Jewish Jazz

...Recently, the British musicologist Deryck Cooke concluded a profound study of music as language by warning: "When the language of music is finally deciphered, some terrible secrets may be revealed, not only about the particular composer, but about humanity at large.' To this distinguished scholar, the Sick comic might reply, "Yaas, baby, some of our cats is already out of the bag...

...Sick comedy has given vast numbers of people all over the world a new slant on just those problems and issues—security, conformity, racial hatred, neurosis and the Bomb—that most agitate men today...

...in fact, Show Biz with its cult of personality, its blatantly phoney treatment of the audience (who have always been a "wonderful" audience), its cheap sentimentality and even cheaper morality has long been one of the favorite targets of Sick humor...

...Like Bop, Sick humor is largely a protest against and a parody of this slick commercial entertainment by men who could do the going-thing perfectly but who are too serious to settle for the fat wages of the funny man...

...Today the center of underground power has again shifted, this time away from the stereotyped figure of the jazzman (who has undercut his racial strength in the struggle for status and dignity) to a new voice—the strident, caustic chatter of the Sick comic...

...Doubtless any underground art must go the same route in modern America...

...For as Bruce ingenuously explains, everyone from New York is Jewish and anyone from out of town, even a Jew, is Gentile...

...Instead of the racket of angry horns, the little clubs, the coffee houses, the downtown lofts and pads, the haunts of the underground now rock with the tortured yet grateful laughter of listeners whose dammed-up anxieties and aggressions are discharged only by the outrageous satire and fantasy of the Sicks...

...IN the beginning, working behind the scenes at private gatherings where everyone was hip and there was no need to pull punches, the Sicks, like the Boppers up at Minton's in Harlem, perfected their art at after-hours jam sessions supported and inspired by that familycircle acceptance more valuable to the improvisor than any narcotic or stimulant...

...But the parallel extends much further than these surface resemblances suggest...

...It is endemic to a whole sub-culture, widely if surreptitiously practiced and hence well-understood and enjoyed...

...And, like Bop again, once Sick comedy came into the open (Mort Sahl's first appearance at the hungry i in San Francisco dates back to 1953), it was instantly recognized as a breakthrough, a radical new approach that set the whole comedy business in an uproar...

...Immediately, there was the usual storm of protest, not only from outraged listeners and square critics, but from the old-time, bigmoney professionals, who saw it as a threat to their power and an embarrassingly naked expression of forces they had long since come to terms with in their own work through disguise and repression (remember Sid Caesar's "Japanese" films with characters like Takah Mischugah...

...Instead of coming on suavely dressed and wellgroomed, he walks out in shabby clothes, unkempt and beat...

...But Variety was right and wrong in precisely the same way as were Metronome and Down Beat in the early days of Bop: right in predicting trouble (Bruce has been arrested seven times during the past year, four times for obscenity...

...With its alienated vision, its in-group idiom and its free-wheeling improvisatory methods, the new comedy is obviously a parallel as well as a successor to jazz...

...Jazz is much more than a hip way of improvising music...

...Like Bop, whose greatest figures emerged from the big, commercial Negro swing bands, Sick comedy grew out of the immensely popular commercial humor—radio, movies, night clubs—of the '30s and '40s (also dominated by Jews), which was pure entertainment directed at a mass audience, and consequently timid, bland, and highly conventionalized...

...Like jazz, Sick comedy is a folk art, not merely the invention of certain individuals, or even a clique...

...it assumed a conventional way of seeing things musically and twisted this vision into an inverted image of itself...

...The Sicks, as with the Boppers before them, have been extremely successful within the limits appropriate to an in-group art...

...Behind Jewish jazz stretches one of the greatest comic traditions of modern times, beginning with Heine, the mordant exile, and descending through the Central European deflationary humor of the Viennese cabarets to the Weil-Brecht collaborations, the gibes of Bemelmans, Perelman and the other members of that "Jewish infected minority" condemned by Goebbels in 1938 for "jokes that cease to be jokes when they touch the holiest matters of the national life.' And just as Sick comedy stands in the same relation to the Jewish community as jazz once did to the Negro community—not a simple, open relationship but one that is oblique and clouded with shame— so its brief history reproduces almost exactly the familiar story of Be-Bop...

...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman Jewish Jazz Every so often an underground art—the intense imaginative expression of some regional or minority ethos—comes to the surface of American culture and captures the attention of the nation by its novelty and power...

...In the translation of values, the "spade""fay" polarization has been replaced in Sick comedy by the Jew-Gentile distinction...

...In the '40s, for instance, the switchblade cruelty of Be-Bop shocked a country that liked its music happy and swinging and set the imaginations of thousands whirling around the mythic figure of the wild, way-out Negro jazzman, blowing chorus after impassioned chorus on a glittering horn before hurling himself into a black abyss of drugs, violence and sudden death...

...Today the squares have fallen back on the explanation that people go to the clubs just to be shocked...

...Lenny Bruce's whole act can be regarded as a total parody of the Show Biz performer...

...Where once the Negro was a living symbol of the conflict between man's will to live and the oppressive, punitive forces of society, so today the Jew with his hang-ups, his self-doubt and self-irony, his awkward alienated stance has become a symbol of a far more pathetic, because less hopeful and ambitious, conflict: the struggle to maintain identity for the individual in a mass culture...

...instead of carefully clarifying every move and joke so that even the most retarded member of the crowd can understand him, he constantly speaks in dialogue, leaving out the "he said," "she said," often mumbles and slurs his words, and on occasion even drops a routine in mid-course if it drags him...

...However Sick humor may strike other people, it strikes Jews with the shock of recognition—it is Jewish jazz...

...Louis Armstrong said the Boppers were crazy men peddling hate...

...This was the age when rebellious Americans—black or white, hip or beat, idiot or intellectual—fastened their fantasies on the Bop "saint," Charlie Parker, finding a voice for their rage and ecstasy in the acid beauty of Bird's music...

...Unlike the traditional Jewish comic, say, Jack Benny, who never for one moment allows the audience to glimpse his Jewish identity, even going to the extreme of presenting as his comic foil an outrageous stereotype like Schlepperman, Bruce, along with other Sicks such as Mel Brooks, constantly makes his Jewish identity paramount...

...He does this through the use of Yiddish expressions, frequent references to Jewish mores, imitations of Jewish speech and mannerisms, and, most important, by making the audience feel that they too are Jews—even when they are not...

...Jazz came out of filth and squalor and misery, and it is precisely the musical symbols of these qualities that are most prized in jazz—the "funky," "blue," "bad," "tough," "terrible," recklessly "high" or "crazy" qualities...

...One great difference between this Jewish jazz and Negro jazz, a difference that may prove decisive, is the extreme exposure of the comic as contrasted to the protective mantle of abstraction that covers the musician...

...His material, as it stands, is not for public performance...

...Variety, in a masterpiece of understatement, wrote of Lenny Bruce: "Bruce makes a mistake in his comedy by attacking or satirizing so broad a range of subjects that he will certainly antagonize somebody if he were to play a large enough audience...

...many commercial comics reacted the same way to the Sicks...

...One effect of this symbolic representativeness is that the humor of the Jew, which for centuries has enabled the alienated to survive hostile environments, is now enabling millions of people to endure the sense of helplessness engendered by this terrifying time, millions who have no connection with the Jewish community and are not even aware that what they are laughing at is Jewish humor...

...Jewishness, then, has the same ambivalent importance in Sick comedy that being Negro has traditionally had in the world of jazz...

...Much the same thing characterizes the new comedy...

...Not for public performance"— one would think that after the long experience of jazz people would understand how folk arts function and would not be misled by their dirty faces...

...essentially it is, or was, the life of the Negro people abstracted to those basic emotions and attitudes that have deep meaning for everyone who, regardless of color or class, considers himself an outsider...

...wrong in thinking that the public would not understand...

...Just as the formula for jazz is hip improvisation ("blowing") plus the Negro soul, so Sick comedy is comic verbal improvisation ("spritzing") plus the feelings and attitudes, the unique but universally viable vision of a people—the urban American Jews...

...instead of ingratiating himself with the audience, he treats them contemptuously, like prosperous whores...

...Bop was protest and parody...

...But what makes the similarity between Sick comedy and Bop even more striking is the common techniques arising out of similar conditions...