Jewish Comedy as a Love Language

It’s hard to say what about it is more charming to me, the hilarity of it or the inescapable Jewishness of it. Mel Brooks could be any man in my family.

HOST (REINER): Sir, could you give us the secret of your longevity?

2000 YEAR OLD MAN (BROOKS): Well, the major thing . . . the major thing . . . is that I never, ever, touch fried food.

HOST: . . .

2000 YEAR OLD MAN: I don’t eat it, I wouldn’t look at it, and I don’t touch it!

HOST: . . .

2000 YEAR OLD MAN: Oh, and never run for a bus. There’ll always be another!

(from Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks’s The 2000 Year Old Man)

*

I measure my relationship with my father using the unit of the bit. He and I were always cooking up goofy bits, bantering like a couple of vaudevillians, trading off straight man duties and deliveries of well-worn punch lines. We mined bits from every vein of comedic ore in our lives, be it his divorce, my divorce, or even his imminent death when the time came—a week before he died in the ICU, when I matter-of-factly told him he wasn’t allowed to go gentle into that good night, he laughed so hard that a nurse had to come hold his oxygen mask in place until he could collect himself. But the most common bit that we returned to a million times over was the hilarity of our shared Jewish heritage. Non-Jews were expected to bite their tongues and provide an enthusiastic audience to our endless riffing on stereotypes about Jews, stereotypes whose comedic potential we treasured even as they made our lives harder.

We were proud to be Jewish. We believed it said something about us: that we were hardier than the average WASP, smarter, and of course funnier. We weren’t observant, and our shared understanding of our Jewish background didn’t exceed the limits of what could have been recited in some Borscht Belt comic’s tight five, but we held a Jewish magnifying glass to our peculiarities with zeal. My father’s habit of falling asleep at the movie theater was Jewish, as was his insistence on standing a foot away from the television to watch it. If I did especially well in school, it was my Jewish smarts, and when I did poorly on a precalculus test, that was somehow my Jewish smarts, too, because as Jews we could be counted on to know that precalculus wasn’t important. (My father: “Precalculus, postcalculus, it’s all farkakte. Just don’t put me in a home.”) The content of our jokes didn’t matter, and the jokes didn’t need to make that much sense as long as we delivered them in a manner that I’d start to think of as Jewish, a hammy tone that I later learned had been more or less ripped off from Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s classic comedy routine The 2000 Year Old Man. And if my father were still alive, we’d cook up a bit about that, too, because what could be more Jewish than ripping off The 2000 Year Old Man for the sole purpose of making fun of your family members?

My father often said that I was his best friend, and he was certainly mine. So it made sense that our relationship should trawl the same ground that Jewish men’s closest friendships are forever trawling. Take Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner: Their seventy-year friendship was the most iconic example of the phenomenon I’m talking about. These Jewish men’s friendship began with a comedy partnership in the 1940s and lasted until Reiner’s death in 2020. During those seven decades of friendship, they famously ate dinner together nearly every night, loved each other so much and so publicly that much of Twitter’s reaction to Reiner’s death centered on people’s worry about Brooks’s subsequent loneliness. And, of course, they were comedy collaborators countless times.

When we gleefully launch into the same old routines, are we approaching that emotional work in an oblique way, or are we avoiding it?

Their most famous collaboration, the widely beloved series of comedy sketches The 2000 Year Old Man, is pure Borscht Belt. The premise of the sketch is that Mel Brooks is a 2,000-year-old (and very Jewish) man being interviewed about his life by Carl Reiner. It’s all big campy winks, exaggerated shtetl accent, and Brooks’s insistence on breaking the fourth wall for regular grins at the audience. It’s hard to say what about it is more charming to me, the hilarity of it or the inescapable Jewishness of it. Mel Brooks could be any man in my family. He could be my dad.

Everything I see in The 2000 Year Old Man repeats itself in my memory in outings with my father. Even in big groups, his natural tendency was to find a comedy partner to do bits with. Sometimes that partner would be me, and he and I would riff for his friends, who provided a game audience for our relentless vamping. Other times, he’d choose a buddy as a partner, inevitably another Jewish man who was equally fluent in the rhythms of his preferred comedy. My father mostly preferred socializing with other Jewish men, embarking on an endless string of Borscht Belt–style buddy acts that could go on for hours and were unfailingly, gut-bustingly funny.

And that’s to say nothing of the voice, the voice, that chipper 2000 Year Old Man accent that we Jews forever turn to when it’s time to make fun of ourselves. It’s all swallowed l’s and guttural r’s and Yiddish-inflected innuendo, like Tevye via the Marx Brothers. The emblematic funny sound of my life, that voice, and anytime I heard my dad gearing up to do it himself (usually heralding its onset with a warm-up groan or two), I knew I was in for a treat.

*

MY DAD: Say, Jim, you’re not Jewish, are you?

MY DAD’S FRIEND JIM: No, Bob, I’m not.

MY DAD: That’s nuts. Here you are with all your friends, and we’re all Jewish, and you’re not Jewish.

JIM: That’s right.

MY DAD: Seems like it’d be only fair for you to be Jewish, no? I mean, you’re missing out on all these great Jewish jokes with your friends here.

JIM: I suppose so, Bob, yeah.

MY DAD, picking up a butter knife from the table: How about I knight you now?

JIM: Knight me? You mean as a Jew?

MY DAD: Cost ya ten bucks.

JIM: Well, what’s the knife for?

MY DAD: The knighting . . . and the bris.

*

Why do I see the shadow of Borscht Belt buddy acts in so many friendships between Jewish men now? Why was every tonal element of The 2000 Year Old Man backgrounded in every conversation that my dad had with a friend or with me? Maybe Jewish comedians found such great success with the bit when performing it at resorts in the Catskills that future generations couldn’t resist recycling it, even into the present day, even on a strictly interpersonal level between friends. Much has been made of women’s shared suspicion that men use us for the emotional work that their friendships with other men fail to do. But what about this inherited comedic language that so many Jewish people of all genders speak fluently? When we gleefully launch into the same old routines with one another, are we approaching that emotional work in an oblique way, or are we avoiding it?

It’s a question that my dad tried to raise with me more than once, and one that I wish I’d been more able to tackle honestly. He wasn’t just a partner-in-bits; he was also an adviser, wiser and more emotionally generous than almost any person I ever knew, and it pained him that I didn’t call on him more often for his wisdom at the end of his life. “I want to help you,” he told me once, so frustrated that tears were in his eyes. “When we talk, why don’t you ask me for help? Have I ever failed you when you’ve asked me for help?”

The answer was no, he never had. He’d given over years of his life to protecting me from a dangerous romantic relationship in thoughtful and intuitive ways that kept me safe. He knew, for example, to give me gift cards to the grocery store rather than cash; he knew never to begin having a sensitive phone conversation with me until I’d confirmed that nobody was home to listen. He knew all this not because I’d ever explained it to him, but because he’d spent his entire adult life caring for friends who, like me, couldn’t take care of themselves on their own. I’d heard the stories of my father’s generosity whispered for decades like legends of a beloved king. And sometimes I was so lonely for care that my entire brain would scream at me to call him call him call him already, which he would have wanted me to do, which he routinely begged me to do, and which I almost never did. I wanted my father’s love, and I also wanted to be one of the guys. In my eyes, the two were incompatible.

I loved when my father goofed around with me because it was identical to the way he goofed around with his buddies; it felt, in essence, like I was being permitted to be a pal rather than a daughter anytime we riffed off one another. When my father joked around with me, it was in the same conspiratorial manner that another father might use when offering his teenage son a beer. With his Jewish friends, he was rough around the edges, comfortable, wildly entertaining. At some point, I’d subconsciously noticed as much and decided what space I preferred to occupy in his life. When I fondly say that my father was my best friend or that I was his, it’s not without some bitterness. He didn’t want his daughter for a best friend. He wanted a child he could raise, and teach, and coach, and in some ways he had one, and in some ways he had a wannabe bro who’d mistakenly identified a masculine spirit in the way he and his friends joked with each other.

My father never told me he preferred men’s company to women’s, or to mine. And yet, when he was so obviously happy in the company of his goofball friends, that’s exactly the message that I took away from it. I didn’t like nights when he picked one of them to be his straight man instead of letting me do it, because it relegated me to the role of audience member, a role that I unconsciously associated with being a girl. I wanted to be a man, loud and profane. I wanted to be a Jewish man making fun of myself for standing next to the TV instead of watching it from the sofa. I couldn’t see the quieter and more profound ways that I made my father happy, even when I wasn’t making him laugh. All I could see, and all I could care about, were the tears of laughter that streamed down his face when someone had really cracked a good one. I wanted the someone who had really cracked a good one to be me.

I wanted my father’s love and I also wanted to be one of the guys. In my eyes, the two were incompatible.

I believed that we were imitating the dynamic between Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, which felt inherently masculine to me. I thought that dynamic depended on two people’s ability to be so funny to each other that nothing else mattered. I’d absorbed all our cultural messaging about men’s refusal to feel their feelings and filtered it through the lens of my father’s raucous laughter with his friends. Feelings were for girls; the fun stuff, that was the province of men. In all the riotous fun of nights out with the guys, I hadn’t noticed that they also brought him matzo ball soup when he was sick, that they never made him spend one minute alone for the two weeks that he was on his deathbed. I only saw the care threaded into Jewish humor when I became an adult and my own Jewish friends were the ones providing that care. The week my father died, my friend Alexander brought me a kugel and asked how I was doing with a gentle, “So, other than this, Mrs. Lincoln, how are you enjoying the show?” I laughed, grateful for the opportunity to laugh, and then, too late, I got it.

I’d sniffed out something of the Reiner-Brooks relationship in my father’s relationships with his friends, but I’d misidentified what sat at the core of that relationship. It wasn’t comedy, plain and simple; it was warm humor, heavily inflected with love and care and mutual respect. As Mel Brooks himself said in response to Reiner’s death, “Whether [Reiner] wrote or performed or he was just your best friend—nobody could do it better.” The writing and performing were inextricable from the seventy-year love during which the two men ate dinner together almost every night. The humor was no substitute for the emotional work; the emotional work could live in the humor, if given space to do so. I’d chosen between two alternatives not knowing that a third option existed: to love my father with all the wit and humor in the world, but to still love him, not worship at his altar.

Still, I appreciate that my father was always happy to be the Carl Reiner to my Mel Brooks, and vice versa. And I’ll never give up the warmth I still feel when I remember how he’d coach me on my 2000 Year Old Man accent, teaching me how to hit my l’s and my r’s, how to let a punchline land without stepping away from it too quickly. It’s bitter, but it’s sweet. I was my dad’s best Jewish guy friend: in some ways closer than any daughter or son could have been, and in some ways exactly the daughter he was always going to have.