Shine on, Harvey Bloom

...And this was not only true for Jews: non-Jewish youths with families ol longer residence in the United States than my own were no longer in tercsted in the standbys of choirs, glue clubs, and barbershop quartets...

...Nowadays, the general American population is hardly more familiar with the original verse of "Greensleeves" than Jews are...

...Jews represented normality, quotidian life, the utterly prosaic—quite an ironic achievement for an ethnic minority that represents less than 3 percent of the country's population...

...Sherman, an out-of-work Hollywood television producer (he and a colleague developed the game show "I've Got a Secret"), had been entertaining his friends for years by setting comic Jewish-oriented lyrics to popular songs like "There Is Nothing Like a Dame": We got herring sweet and sour, We got pickles old and young...

...A Jewish speech professor bets a friend that, with his coaching on the pronunciation of Hnglish words, she'll be president of Hadassah within six months...

...Oh it's grand on the streets where we live...

...What ain't we got...

...A Jewish name was enough to make its owner a comic figure in a joke, a story, a film, a television show, or a song...

...today Jewish astronauts ride the space shuttle and there is nothing the least bit dissonant about that...

...and, to the music of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic...

...This comment reflected the belated recognition of the Jew ish role in American culture: since then...

...We got corned beef and salami and a lot of tasty tongue...

...In My Son, the Folk Singer and the seven albums that followed, Sherman won most of his laughs by putting Jews into unaccustomed roles as heroes: the Jewish astronaut ("Shine on, Harvey Bloom"), the Jewish gunslinger and the Jewish Don Juan ("The Kiss of Meyer...

...We got Philadelphia cream cheese in a little wooden box...

...American society had begun to doubt the conventional notions of heroism and of what constituted admirable character...

...In Sherman's songs, Jews transformed glorious situations like the winning of the West and space (light into pedestrian ones...

...making it less Jewish...

...The appeal of these songs was peculiar...

...This is such a predictable lyric that the live album's concert audience began laughing after the second line...

...For decades American Jewish comedians had been satirizing Jewish life, but their jokes had been directed to primarily Jewish audiences in New York City and the Catskills...

...A musical based on his song parodies recently enjoyed a seven-month run Off-Broadway...

...Sherman wrote (but was never able to record) an entirely new set of lyrics to My Fair Ladx...

...Jewish delicacies were funny...

...Ashegnes her a short course on Jewish lifestyle, she asks him where Jews live...

...alherthan being an example of Jewish self-hatred, the songs expressed pride in Jews* apartness from the dominant culture, while at the same time celebrating their subversive influence upon it...

...What were the conventions of the genre...

...i. 17...

...We ain't got lox...

...Playboy Press published his rambling, myopic book...

...American culture has been forced to rccogni7e the many other cultures that have fed and continue to feed into it...

...moving the story from London to New York's Lower Fast Side...

...On the jacket of MxSon, the Folk Singer, Sherman declares: "These songs are what would happen if Jewish people wrote all the songs—which in fact they do...

...Hello Fadduh," an anthem of summer camp misery based on the nineteenth-century Italian composer Amilcarc Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours," Sherman went into a decline, both personal and professional It wasn't so much that his shuck was no longer funny, but that he changed his shtick...

...Jewish ways of speaking were funny—well, enough already, you get my point...

...Jews became more defensive, feeling less secure in the American urban society of the past two decades At the same time, the ongoing assimilation of Jews into American life also enervated Sherman's shtick...

...He replies: We have often walked West End Avenue And you'll find us on a Parkway known as Mosholu Living gaily there Like Israeli there...

...and Charlie Brown, great film klutzes like Jerry Lewis and the bumbling cops, bumbling spies, bumbling sailors, bumbling soldiers, bumbling cowboys, and bumbling astronauts that populated our television sitcoms—shows that were written largely by Jewish writers...

...Harvey Bloom," Sherman wished the Jewish lunar explorer "a lovely seder in your crater...

...The time I'm thinking about is the early 1960s, the formative years of my own Jewish childhood, around 1962, say, when I was eight and trying to learn what was funny and what was not...

...The Rape of the A.I3.E...

...When we look back at the early 1960s and recall America's confidence in itself, in its large cars, its sparkling technology, and its moral goodness, we may forget that many of our entertainments stressed the lovability of the loser...

...The antiheroes of my childhood included the 1962 Mcts (40 wins, 120 losses), Alfred E. Neuman...

...In 1973...

...More or less a view of the sexual revolution through the eyes of a middleaged Hollywood cynic, the book is a messy hybrid of Lenny Bruce and Charles Reich...

...Or was it a function of Jewish confidence and security in America...

...This was not such a bad thing...

...At the time the fastest-selling item in the history of the record industry...

...Modern man was Jewish man and modern man looked silly in the guise of the old heroes...

...Hven the old Jewish accent that Sherman sometimes employed has fallen passe— Israel's Six-Day War may have had something to do with reversing the image of the noiiheroic Jew...

...I didn't know half the songs on which Sherman's parodies were based until I was in 15 my twenties...

...Perhaps it Sherman had lived longer he might have better understood the transformations being effected throughout American society Since the late 1960s, the meaning of American Jewishness has been rewritten, lor Jews and non-Jews alike...

...Near the goys on the streets where they live...

...After his 1963 hit "Hello Muddah...

...While Jews before World War 11 were associated with a hellbent-on-success, I-Can-Get-It-for-You-Wholesale ethic, afterwards they st(K)d at the heart of failure, the most prominent victims of the twentieth century...

...Sir Greenbaum, was sung to the music of "Greensleeves": Said he: "Forsooth, 'tis a sorry plight That engenders my attitude blue-ish...

...The society had even begun to doubt the virtues of success...

...the show bombed...

...When he approached Warner Brothers in 1962 about recording these songs he was told that, because of copyright problems with composers who preferred the original lyrics, he should employ music in the public domain...

...We've got Great Neck men...

...Sherman made Jewish humor about Jewish people mainstream humor...

...My Son, the Folk Singer expressed Jews' apartness from American culture, at a time when the culture itself was about to go counter...

...This is not to say that Sherman was especially quick 10 embrace the counterculture, his later albums included dumb, cutesy generation-gap novelties like "Pop Hates the Beatles...

...These gunslingers and knights were not from our past, nor from a past that still seemed relevant to the larger American audience of the 1960s...

...There, a flower girl struggles to make herself understood: she speaks English too well...

...When Sherman and the other Jewish comics of the era began making their Jewishness a key element of their acts, they opened the way to the contemporary acceptance of multiculturalism...

...Jewish writers and comedians like Sid Caesar and Milton Berle heavily populated the television industry, but the subjects of their wit were rarely Jewish...

...what's a greensleeve, anyway...

...Strange new noses there...

...The modern information age devalued brawn and physical prowess...

...In "Shine On...

...The Jew's historic alienation from gentile society finally came into its own in modern times, when even-one became alienated...

...Friends of Moses there...

...Were Jews and non-Jews laughing at the same things...

...but the 1973 Yoni Kippur War, with its heavy Israeli losses and its ambiguous outcome, had a greater impact on the Jewish psyche Here in America...

...The fact that many listeners 16 besides myself barely recognized the songs on which Sherman's parodies were based—including, tor heaven's sake...

...He also edited and wrote the introduction to Christopher Marlev's Philadelphia (Fordham University Press...

...And why did / laugh...

...Jewish mannerisms were funny...

...He could kvctch as easily as Sir Greenbaum, "All day with the mighty sword and the mighty steed and the mighty lance/ All day with the heavy shield and a pair of aluminum pants...

...Sherman gained weight and his health suffered...

...By demonstrating how hilarious the Jew might look in classic heroic situations...

...In October of that year an overweight, bespectacled, nasal-voiced comedian named Allan Sherman produced a record album that parodied popular American songs by making them about Jews and Jewish situations...

...a tango...

...The Battle Hymn of the Republic" -suggests how distant we found ourselves from the supposed center of the culture...

...vah"), transform the "The Yellow Rose of Texas" into "I'm Melvin Rose of Texas...

...tell the story of garment cutter Harry Lewis, who died while "trampling through the warehouse where the drapes of Roth were stored...

...My Son, the Folk Singer ultimately sold 1,250.000 copies and supplied the soundtrack (or at least the lyrics) to my childhood and adolescence...

...His moment passed, as did a good deal of the money he had earned in his early celebrity...

...It took him three weeks to turn the Harry Belafonte hit "Matilda" into "My Zelda," relocate the gunfight of "The Streets of Laredo" to "The Streets of Miami" ("I shot and Sam crumpled, just like a piece of halKEN KALFUS \v criticism has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and the Village Voice Literary Supplement...

...a few months before his death...

...And just lately we've been sneaking into Darien...

...We've got Scarsdale men...

...Jewish humor of the era suggested that virtue could be found in intellect and street-wise craftiness...

...Did the success of Sherman's lampoons of urban Jewish mores represent the emergence of Jewish self-hatred...

...It was funny...

...Sherman demonstrated how irrelevant any of us would look, thereby undermining the values that those situations celebrated...

...When in I96S NBC signed him to do a television special, the network reponedly asked him to eschew ethnic references...

...The lament of Sherman's knight...

...Allan Sherman became a household name...

...which declared the end of the "American Puritan Hthic...

...After twenty-one years of marriage, he and his wife Dee divorced in 1966...

...Jews (then, not now) associated themselves with a lack of knightly heroism...

...At first glance it is not clear why an ethnic minority would enjoy humor that mocked it, and why it would want to share this humor with the majority group...

...Said he: "I don't want to be a knight That's no job for a boy who is Jewish...

...What was so funny...