Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman

2 | College in Sex Acts (Printer's Error)

33 Inthefallof1941,Shermanwrotealettertotheeditorofhiscollegenewspaper decrying the lack of a student humor magazine. The University of Illinois had one once,but it hadfolded four years before.Sherman heard it was considered too risqué. That was more than he could bear. He was just one month into his freshman year and not yet seventeen years old when he opened fire in the October8DailyIlliniwith,“AndhadthejudgesoftheSiren readtheHarvard Lampoon, or the Yale Record, or the California Pelican? And had the judges of the Siren read The New Yorker, or Esquire magazines?” This was quite a how-do-you-do. He defended his demand for the return of theSirenwiththeobligatory,“obscenity,assuch,hasnobusinessonacampus,” but a careful reader might have wondered what the vague qualifier, “as such,” would allow Sherman to get away with, especially as it was followed by a plea for the college to embrace “broadmindedness.” Over the next several years, the school found out. Sherman wrote an Illini column and packed it with satire, parody, wisecracks, fictional football games and apropos-of-nothing references to the Moscow Art Theater. He dreamed up student stunt shows College in Sex Acts (Printer’s Error) 34 / Overweight Sensation that featured a song parody about the murder of Leon Trotsky, an obscene version of an English folktale, and salutes to the 4Fs unqualified for military service. Sherman ripped apart the custom of “pin hanging” that saw a coed wearing a college man’s fraternity pin as a sign of intention to marry, instead of a license to have sex, and his “Don’t Take My Pin” parody of “Don’t Fence Me In” became an official song of the local Sigma Alpha Mu (SAM) chapter of the national Jewish fraternity. Sherman became a campus celebrity and, based on his dean’s disciplinary file, a marked man. He never graduated from the University of Illinois. “Sherman was so bright, he was ahead of all of us,” said Arte Johnson, the comicactorbestknownforhisrolesonthe1960sRowan&Martin’sLaugh-In television show. “We were children compared to him. He was my hero.” His inventive wit and charm won him friends and fans, but Sherman’s condescending letter to the editor also announced the arrival of a troublemaker, and in a movie version the dean would look up from the Daily Illini and give his assistant the nod that means, yes, watch him. The University of Illinois was founded in 1867 as one of the original public land-grant colleges made possible by the 1862 Morrill Act, signed into law by President Lincoln, and its location in Urbana-Champaign put it roughly equidistant from Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapolis. But despite being born in Chicago, Sherman was no Midwesterner. “Allan was different,” said Bruce Clorfene, a college friend. “He was very honest, outspoken. Most of the fellas did not like him.” That was because he emerged from his chaotic childhood and adolescence asajesting,sexual,cynical,literate,Jewishkidonthemakeeagertoentershow business or journalism. In the Midwest, those traits made him a virtual New Yorker. All of Rose’s attempts to assimilate had backfired. Her son was not just Jewish, but a Jewish type. Starting in the 1930s, New York Jews fanned out across the country to attend college where tuitions were cheaper and the competition from other Jewish students less intense. Midwest Jews came to know their New York counterparts, and familiarity bred contempt. New York Jews “look down on the mid-westerner,” wrote a Hillel director at the University of Wisconsin. They are “obnoxious,” chimed in a Hillel official at Illinois. The descriptions fit Sherman when he did not bother to turn on the charm. “He was aloof College in Sex Acts (Printer’s Error) / 35 from the guys in the SAM fraternity house,” said fraternity brother Sherman Wolf. It could be worse than that. “If he didn’t respect you, you were nothing. Nothing,” Clorfene said. The University of Illinois was not his first choice. Sherman applied to the University of Chicago with the help of a recommendation letter from one of his Fairfax High School teachers, and according to the farewell-to-seniors edition of his high school newspaper he was headed to Columbia University ’s Pulitzer School of Journalism. This may have been boasting or keeping up appearances. His crucial junior year of high school was spent on the run. Besides, Chicago and Columbia were expensive, and both schools curtailed Jewish enrollment. Chicago limited Jews to their proportion in the Chicago area, which prevented it from...