Comedy on the Radio

You know what?  My most best programs on the radio forever were the comedians.  I loved their different funny voices.  You know who I mean? Jack Benny, and his friend Rochester,  then Amos and Andy, the Kingfish, the Knights of the Sea Lodge,  of course, Baby Snooks and her little brother Robbespierre, and also I forgot to tell you about Mr Kitzel, and sometimes Danny Kaye, who once played on the piano in our house before my father went into the army when we lived in the little apartment right next to the El on Thirteenth Avenue, and inka dinka doo Jimmy Durante, the Schnoz, and Ed Wynn, the Perfect Fool—they were voices which were unmistakable and funny just to hear even if you didn’t get the jokes.  You sat up right close to the wooden radio, with the little glow of the tubes inside, and you listened like it was right there from another world.

I would love to tell you all about them in a funny story, like with Charlie McCarthy and Mortimor McSnurd, along with the real person Edgar Bergan. but you know what? That Woody Allen, he already did it, he’s stolen my thunder, my lightning, and even my sad black cloud.  So what can I talk to you about?  Not much because, as you already know.  From them all, those intellectual comic writers.

I did not live on a street right by Brighton Beach or under the roller coaster in Coney Island.  My family were not little crazy people full of bigotry and angst.  They weren’t intellectual would-be’s and religious fanatics who drove their children nutty.  Did I mention the other comedians and comediennes, like Imogen Coco and what’s her name who pretended to be a fine dancer and the other one, was it Martha Rae, with her deep voice, who came from Vaudeville do to special appearances on other people’s shows during the War to help sell bonds and make parents whose boys were lost know that the nation was grateful and appreciated their sacrifices? 

            All these names, even the ones I forget, you know because of the famous playwrights and scriptwriters of the 1950s and 1960s.  Theatre of the Absurd.  Waiting for this godnik and waiting for that godwit.  In the Park and out on the Square.  Is it my fault I was too young then to write all this down for you when it was still fresh in my mind?  Into me all the voices, but also the comic routines, the shticks, the timing, the sound-effects, the canned laughter, all of that flowed into me instead of the existential ideas and the Marxist philosophy that was supposed to be in the air, breathed out delicately or harshly by the Spirit of the Times, from the ghosts of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, or maybe Heinrich Van Loon and H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw.   In my house, nebech, no such mental apparitions floated around. 

There came, however, as everyone who knew my parents knows or at least used to know—with all their noses and noises—so many doctors, lawyers, school teachers, accountants, engineers, dentists, even occasionally a postman or an advertising jingle writer, a reporter from the newspapers, a man who write books about electricity, a dean from a college—yes, all of them came, sat around the kitchen table, a board groaning with platters of delicatessen from Katz’s downtown and Skilowitz on 13^th Avenue, corned beef, pastrami, coleslaw, half-sour pickles, with cakes and breads fresh from the bakery, cheese cake, straddles, thickly-sliced rye bread with and without seeds, pumpernickel, chewy Kaiser rolls,  from Ebinger’s and Schrafts’, with blue-green seltzer bottles you spritz from, with different coloured glass bottles of all kinds flavours of Hammer’s soft drinks, raspberry, cherry, lime, and mixtures, and also pots of hot black coffee and Russian or Chinese tea, so all day long it seemed, seven days a week, it was jammed with men and women who loved to talk, people who read books from the Book-of-the-Month Club and the second-hand shops along 2^nd and 3^rd Avenue near Union Square and think almost banned newspapers, PM, The Daily Worker, The New York Post, The Brooklyn Eagle, The Sun, and they listened to the news on the radio every hour on the hour, and they often went to the movies and paid attention during the Movietone News and liked the voice of Ed Herlehey, and they discussed ideas and politics and the dangers in the world.  But it was never like what those playwrights who had their dramas in Greenwich Village in little theatres talked about.  It was never the mishugganah, neurotic speeches of the nostalgia movies.  It was comedy and tragedy at the same time.  They talked and laughed, and they talked and cried, and they ate, drank, talked, and they laughed and they cried.  Maybe too since I am being so honest with you—and you even if you once knew these people have forgotten because of all those plays and movies you have seen don’t remember any more—they had funny voices.

            Funny because they were nervous and had to say everything quickly, all at once, to each other, the mere saying of which was more important than anyone listening, let alone under-standing or agreeing; because they all understood and agreed with each other.  If anyone had spoken about Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, they wouldn’t have heard: the names and the words could not have passed through the filter of their own speech.  None of them read Freud or Jung Marx or Engels, and they certainly didn’t know about Sartre or Camus.  Like the comedians on radio, they used their voices to soothe each other and to fill up the empty spaces in their lives.  Their timing was not perfect because they had been born at the wrong time.  Their parents had come from the Old Country not only to escape from the pogroms and the libels but from the tuchas warmers and the religious fanatics, and then, while they had to work their way through the Depression and so put aside their earlier dreams and ambitions, they had to face the news that was coming out of Europe: that all their families were being persecuted, and then killed, and so when the War ended they found that everything they had hoped to run away from and rebel against was not there, and they also found, when they looked into the mirror or heard the voices of their best friends from the olden days, it was really the horrible distorted voices of all the people in the Old Countries who weren’t there any more to make fun of and cry about when their letters came and misunderstood what was modern in the world.  So they talked and ate as fast as they could and made new kinds of jokes about themselves and about their children who thought, of all things, that they had accents and were out of step with the modern world.  They laughed and they cried, they ate and they drank, and they sat around the table all the time hoping that time would not find them the way it found all those parents, cousins and uncles and aunts who used to be over there—and now were deep inside themselves crying out in hunger and fear.