This just in: A lot of comics are Jews

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on December 28th, 2007

We know– we were stunned, too.

CNN.com is running an article in their “mental_floss” section entitled “Long line of Jewish comedians ahead of Seinfeld.”

Handed down since Moses was kvetching about having to cross the desert in his bare feet, Jewish humor emanated from Eastern Europe where the Hebrews overcame some seriously hellacious circumstances on the way to the Promised Land. “Laughter through tears,” they called it.

They go on to profile ten “groundbreaking Jewish comedians.”

Of course, this comes as no surprise to anyone even passingly familiar with the art or the history of standup comedy. And early readers of this magazine are especially aware of the role that Jews played in standup– we have cited on more than one occasion what we believe to be the definitive work on the subject, Lawrence J. Epstein’s “The Haunted Smile,” which contains the following:

The embarrassingly rich crop of American Jewish comedians defies common sense. In 1979, for example, Time estimated that whereas Jews made up only 3 percent of the American population, fully 80 percent of professional comedians were Jewish.

The real story is the startling transformation of the business of standup since the Time estimate– the business underwent a swift and thorough diversification in the ensuing ten years. Yet the influence of the legion of Jewish comedians lives on– it could be argued that we’re all Jewish comedians. Nearly all modern comics, be they Irish-American or African-American, impressionist or monologist, male or female, can trace their comedy roots back to early Jewish performers. They are nearly all, wittingly or unwittingly, influenced by the likes of Al Jolson, Henny Youngman, Myron Cohen, Milton Berle or Weber and Fields.

Another fascinating observation on the subject comes from Gary Giddins’ excellent collection of articles from 1992, “Faces In The Crowd.” In his 1985 essay on Jack Benny, he writes:

Before 1900, Jewish grotesquerie was a familiar ingredient in the entertainment world, but Jewish humor that wasn’t self-deflating simply didn’t exist on the American stage. “There were plenty of excellent Jewish performers,” according to vaudeville’s chronicler Douglas Gilbert, “but they were doing Dutch, blackface, or singing and dancing acts. Some of them were good Irish comedians. Indeed, Weber and Fields at one time did a neat Irish act.”

In just over a century, the situation is reversed– in the past, we had Jewish performers imitating Dutch and Irish comics. Now we have comics of every ethnicity and nationality doing essentially Jewish schtick.

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