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144 8 The Bad Girls of Jewish Comedy gender, class, assimilation, and whiteness in postwar america giovanna p. del negro In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the bawdy humor of Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and Patsy Abbott, a trio of working-class Jewish stand-up comics, enjoyed enormous popularity in the United States. Today largely forgotten or dismissed, they released bestselling LPs known at the time as “party records,” which, though intended for respectable, middle-class consumers, were often sold under the counter and banned from radio airplay. With their earthy, old-world sensibility and strategic use of Yiddish, these middle-aged performers railed against societal mores that told them to be quiet, well behaved, and sexually passive. During the period in which these comics flourished, many working-class Jews experienced upward mobility and suburbanization, acceptance as racial whites, and substantial pressures to assimilate into mainstream American culture. This chapter explores the ways these comics placed Jewish identity and highly sexual subject matter at the center of their humor and, in so doing, negotiated issues of gender, Jewish ethnicity, class, and whiteness in the 1950s. In their heyday, the albums that these comics recorded proved enormously popular with American audiences across the country. Belle Barth, who released eleven LPs with sexually suggestive titles such as If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends; I Don’t Mean to Be Vulgar, But It’s Profitable; and This Next Story Is a Little Risqué, reportedly sold two million records in her career, while Pearl Williams, who released seven albums including A Trip around the World Is Not a Cruise; Bagels and Lox; and Pearl Williams Goes All the Way, sold over a million copies—or even more, given the recording companies’ habit of undercounting sales in order to avoid paying taxes and sharing profits with artists.1 The least prolific of the cohort, Patsy Abbott, only recorded two albums, Suck Up, Your Behind and Have I Had You Before.2 By the conservative estimates of critic Michael Bronski, “the three performers may have released . . . more than five million records.”3 At the peak of their careers, these comediennes played to sold-out crowds in the nation’s top venues. Barth headlined at Carnegie Hall, Caesar’s Palace, and El Morocco The Bad Girls of Jewish Comedy 145 and owned her own club, named Belle Barth’s Pub. Williams, who commanded a $7,500 weekly salary, regularly performed at luxury hotels and swanky clubs like the Foutainebleau, Maxine’s, the Hotel Windsor, Chez Paris, and Place Pigalle.4 After a successful run as a comedic singer on the stage and in the club circuit around the country, in 1958 Abbott opened her own establishment, Patsy’s Place. The trio performed regularly across the United States and Canada during the first decades of their careers, but audiences in the 1960s associated them most closely with Miami, and their success in this city was directly tied to the social transformations of Jewish American life that occurred after World War II. During this period, over one hundred thousand Jews migrated to Miami, which they jokingly dubbed the “Southern Borsht Belt”; many more went there for their holidays.5 In Florida’s tourism capital, the trio found lucrative work catering to vacationing Jewish suburbanites, retired Jewish snowbirds, and transplanted second- and third-generation Jews who nostalgically longed to remember the homes that they had left behind. It was not only their nightclub performances that linked the trio to these social transformations; the emerging genre of the party album did so as well. After the war, an increasing number of returning Jewish servicemen with specialized skills in technical fields or management moved to the suburbs. Transmitting the sounds, images, and narratives of the older, working-class Jewish culture directly into the new suburban living rooms, the party albums that many of these recently married ex-soldiers and their families enjoyed offered fresh representations of Jewishness and American life. The listeners were far away from the ethnic enclaves of their childhood, and many found in these albums a way of feeling connected to their old community. Played in the home, but during social situations that weren’t fully private, these albums encouraged their audiences to think about the cultural transitions between the ethnic and the mainstream, the urban and the suburban, the public and the private. Thus, on the nightclub stage or the living room stereo, the humor of Barth, Williams, and Abbott addressed con- flicting...

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