Jewish Comedians is a perfect (please God) post-pandemic pick-me-up In 1978, Time magazine estimated that around 80 percent of professional American comics were Jewish, and Jewish humor remains a foundation stone of American popular culture and humor. This book is not intended as a definitive tome but is instead a joyful and irreverent celebration of great photography and some of the greatest one-liners of the 20th century, ripe in satire, anecdote, self-deprecation and irony. Featuring photographs of comedians such as Larry David, Fran Lebowitz, Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Sarah Silverman, Joan Rivers and George Burns, the book's portraits are accompanied by one-liners such as: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." (Groucho Marx); "When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick." (George Burns); "It was a Jewish porno film ... one minute of sex and nine minutes of guilt." (Joan Rivers); "You know who wears sunglasses inside? Blind people and assholes." (Larry David); "I am not the type who wants to go back to the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel." (Fran Lebowitz).
Lawrence Epstein's The Haunted Smile tackles a subject both poignant and delightful: the story of Jewish comedians in America. For the past century and more, American comedy has drawn its strength and soul from the comic genius of Jewish performers and writers. An incomplete listing of names makes the point: The Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, Fanny Brice, George Burns, Milton Berle, Jackie Mason, Joan Rivers, Rodney Dangerfield, Mel Brooks, Alan King, Mort Sahl, Buddy Hackett, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Andy Kaufman, Richard Belzer, Jerry Seinfeld. These men and women, among others, form the canon of Jewish-American comedy. In the words of the Detroit Jewish News, The Haunted Smile "offers us a deep and subtle understanding of how Jewish culture and American openness gave birth to a new style of entertainment." Often the best way to illuminate a point is to recount some of these comedians' own brilliant routines, and Epstein uses the comedian's work to great effect, making for a book that is both a thoughtful work of history and a great deal of fun.
Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America is the first study of stand-up comedy as a form of art. John Limon appreciates and analyzes the specific practice of stand-up itself, moving beyond theories of the joke, of the comic, and of comedy in general to read stand-up through the lens of literary and cultural theory. Limon argues that stand-up is an artform best defined by its fascination with the abject, Julia Kristeva’s term for those aspects of oneself that are obnoxious to one’s sense of identity but that are nevertheless—like blood, feces, or urine—impossible to jettison once and for all. All of a comedian’s life, Limon asserts, is abject in this sense. Limon begins with stand-up comics in the 1950s and 1960s—Lenny Bruce, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Elaine May—when the norm of the profession was the Jewish, male, heterosexual comedian. He then moves toward the present with analyses of David Letterman, Richard Pryor, Ellen DeGeneres, and Paula Poundstone. Limon incorporates feminist, race, and queer theories to argue that the “comedification” of America—stand-up comedy’s escape from its narrow origins—involves the repossession by black, female, queer, and Protestant comedians of what was black, female, queer, yet suburbanizing in Jewish, male, heterosexual comedy. Limon’s formal definition of stand-up as abject art thus hinges on his claim that the great American comedians of the 1950s and 1960s located their comedy at the place (which would have been conceived in 1960 as a location between New York City or Chicago and their suburbs) where body is thrown off for the mind and materiality is thrown off for abstraction—at the place, that is, where American abjection has always found its home.
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award “Dauber deftly surveys the whole recorded history of Jewish humour.” —Economist In a major work of scholarship that explores the funny side of some very serious business (and vice versa), Jeremy Dauber examines the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing Jewish comedy into “seven strands”—including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar—he traces the ways Jewish comedy has mirrored, and sometimes even shaped, the course of Jewish history. Dauber also explores the classic works of such masters of Jewish comedy as Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, and Larry David, among many others.
"A feast for the eyes...bringing alive a long vanished world that's still eerily present."--Daniel Czitrom, New York Post The premiere national Jewish newspaper has opened its never-before-seen archives, revealing a photographic landscape of Jews in the twentieth century and beyond. This extraordinary volume features classic photographs of the history one has learned to associate with the Jewish Daily Forward--Lower East Side pushcarts, Yiddish theater, labor rallies--along with gems no one would expect. The book also features essays by Leon Wieseltier, Roger Kahn, and Deborah Lipstadt, and a rousing introduction by Pete Hamill.
This comprehensive collection of portraiture of comedians born before 1930 includes the famous (Milton Berle, Groucho Marx, Jerry Lewis, Mel Brooks, Jack Benny), the not-so-famous (Benny Rubin, Shelly Berman) and the largely unknown (Al Kelly, Menasha Skulnik). The Reuben Award-winning Friedman presents a thorough visual history of these greatest Borscht-Belt comedians.
Born Julius Marx in 1890, the brilliant comic actor who would later be known as Groucho was the most verbal of the famed comedy team, the Marx Brothers, his broad slapstick portrayals elevated by ingenious wordplay and double entendre. In his spirited biography of this beloved American iconoclast, Lee Siegel views the life of Groucho through the lens of his work on stage, screen, and television. The author uncovers the roots of the performer’s outrageous intellectual acuity and hilarious insolence toward convention and authority in Groucho’s early upbringing and Marx family dynamics. The first critical biography of Groucho Marx to approach his work analytically, this fascinating study draws unique connections between Groucho’s comedy and his life, concentrating primarily on the brothers’ classic films as a means of understanding and appreciating Julius the man. Unlike previous uncritical and mostly reverential biographies, Siegel’s “bio-commentary” makes a distinctive contribution to the field of Groucho studies by attempting to tell the story of his life in terms of his work, and vice versa.
Bob Mankoff grew up Jewish in Queens, NY in the 1950s and 1960s. As a kid, he visited the Borscht Belt and reveled in the hilarious performances of some of the best Jewish comedians such as Jerry Lewis, Buddy Hackett, and Rodney Dangerfield, among others. These early experiences helped shape Mankoff's view of life and led him to become a creative master practitioner of humor and cartoons. He started his career unexpectedly by quitting a Ph.D. program in experimental psychology at The City University of New York in 1974 and submitting his cartoons to the New Yorker. Three years and over 2,000 cartoons later, he finally made the magazine and has since published over 950 cartoons. He has devoted his life to discovering just what makes us laugh and seeks every outlet to do so, from developing The New Yorker's web presence to founding The Cartoon Bank, a business devoted to licensing cartoons for use in newsletters, textbooks, magazines and other media. In this new book, Have I Got a Cartoon for You! this successful cartoonist, speaker and author, presents his favorite Jewish cartoons. In his foreword to this entertaining collection, Mankoff shows how his Jewish heritage helped him to become a successful cartoonist, examines the place of cartoons in the vibrant history of Jewish humor, and plumbs Jewish thought, wisdom and shtik for humorous insights. Mankoff has written: "I always think that it's strange that the Jews, The People of the Book, eventually became much better known as The People of the Joke. Strange because laughter in the Old Testament is not a good thing: When God laughs, you're toast. If you say, 'Stop me if you've heard this one, ' he does for good." A major influence on his cartoons about religion derives from Jewish culture's disputatiousness, the questioning everything just for the hell of it and then the questioning of the questioning to be even more annoying. He recalls: "When, I was first dating my wife, who is not Jewish, we once were having what I thought was an ordinary conversation and she said, 'Why are you arguing with me?' I replied, 'I'm not arguing, I'm Jewish.' I thought that was clever. She didn't. Some humor scholars claim this stems from the practice in the Talmud of pilpul, which Leo Rosten has described as 'unproductive hair-splitting that is employed not so much to radiate clarity ... as to display one's own cleverness.' I go along with that except I like to think that some clarity and cleverness are not mutually exclusive. Anyway, that's my aim in cartoons like these. Now, am I worried that these jokes will bring His wrath down upon me down with a bolt from the blue. Not really, but every time there's a thunderstorm, I hide in the cellar."
"Sixty years later, Jaffe’s classic still strikes a chord, this time eerily prescient regarding so many of the circumstances surrounding sexual harassment that paved the way toward the #MeToo movement." -Buzzfeed When Rona Jaffe’s superb page-turner was first published in 1958, it changed contemporary fiction forever. Some readers were shocked, but millions more were electrified when they saw themselves reflected in its story of five young employees of a New York publishing company. Almost sixty years later, The Best of Everything remains touchingly—and sometimes hilariously—true to the personal and professional struggles women face in the city. There’s Ivy League Caroline, who dreams of graduating from the typing pool to an editor’s office; naïve country girl April, who within months of hitting town reinvents herself as the woman every man wants on his arm; and Gregg, the free-spirited actress with a secret yearning for domesticity. Jaffe follows their adventures with intelligence, sympathy, and prose as sharp as a paper cut.
