Recently, I watched myself on the big screen at TIFF, in a documentary directed by Alan Zweig called When Jews Were Funny.
I had forgotten I’d given Zweig an interview in the spring. I get asked to do a lot of pontificating on comedy for documentaries, few of which ever see the light of day. But the award-winning Zweig is not your average documentarian.
His latest film uses an axiomatic starting point: the enormous influence of Jews on modern comedy. But the title illustrates the film’s contentiousness: When Jews Were Funny. The past tense implies that they no longer are, which might come as a shock to fans of Jon Stewart, Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman and Judd Apatow.
But Zweig isn’t just talking about Jewish performers. He’s talking about the Jewish people as a whole.
Slowly, as the movie progresses, a thesis begins to take shape: there was a time, which ended a generation ago, when Jewishness itself was funny and when any bubbe or zayde had a humour about themselves and the world. And now, suggests Zweig, that world has vanished, leaving us poorer for it.
He lines up an impressive list of performers to explore the issue, beginning with the great Catskills comics: Shelley Berman, Shecky Greene and Jack Carter. Shockingly, at least to me, each of them vehemently denies being a “Jewish” comic. I can only think they mean that they didn’t tell stories that ended in a Yiddish punchline or engage in dialect jokes. But the other markers of Jewish humour are all there: the paranoia, the melancholy, the ambivalence about body issues, the mistrust of institutions.
Toronto native Howie Mandel is a standout. His intelligence and keen analysis are a stinging rebuke to critics who thought he was just a guy who put a rubber glove on his head. I also found Mark Schiff to be fascinating, a former stand-up turned writer.
“Super Dave” Osborne, a.k.a. Bob Einstein, gives Zweig an argumentative interview, which is both hilarious and insightful.
Simon Rakoff, another Toronto interviewee, is profound and witty, but his withering gaze at Zweig’s off-camera questions often speaks louder than his words.
Zweig’s presence as an interviewer grows as the story unfolds, and we begin to see some of the issues that drive his work. He’s recently married to a non-Jewish woman and has a two-year-old daughter. How does he pass on his grandparents’ culture when that world has virtually disappeared?
I went to high school in Toronto with Zweig, and I never thought of him as being sentimental. But it becomes clear that he misses not just some golden age of Jewish comedy, but of a Jewish lifestyle that was tinged by a Yiddish, European consciousness.
There are a lot of old Jewish jokes in the film, if you like that sort of thing. I found them unfunny and exactly what a new generation of Jewish comics is rebelling against. In this way, the old Catskillians have a point when they reject the “Jewish comic” label.
But blood is thicker than water. After the great Shelley Berman denies any Jewish influences repeatedly throughout the film, he breaks down as he tells the story of losing his 13-year-old son so many years ago. Tears welling up in his eyes, Berman sings a rendition of an old shtetl song in perfect Yiddish. Point made. Roll credits.
Post City Magazines’ humour columnist, Mark Breslin is the founder of Yuk Yuk’s comedy clubs and the author of several books.