On Kanter's Lunch

Old Jews Slurping Soup and Fate of Jewish HumorLunch. Directed by Donna Kanter. 2012. USA: Donna Kanter Company, 78 minutes.Gary and I are not old enough yet to eat soup, declares TV writer and producer John Rappaport, who, along with voice actor Gary Owens, represents youthful contingent of veteran comics documented in film Lunch (Donna Kanter, USA, 2012). So they all have soup, Rappaport continues. There's always a matzo ball and cabbage and everything else . . . and Gary and I just sort of kill time until they're all done slurping, then we can join in. Slurping matzo ball soup is just one of many rituals that transpired every other Wednesday for past forty years, when Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Hal Kanter, Arthur Hiller, Monty Hall, Matty Simmons, and other Jewish writers and directors who shaped comedy of Hollywood congregated to nosh, kibitz, and kvetch at Factor's Famous Deli and other Los Angeles eateries. Lunch's intimate look at merrymakers of mid-twentieth century is entertaining but hardly unique, having been released almost concurrently with When Comedy Went to School (Mevlut Akkaya, Ron Frank, USA, 2013), tendentiously titled When Jews Were Funny (Alan Zweig, Canada, 2013), and ongoing web series Old Jews Telling Jokes (Sam Hoffman, USA, 2009-).1 Although quest to capture voices of old Jewish jokesters in their twilight years is a laudable one, and future generations will likely appreciate such intimate encounters with comedy's elder statesmen, all these productions propagate and perpetuate certain myths about fate of Jewish humor in America and, by implication, fate of Jewish people.There was indeed something special about this generation, who on surface share a similar biography: Born to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, they entered comedy by way of vaudeville, theater, radio, and often Catskills, then made their way to Hollywood, where they rose to fame writing and producing for film and television. In retirement they have lived out their golden years in rapidly declining health but still enjoying each other's company, eating pastrami, telling jokes, bickering over punch lines, and eagerly sharing their musings on humor with anyone willing to listen. They believe and contend that their cohort was pivotal in shaping American comedy not merely of their talent but of their yichus-the Jewish culture they inherited-and of constellation of forces that allowed them to stake out a career in burgeoning entertainment industry in post-World War II America. There have been a lot of wonderful Jewish writers and Jewish comedians through history of show business, it was one of things that was open to Carl Reiner avows in Lunch. You couldn't be a doctor, but they couldn't stop you if you could make them laugh. And they were well positioned to do so, as the Jews, who have been persecuted for centuries, have always survived, according to Hal Kanter, because they did build up a wall of protection through humor. You had to have a sense of humor, for Christ's sakes, muses Jerry Lewis in When Comedy Went to School. That's what got Jews through it; it was our salvation and it was our understanding that we'll get through it if we're not too terribly serious.Anti-Semitism thus engendered Jewish wit, and it came in form of complaint-a vociferous, passive-aggressive discontent with everything, from God to family to poverty to persecution. Such humor took shape following eleventh-century Crusades, according to Michael Wex, a popular Yiddishist and author of Born to Kvetch, when a series of Christian massacres devastated Jewish communities of Rhineland; suffering and complaint became Jewish modes of expression.2 It need not be stated that neither Wex (who inherited this old Jewish sensibility from his grandparents), nor Carl Reiner, nor Sid Caesar were at Crusades to document alleged gestation of this cultural trait, and most recent scholarship argues that Jewish humor emerged far later, in nineteenth century, when secularism and a sense of skepticism over God's purported divine plan led many Jews to view persistence of anti-Semitism and exile in a new, ironic light. …

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