Bloom, James D. Gravity fails: the comic Jewish shaping of modern America.
Praeger, 2003. 192p bibl index afp ISBN 0-275-97720-X, $62.95
Enough about the Catskills and all those circumcised stand-ups already. Here Coen (Fargo) gets one mention, Myron Cohen none. This energetic study examines how "funny Jews" have shaped not just American entertainment but commerce, visual arts, science, sex, and history. Jewish iconoclasm and the "counterlogic of Jewish funniness" reshaped mid-century American culture, from advertising upward. Bloom (Muhlenberg College) finds Jewish comedy behind such different successes as Bob Dylan's protest songs, Richard Feynman's quantum physics, Gertrude Stein's hardheaded whimsy, and Saul Steinberg's cartoon art. Bloom's central figure is Philip Roth, here leading into artist Larry Rivers, the hugely influential Mad Magazine and Sergeant Bilko, then into Lenny Bruce, Alfred Kazin, and Jules Feiffer, then off again into the Barbie Doll, Blonde on Blonde, and illusions of assimilation. Jewish sexual candor involves not just Roth, Bruce, and Groucho but Erica Jong and rock and roll lyricists Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. A rare error occurs in the chapter on the Jews' Nazi comedy. Bloom misnames the playwright in Mel Brooks' The Producers as actor Kenneth Mars rather than the character Franz Liebkind (i.e., Lovechild/bastard). To a well-tilled field Bloom contributes fresh. ideas of wide-ranging insight and stimulation. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All collections.-M. Yacowar, University of Calgary
137 CHOICE January '04 - Vol 41, No.5 @2004 American Library Association
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Human nature seized the gift of laughter by KELLY HARDING The Allentown Times June 10, 2005
According to the English professor
"Insights (once we call them that) are never funny," Jim Bloom, English professor at Muhlenberg College, said. "According to Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (The Thousand Year Old Man), the first funny thing that ever happened occurred when the other guy got hit in the head with a rock."
As an essayist and author, Bloom expresses humor naturally when he writes. His sense of humor is not a happy accident. In his article "Independence Day, Apart from the Fireworks" he uses familiar patriotic phrases mixed with word combinations that tickle the reader in a strange way.
"Amidst all the lofty talk about 'founding fathers' and 'birth freedom' and 'brave minutemen,' we'd like to forget that a lot of us focus mostly on the hot dogs and beer, the possibility of necking or more under cover of darkness and fireworks noise, the shore traffic, the doubleheader, etc.," he said.
In terms of teaching humor in literature Bloom stresses the importance of two key words: literalness and incongruity.
He says that literalness is the element of "how anything is funny when taken literally and seen in it all its concrete simplicity, even death as with the corpse in 'As I Lay Dying' by William Faulkner or the skull in the Hamlet gravedigger scene."
Incongruity sometimes refers to the absurdity of an author's conclusion about his own literary creations.
"Significantly funny writing reveals instances where language doesn't match any or professed beliefs don't match behavior: nearly every classic novel since Don Quixote and almost every Shakespeare play does this."
Some of the most fun for writers looking to elicit laughter comes from taking a look at our own society's shortcomings. It's why Jon Stewart has a job.
"Artfully funny writers capture our everyday speech, especially the pseudo-casual but carefully scripted and regrettably contagious words of politicians, advertisers, and mimic them in a way that exposes either their mendacity or stupidity. In popular culture, George Carlin may be the most striking example of this," he said.
And there's always something to learn from a good laugh. Bloom believes that humor teaches humility, modesty and skepticism.
"Humor teaches that we can never be as smart as we need to be. Most joke resisters tend to be smart people who aren't nearly as smart as they think they are.
(You learn) to take others more seriously than you take yourself, to test principles against experience, to keep your language--especially expressions of piety and sentiment and enthusiasm--from getting so far ahead of knowledge and experience that we end up sounding and looking stupid."
Bloom's most recent publication, "Gravity Fails: The Comic Jewish Shaping of Modern America" tells the history of those who pushed the limit in the entertainment industry.
"Gravity Fails documents and analyzes the way 'funny Jews' in movies and TV, literature, painting and drawing, music, advertising transformed American culture during the twentieth century, especially during the generation following World War II," he said.
"The artists and performers discussed--including Philip Roth, Larry Rivers, Joan Rivers, Woody Allen Saul Bellow, Jules Feiffer, Bob Dylan, Mike Nichols, Randy Newman, Nat Hiken, Erica Jong, Mel Brooks, among others--shaped and challenged Americans' relationship to language, sex, history, and explanation."
Yet these entertainers couldn't subsist on laughter alone.
"Whatever catharsis humor provides doesn't last long. If we want to use this kind of body metaphor, maybe inoculation is more apt than catharsis. 'Mordant' (from French and Latin for biting) is the word that comes to mind: The bite that fortifies us against deception, exploitation, and foolishness." http://www.pennlive.com/living/allentowntimes/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1118395201133640.xml&coll=11
My first two books focused narrowly on linked pairs of writers, R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman in The Stock of Available Reality (Bucknell. 1984), based on my dissertation, and Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman in Left Letters (Columbia, 1992). The figures named in the books' subtitles might be misleading, since neither book confined itself to biography or readings of the named authors' work. Each book also addressed questions about literary study and cultural poetics that arose out of my broader reading and ever-changing teaching challenges. With sections on New Criticism and on the politics of reading Milton, Stevens, Yeats, Keats, and Shakespeare, the 1984 book, for example, reflects a youthful grapple with the paradigm shift, from "close reading" to "theory," that colored my graduate school experience and my early years as an assistant professor. Similarly, Left Letters represents my effort to engage the so-called "political turn" that literary studies took in the 1980s without losing sight of the fidelity to language that underlies and ultimately legitimates literary studies. This concern for "literariness" animated my most recent book, The Literary Bent (University of Pennsylvania, 1997). All three books grew out of and, in turn, shaped my teaching interests, as does my newest book, Gravity Fails , which sustains an inquiry begun when I offered a first-year seminar with the titled "Funny Jews" in the mid-1990s. The questions of cultural poetics that the seminar prompted and the range of texts I needed to probe in order to address these questions couldn't possibly fit the circumscribed format that a single semester course provided; hence I began my inquiry in earnest the summer following the seminar.
Gravity Fails treats the mid-century flourishing of comic performance and satiric critique in the arts and in mass entertainment by children and grandchildren of relatively recent Jewish, mostly Ashkenazi, immigrants. My study argues that cumulatively and collectively their work constitutes a culture-transforming critique of the prevailing languages and imageries whereby an Anglocentric United States had traditionally represented, explained and so maintained itself. Gravity Fails also argues that this ethnic Kulturkampf clarified and advanced the liberating agenda that early-century modernisms had, often more primly, inaugurated.
Whenever I complete a book project, residual questions, prompted by the inquiry just completed, spur subsequent projects. As of now, two such topics for a new book include sexual candor, treated in chapter two of Gravity Fails, and the regulation of curiosity, addressed in chapter four of both The Literary Bent and Gravity Fails . A third project, which began as a critical biography of the influential screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg, became the basis for a paper I delivered last month at Oxford for the "Republic of Letters 2000" and for an inquiry I've just begun into the relationship between screen-writing and cultural action. My work on The Literary Bent , Gravity Fails , and Left Letters left me reflecting on the extent to which writing often doesn't get acknowledged as writing, the extent to which various mass media encourage us to overlook- stand-up talk-show scripts, office-holders' and executives' "ad-libbing," much advertising copy as well as screenplays and teleplays- scripts contemporary intellectual life while concealing the writtenness of these scripts. In my next book, I plan to probe the relationship between these scripts and the writing we customarily regard as literary. |
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