Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Comic Reader

Introduction: GEEVE A LEESTEN!

For L.P., who hipped me to Gross some years ago. And to E.P [ vi ] Contents Acknowledgments viii N i z e B a b y (1926) (excer p t s ) 5 5 De Night in de Front from Chreesmas (1927) 163 Dunt Esk! (1927) 107 Introduction 1 geeve a leesten! Ari Y. Kelman [ vii ] Bibliography 289 About the Editor 293 Hiawatta (1926) 187 F a m o u s Fimmales (19 2 8 ) 2 1 1 Assorted Milt Gross Images 273 [ viii ] Acknowledgments This book began while I was working at the American Jewish Historical Society, where the executive director, David Solomon , not only supported the project but advocated for it as well. He mentioned it to Professor Hasia Diner, who encouraged me to pursue the project and see it to completion. Her comments have always been right on the money and she constantly challenged me to make this a more sophisticated, insightful book. Eddy Portnoy has been a great friend and incredible resource both with respect to things Yiddish and with respect to American comics. His patient readings and rereadings of the introduction helped the project dramatically . Sarah Bunin Benor has also been extremely helpful, offering key insights and suggestions along the way. Simon Elliott at the Young Research Library at UCLA deserves special acknowledgment for being such a wonderful host during my weeks of research in the Milt Gross Papers, and for helping me follow up with Gross’s family. The four anonymous readers of NYU Press provided much needed criticism and guidance that I hope have succeeded in making this book stronger. My brilliant colleagues at the University of California, Davis, offer kind and strong support and have made Davis a great home. They are largely responsible for creating an environment of curiosity, rigor, and humane [ ix ] working conditions. To Eric Zinner and Ciara McLaughlin, my editors at NYU Press, my most sincere thanks for their fond support and encouragement on this book. And finally, to Milt Gross himself, whose inventiveness, creativity, insight, and humor encouraged me to write a book I hope he would have liked. Milt Gross . . . mangled all languages, English, Yiddish, whatever.1 —irving howe Wait—geeve a leesten. I hoid a good jukk rigudding Cohen wit de lawyer! Off cuss I couldn’t tell it witt de dialect! I’ll hev to spick it plain!!2 —milt gross 1. Irving Howe, The World of Our Fathers (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 404. 2. Milt Gross, Dunt Esk!! (New York: Dorian, 1927), 152. [ 1 ] Introduction geeve a listen! Ari Y. Kelman Milt Gross had an ear for comedy. He could hear humor in the recessed corners of American poetry, in great myths, in historical tales, and in the airshafts of Bronx tenements. In classic slapstick style, Gross created a comic universe in which nobody could avoid a pratfall, a malapropism, or a well-placed anachronism that lowered the gods to human status and humans a bit lower still. Nothing escaped his comic ear or his sharp pen, both of which he showcased in an avalanche of cartoons and newspaper columns steeped in the sounds and culture of immigrant Jews. Whether readers considered him a linguistic innovator or a peddler of derogatory stereotypes, Gross’s popularity during the 1920s and 1930s indicates how widely his work resonated with American audiences. In his columns and cartoons, Gross captured the comedy of tensions between immigrant Jews and their American-born children during a period in which radio and movies began to speak, cartoons began to reach maturity, and ethnic comedy crested. His work from the late 1920s amplified these transitions and the attendant negotiations among sound, cartoons, humor, and ethnic identity in the United States. From the late 1910s until the mid-1940s, Milt Gross turned his gift for hearing the humorous overtones of well-worn introduction [ 2 ] stories and the comic undertones of daily immigrant life into a series of wildly popular cartoons and columns. Riding that wave of popularity, Gross collected his works and published them in books that captured the attention and appreciation of American audiences and critics and earned reviews in publications as diverse as the New York Times, the New Republic, and the American Hebrew. In Jewish-English dialect, Gross plumbed the outer limits of a new American immigrant language and found in it an almost endless supply of humor, ego-deflating parody, and...