Laughing Like a Jew
By Chris Hanna
Julia Child often laughed about her experience being raised as
a child on tuna noodle casserole in Southern California. It wasn’t until she
was in her twenties and sat down to her first Parisian meal that she knew in
her heart that she was actually French. Myself, I didn’t have to wait that late
to discover my hidden identity - and it didn’t arrive with a foreign meal. No,
all it took me as a young boy was a television dial and a typical evening in
front of the TV with my Irish American family: Leave it Beaver, Gilligan’s
Island, The Beverly Hillbillies. Everyone
around me laughing loud -- and my wondering just what they found so funny.
Then one particular evening the dial got moved to a program
we didn’t usually watch, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and came to life right away. The show’s two bickering side
characters, Maury Amsterdam and Rosemarie, were my favorites. Their dry banter
seemed so much funnier than the over the top guffaws of most sit coms that I
thought their dialogue was the funniest set of lines ever written. I asked my
parents why more characters didn’t joke like that on the shows we watched and I
still remember my mother’s somewhat startled response:
“That’s Jewish
humor, sweetheart.”
The rest of the family was soon cackling again to Art
Carney’s antics on The Honeymooners,
but my mother’s explanation had been an inspiring springboard for me. Home
alone on sick days I soon discovered Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Groucho Marx, Jerry
Stiller, and my absolute all-time favorite: Burns
and Allen. George Burns’ wry comments to the camera, cigar in hand, drove
me to convulsing laughter every time. He
was dead serious, pausing only when absolutely necessary for a sly smile suggesting,
‘laugh now if you want,’ like a dentist giving permission for a quick rinse
between fillings. Somehow, by not trying to be at all funny, he was hilarious.
So I had a Jewish sense of humor. Who knew? And because laughs
were my passport through the countless discomforts of adolescence, I might as
well been Bar Mitvah’d at thirteen along with the rest of my Westchester
classmates.
By the time I entered my stage career years later, American
theater seemed to have lost its sense of humor; particularly its Jewish humor.
Regional theaters, like our wonderful Virginia Stage Company, had risen to
prominence and they were focused primarily on producing culturally significant
work. Back then comedy wasn’t considered cultural or significant unless written
before 1800 (another Lysistrata
anyone?) or by British playwrights. And
within that rarified world of theatrical art, everyone agreed on the importance
of banishing our public enemy number one: that old time Jewish jokester, Neil
Simon.
Neil Simon’s plays had earned big profits for Broadway
producers over decades but Artistic Directors at regional theaters considered
them pedestrian fluff. Audiences were
allowed rhyming couplets of Twelfth Night and the mindless quips of Private Lives but Neil Simon’s plays
were left to community and high school stages.
Styles change everywhere, of course, and the stage is no
exception. No change has made me happier within the theater world over the past
decade than the reevaluation of Neil Simon’s talent. Although written decades
past, his plays have never seemed more contemporary or funny than they do
today. Like any great master of Jewish
humor (including Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, who came along after Simon’s
heyday) Simon understood that stories
don’t have to be serious or funny. They
can be both, and that can happen at the same time. Simon’s humor comes from the confrontation
between human eccentricities and the realities of everyday living. What makes
them so unique to us these days is that they manage to stay so warm hearted,
even as they x ray the human soul. Witty banter doesn’t take away the tsuris
but it sure makes for a lot of fun.
For the characters of The
Odd Couple, as for George Burns and Groucho Marx before them, cigars can be
a big help too. I hope you can make it down to the Wells for our terrific
production.
