Giovanna P. Del Negro
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781904113461
- eISBN:
- 9781800340343
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781904113461.003.0007
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter addresses mass-media culture, as the Jewish home-based value of laughing at oneself goes public with the rise of the recording of Jewish comedy acts. It explores the bawdy humour of ...
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This chapter addresses mass-media culture, as the Jewish home-based value of laughing at oneself goes public with the rise of the recording of Jewish comedy acts. It explores the bawdy humour of Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and Patsy Abbott — three working-class, Jewish, stand-up comics who were hugely popular in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It looks at how this group of entertainers positioned themselves at the intersection of gender, Jewish ethnicity, class, and whiteness in the 1950s, as well as the significance that their humour had for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. With their earthy, shtetl sensibility and their smatterings of Yiddish, these performers, who attained their greatest popularity in their middle years, railed against societal mores that told them to be quiet, well-behaved, and sexually passive. That some of the prominent comedy recordings brought into living-rooms across America were by Jewish women brandishing a racy, Yiddish-tinged humour becomes significant in the context of the middle-class suburbanization that Jews were experiencing during the 1950s.Less
This chapter addresses mass-media culture, as the Jewish home-based value of laughing at oneself goes public with the rise of the recording of Jewish comedy acts. It explores the bawdy humour of Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and Patsy Abbott — three working-class, Jewish, stand-up comics who were hugely popular in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It looks at how this group of entertainers positioned themselves at the intersection of gender, Jewish ethnicity, class, and whiteness in the 1950s, as well as the significance that their humour had for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. With their earthy, shtetl sensibility and their smatterings of Yiddish, these performers, who attained their greatest popularity in their middle years, railed against societal mores that told them to be quiet, well-behaved, and sexually passive. That some of the prominent comedy recordings brought into living-rooms across America were by Jewish women brandishing a racy, Yiddish-tinged humour becomes significant in the context of the middle-class suburbanization that Jews were experiencing during the 1950s.
Clem Bastow
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474440189
- eISBN:
- 9781474476607
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440189.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Is it possible to reclaim certain works as part of the feminist film canon, even if they were never intended as such? If Elaine May ever self-identified as a feminist, her public stance on the topic ...
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Is it possible to reclaim certain works as part of the feminist film canon, even if they were never intended as such? If Elaine May ever self-identified as a feminist, her public stance on the topic was one of comical obfuscation. This chapter reclaims May’s second film The Heartbreak Kid from the second-wave feminist critiques that dismissed it as sexist. It reads the film through a contemporary feminist lens, specifically looking at May’s framing of key scenes within the film as a representation of the ‘female gaze’. It looks closely at the contentious character of Lila (played by May’s daughter, Jeannie Berlin), who has been dismissed as many critics as a caricatured representation of Jewish womanhood, as key in May’s critique of both the character of Lenny and the filmic canon of her male contemporaries. May looks beneath the caricature represented by Lenny’s resentful and self-loathing gaze, and finds the humanity within Lila.Less
Is it possible to reclaim certain works as part of the feminist film canon, even if they were never intended as such? If Elaine May ever self-identified as a feminist, her public stance on the topic was one of comical obfuscation. This chapter reclaims May’s second film The Heartbreak Kid from the second-wave feminist critiques that dismissed it as sexist. It reads the film through a contemporary feminist lens, specifically looking at May’s framing of key scenes within the film as a representation of the ‘female gaze’. It looks closely at the contentious character of Lila (played by May’s daughter, Jeannie Berlin), who has been dismissed as many critics as a caricatured representation of Jewish womanhood, as key in May’s critique of both the character of Lenny and the filmic canon of her male contemporaries. May looks beneath the caricature represented by Lenny’s resentful and self-loathing gaze, and finds the humanity within Lila.
