In the years after World War II, there was a lot of Jewish humor. People in small towns in the Midwest heard words like schmaltz and saw The Goldbergs on television, to say nothing of late-night shows with Borscht Belt comedians. Television was, even more than movies, a precursor to the internet in that it provided a way to share experiences. (Unlike the 'net, it kept people in large groups that were fairly heterogenous, rather than shattering them into smaller and smaller fragments.)
That humor came not just from the faces of comedy, the Milton Berles and the Marx Brothers, but from the hands and heads of writers and producers and studio heads, many of whom were Jewish. At the same time, a new powerful dictator appeared, Stalin, s successor, as it were to Hitler. American began to feel under domestic threat from Communism. It was real – they got our atomic secrets – but people became so frightened that it moved into paranoia. You've heard the phrase about "Communists under the bed"? It came out of that era, when congressional inquiries began peeking into the lives of celebrities and non-celebrities to see if they'd ever even been Communist, a Communist sympathizer or even attended meetings of groups interested in Communism or socialism. Jobs were lost, careers ruined, families torn apart – it was the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his much-feared hearings. "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" rang from television sets where they were televised live. His hearings on Communism in the U.S. Army led to the immortal words coming from Joseph Welch, the chief counsel for the Army, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Four years of McCarthy's witch hunting began to crumble in that moment.
This is the world in which A Jewish Joke is set. Bernie Lutz is a writer, a guy who's done well, and is about to do better – one of his films is having a big premiere that night, he's got things in the works for Danny Kaye and the Marx Brothers…it's a long way from Newark, where he grew up poor and met his writing partner. Phil Johnson is Bernie in the one-man play which he co-wrote with Marni Freedman. We meet Bernie in his office at MGM Studios, excited about the premiere, grateful for his success, and wondering why his partner hasn't shown up. Stacks of frayed index cards sit next to the typewriter on his desk, scripts in the work hang from hooks. The phone rings incessantly, which is how we learn most of what's happening. Bernie generally answers it with something funny, usually related to what he's been telling himself, in the thinking-out-loud mode of the rest of the dialogue. Every so often he whips out one of the index cards, all of which contain jokes, and reads it to us. Most of them are very old jokes that all but the youngest audience members will have heard. (Except maybe the one about the woman in the Garment District, at least for me.)
But this is, indeed, a drama about comedy, and the phone calls begin to hint and then announce a coming storm: Bernie's been named in an anti-Communist publication as a ComSymp, what they used to call a fellow traveler. And there's this repeated but vague reference to his elderly father. Where did all this come from? What can he do?
Johnson's Bernie is slightly out of kilter. He seems more nervous at the start of the play, constantly fiddling with his glasses, than he is as the problem evolves during the course of the day. There's relatively little variability in his intensity, although that may be a decision by David Ellerstein, the director. Details overall are also slightly off-center – what's with the cat? And if he's so proud of the mink stole he's bought his wife to present her with before they walk the red carpet at the premiere – not, as he acknowledges, that anyone cares about the writers – why is the fur ripped?
Johnson and Freedman make the case that Jewish humor is the way they've gotten through millennia of trouble, and surely as a response to it, the sort of gallows humor that health care workers so often exhibit. That's true. But the combination doesn't quite deliver here.
If there are echoes of contemporary events…well, it’s too soon to say how that’s going to end up.
A Jewish Joke
through December 10
The New Jewish Theatre
The Wool Family Studio
Jewish Community Center Staenberg Family Complex
2 Millstone Campus Drive, Creve Coeur