Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924

7 The Truth of Racial Signs: Civilizing the Jewish Comic

F or a caual oberver like Edwin Royle, what wa remarkable (and a little melancholy) about vaudeville was the seriousness with which it banned seriousness. The program, in his words, was “from the artist who balances a set of parlor furniture on his nose to the academic baboon . . . one concentrated, strenuous struggle for a laugh. No artist can do without it. It hangs like a solid and awful obligation over everything.”1 The formula for a successful vaudeville lineup was simple. The vaudeville bill required one or two headliners, some attention grabbers, some dramatic contrast, and a “climax.” As George M. Cohan and George J. Nathan explained in an article in McClure’s (1913), it all boiled down to a simple “Mechanics of Emotion.”The audience“comes to the theater for one definite purpose, to have its emotions played upon,” they postulated. The “emotion germs” come in three kinds: tears, laughs, thrills. It is up to the performer to trigger the audience’s emotional “reflexes,” which, as Cohan and Nathan explained, mechanistically respond to a concise number of formulaic stimuli , well known in the trade.2 In vaudeville it was, above all, the laugh that counted. But its “laughgetters ” were of a different nature than the “high-class” ones of the legitimate stage. The vaudeville audience would invariably laugh at the following: Open your coat and show a green vest, or pull out your shirt-front and expose a red undershirt.Another excellent thing to do is to wear a shirt without sleeves and pull off your coat repeatedly. Ask the orchestra leader if he is married. Have the drummer put in an extra beat with the cymbals, then glare at him. 159 Chapter 7 The Truth of Racial Signs Civilizing the Jewish Comic Always use an expression which ends with the query, “Did he not?” Then say, “He did not.” “A peculiarity of this kind of humor,” Cohan and Nathan concluded,“is that it finds its basis in the inflicting of pain. . . . The most successful tricks or jokes are always based on the idea of pain or embarrassment.”3 Vaudeville was the medium of incubation, standardization, and diffusion for what critics quickly dubbed the “New Humor.” This humor replaced “the casual improvisations of the story-teller, as well as the droll whimsy of the minstrel comic,”their“flights of fantasy”and their“tolerant recital of the inanities of human beings,” with the well-placed “jab to the solar plexus.”4 This particular morphology was informed by the contraction of time and space characteristic of modern metropolitan life. This meant that, as Cohan and Nathan explained,“Nothing counts in the theatre but the impression of the time being. All the ‘mechanics of emotion’ are based, from the theatrical craftsman’s point of view, on this one solid fact.”5 The modern urban audience lived for the“impression of the moment.”It had no patience for “the development of character, setting and atmosphere,” and required a more intense, fast-paced, shock-oriented form of comedy.6 Not surprisingly, the foundation of the New Humor was the joke. What once was common fare mostly in the masculine culture of saloons and on the streets of the Jewish ghetto exploded onto the mass market. Between 1890 and 1907, the number of joke books published yearly in the United States grew from 11 to 104. The Jewish entrepreneur Henry J.Wehman published the bulk of these books, coming out with sixty titles and sales that ran to more than two million copies. The joke industry, stimulated by an increase in leisure time and family budgets, was fed by professional “jokesmiths ,” writers who could churn out an average of fifty jokes a day.7 The structure of the joke was ruled by a strict economy. Conciseness, incisiveness, and directness were the main ingredients.As Brett Page, advising would-be vaudeville writers, explained, “The first line introduces the situation and invites a slight grin; the second intensifies the situation and provokes a chuckle; the final segment delivers the punch that pushes the laugh over the top.”8 Aiming for the punch line, the new joke eliminated all exposition: “Every man should take a wife. But he should be careful whose wife he takes.” “I saw you outside the Biltmore Hotel.” “That’s where I live.” 160 The Truth of Racial Signs “At the Biltmore?” “No, outside...