Here at last is an iconic photo.
Every family has one. This particular one happens to be of my cousin Rick as a baby, hanging on a towel rack, with a too-small fedora. Priceless.
It reminds me of the fact that I know one word of Spanish and that word is primavera. I know it because of the image I have in my head of my father, rather formal in his trousers and white shirt, prancing around my room like a ninny singing “La Prima-VERA, La Prima-VERA!” He was trying to give me a mnemonic to help me remember the vocabulary for a test in fifth grade. Hey Pop, wherever you are…it worked.
Pop.
That’s what I called him, no idea why. To me he was never Papa, or Daddy, or Father. He was Pop, Pop, Pop. His canned reply: why is Number One Son making sounds like motorboat? It was just a bit from an old Charlie Chan movie but I liked him for knowing that that kind of thing was comic genius to an eight year old.
If you decide to be Jewish, if you are smart about it, it is for three reasons: for Yiddish which is luscious; for the holiday dinners which are scrumptious; and for the humor which is delicious. Most people misunderstand this and think that humor means jokes. Jewish humor has jokes sure; a couple driving along a country road had an argument and weren’t speaking. They passed a barnyard full of mules, goats and pigs. The wife sarcastically asked, "Relatives of yours?" "Yep," the husband replied, "in-laws."
Ba-dum.
But as every good comedian knows – and every good Jew is a comedian if not the reverse – jokes are limited. The meat of the matter is shtick. Bits, gags, snarky jabs. Shtick usually refers to a comic routine or comedy persona, but it really means a kind of off-center attitude about the world. And to me it means above all acting the solemn putz.
Like my heroes growing up, who were not in the comics, they were the comics. But only of a certain ilk and that meant that they first of all had to look serious. A tie, a hat, a white shirt. No clown boots or funny pants. In other words, people like my father who looked like they worked in offices yet were willing to let life derange them. Ernie Kovaks, Steve Allen, Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca. Victor Borge.
Shtick humor is actually spiritual in its nature but this has nothing to do with religion. The Old Testament, after all, is not all that hardyharhar and I personally would not know Rabbi Hillel from a hillbilly. Instead, this is silliness as blessing; prayer as a good guffaw. That freeing place in which you take nothing seriously and an eye-rolling, startled, exasperated sense of surprise is your only defense against the cold hard world. This is humor that jibs and jabs and is pure attitude as a centering device, a gyre of bemused aggravation. Comforting, like always knowing where you are in relation to Zabar’s.
Shtick is about the marrow of life…about irony, twists of fate,
come-uppance, the joy in exasperation. That is why there are so many words in Yiddish for the universe of victims…shnook, shlemiel, shlemazzel, and so on. Say them out loud; the shlurpy sound is a mantra to the insanity at the core of existence. Real true shtick relies on a finely-honed expertise in tsouris and sourness; it is a way of being deadly serious without crying.
As universal as survival and deep as the psyche, shtick and shtick alone is the reason comedians tend to actually be Jewish and not Catholic or Mormon, say. Well, those guys did have Pope Hilarius and an angel named Moroni anyway.
Therefore it makes perfect sense to me to have a photo in the album of my cousin Rick as a baby, hanging on a towel rack with a too-small hat on his head. His father, my Uncle Morty, probably set it up and I am sure my Pop had something to do with it too. Because they knew that hanging a kid on a towel rack was funny. But, much more importantly, that fedoras were actually hilarious. And that too-small ones were a laugh-riot.
Don’t ask why…they just are.
Because what’s funny, to the right turn of mind, just is.
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