Radio Comedy

 

You know what?  You really want to know?  My most best programs on the radio forever were the comedians.  This way back when I was a little boy and it was in the 1940s.  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, Fanny Brice with her Baby Snooks and her little brother Robespierre, and also I forgot to tell you about Mr Kitzel, and sometimes Danny Kaye, a real actor and comedian 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, that means he had a big nose, 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 little wooden radio, with the glow of the tubes inside, and you listened like it was right there in your bed with you coming from another world.

I would love to tell you all about them in a funny story, like with Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer McSnurd, along with the real person Edgar Bergan who was a ventriloquist . 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, all those intellectual comic writers, neurotic and professional, and maybe also a little bit real, but not so real like what I want to tell you, if only I could.

I did not live on a street right by Brighton Beach where there is sand and ocean or under the roller coaster in Coney Island like the famous people who write plays and make movies about growing up in Brooklyn around the same time.   My family were not crazy people full of bigotry and angst.  They weren’t mixed-up noodniks 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 (which I think was somewhere in New Jersey) 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 who put on their shows in the  Theatre of the Absurd which, everyone said, was off-off-Broadway: and their plays were Waiting for this and Waiting for that.  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, whoever they were, or maybe in the books I did eventually read by Heinrich Van Loon and H.G. Wells and Stefan Zweig.   In my house, nebech, no such mental apparitions floated around to engage in coffee-house debates and existential disquisitions. 

But don’t get all snooty and snobbish and think it was stupid people with no interest in anything but the price of peas and carrots and where to get the best cheesecake in the world now that you couldn’t travel to Vienna.  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 wrote books about electricity, a dean from a college—yes, all of them, and I called them my uncles and aunts because the other real family we used to have in the Old Country stopped writing and then now were probably all lost in the camps over there,  well, they all came, sat around the kitchen table, a board groaning with platters of delicatessen from Katz’s and Skilowitz, corned beef, pastrami, coleslaw, half-sour pickles, also with cakes and breads fresh from the bakery, cheese cake, struddles, thickly-sliced rye bread with and without seeds, pumpernickel, chewy Kaiser rolls, from Ebinger’s and Schrafts’, also to help swallow and make a burp which is good for you with blue-green seltzer bottles you spritz from, with different colored glass bottles of all kinds flavors 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, and especially in the evening until way late after my bedtime, 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 who also liked to comment upon almost banned newspapers, PM, The Daily Worker, The New York Post, The Brooklyn Eagle, The Sun, and what they listened to on the news over 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 important 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 pokey theatres talked about.  It was never the mishugganah, neurotic speeches of the nostalgia movies the Hollywood studios churned out later.  It was, let me tell you, something very different, though at the same time comedy and tragedy, earnest and ironic.  Around my mother’s table 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 even if you once knew these people but have forgotten what they were like because of all those successful and popular plays and commercial movies you have seen so you can’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 excited and frightened speech.  None of them read Freud or Jung,  or 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 and in the wrong part of the world.  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 and saw the faces of people they had lost 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.  The joke was over.  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 real world.  They laughed and they cried, they ate and they drank, and they sat around the table all the time hoping that bad times 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.  That’s why I had to hide under the blankets every night and listen to the radio to fall asleep.