Women who grew up in Orthodox homes weren’t allowed to stand up on a stage and speak with “unclean lips” unless they wanted to be disparaged as vilde chayes, wild beasts. But most American Jews left their Orthodoxy at Ellis Island. Fanny Brice (whom Barbra Streisand portrayed in Funny Girl) was raised in a saloon, so her parents hardly could object when she dropped out of school to join a burlesque revue. Sophie Tucker, “the last of the red hot mamas,” got her start singing for tips at her family’s restaurant. Gertrude Berg, the star of The Goldbergs, the first nationally popular sitcom (Berg was also the radio show’s writer and director), grew up at her father’s Catskills hotel. Despite her training at the New England Conservatory of Music, Rusty Warren (aka “the knockers up gal”) earned her fame singing bawdy songs and telling risqué stories. Even my mother, who prided herself on her refinement, delighted in telling my father’s jokes when he wasn’t around to tell them (to be honest, she told them better).
The history of Jewish comedy has been well discussed. What is rarely remarked upon is the role Jewish women played in moving comedy from stale one-liners to fresher, more original observational humor based on their own lives. The jokes male comics told were so old they literally had come down from Roman times. The men mocked not only gentiles but also women (“Take my wife … please”). Female comics needed to make up their own material; Rusty Warren joked that women and men both go out on Saturday nights to sow their wild oats, but when women wake up Sunday morning, they pray for crop failure.
As women and Jews, female comics had twice the motivation to mock the mainstream.