Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman

13 | Hail to Thee, Fat Person

251 By the time Sherman died, his descent from stardom was complete. All of his albums were out of print. In the early 1970s, after a tumultuous decade of mass peace and civil rights demonstrations, riots, political assassinations, and the public spectacle of Watergate the country could not respond to his cleverbutnonabrasivecomedyandwasreadyforthehardstuff.RichardPryor and Joan Rivers were among the new comics that delivered. On Pryor’s 1974 album, That Nigger’s Crazy, the “Have Your Ass Home by 11” routine revisits his teenage years with an abusive father. “Be home by 11! You understand ‘11’ don’tyanigger?Youcantelltime,can’tya?What’sthatclocksayinthekitchen, nigger. The clock, motherfucker, what’s that clock say?” Joan Rivers was mild by comparison, but she never let the sentimentality of Sherman’s Fig Leaves distract her from the conviction that the battle of the sexes was war. “Face it darlings, it isn’t easy being a woman. No man’s ever made love to you because you cleaned the linoleum.” As an unmarried woman in her mid-twenties, she was an embarrassment and a burden to her family. “My mother had two of us at home that weren’t, as the expression goes, moving.” As a result, anyone was Hail to Thee, Fat Person 252 / Overweight Sensation goodenoughforher.“Oh,Joan,there’samostattractiveyoungmandownhere with a mask and a gun.” But no one captured the new mood or garnered the successtoproveitlikeGeorgeCarlin,whose1972ClassClownalbumincluded the “seven words you can never say on television” bit that became part of the language. By the end of 1976, Class Clown had sold almost 775,000 units. Sherman sold more copies of My Son, the Folk Singer in about four months, as opposedtoCarlin’sfouryears,butCarlin’scareerwasstillgoingstrong.“When someone sells 1000 a month on a catalogue item . . . that shows what a solid following he has,” his manager told Variety. Such longevity was exceptional, and the best contrasting example of a defunct act was Allan Sherman. “‘The real big (comedy LP) hits [of years ago] you couldn’t give away today,’ he says, ‘even though they were tremendous, like Allen [sic] Sherman.’” The rise of Woody Allen and Mel Brooks in the late 1960s and early 1970s alsohelpeddiminishSherman’sreputation,thoughthetwoJewishfilmmakers shared the outlook of the song parodist. Unlike Pryor or Rivers, Brooks and Allen were too absurd for anger, and they agreed with Sherman that parody was the best way to shatter genres that had become a bore. Blazing Saddles did to the movie western what Folk Singer did to folk music, but the 1974 film admitted that Jews were peripheral to the classic and typically sanitized story. Sherman’s “The Streets of Miami” put Jews in a cowboy gunfight, but it shed more comic light on the bad blood between Jewish business partners than nineteenth-century Americans. Blacks were the important overlooked minority of the Hollywood western, and the frank racism of Blazing Saddles’ white townspeople was the movie’s joke on the genre. Jews would not have made a satisfactory substitute. Woody Allen’s parodies of the crime caper in Take the Money and Run, science fiction movies in Sleeper, the hardboiled Humphrey Bogart hero in Play It Again, Sam, and the historical drama in Love and Death all followed theShermanpatternbysubstitutingaJewisheverymanforthestoicandheroic male lead. In each case, Allen’s characters look around their worlds and see an inventory of drapes where they were told there would be grapes. “Science, I don’t believe in science. Science is an intellectual dead end. It’s a lot of little guys in tweed suits,” his character says at the end of Sleeper. But Allen added a new ingredient to the parody formula. His characters are on the make. They Hail to Thee, Fat Person / 253 want to bed the female lead and are frank about their sexual hunger. All are on the lookout for Sleeper’s orgasmatron, the ultimate sexual high. Brooks also made sex generate laughs simply by recognizing its existence where it had been denied, such as in Frankenstein’s monster. If he is a man, he must have the sexual drives of a man. “Oh, sweet mystery of life/At last I found you,” sings Madeline Kahn as she has sex with the monster in Young Frankenstein. Sexuality became the new firepower Jewish parodists used to blast pop culture products that were suffocating on their own dignity. It was the new frontier. The comic payoff of placing Jews in scenarios that once excluded...