It is Gross’s good fortune, and ours, that a most recent generation of Americans has reclaimed him as its own or, at the very least, brought his talents to the fore once more.
Is Diss a System? A Milt Gross Comic Reader
is a case in point, a showcase of his many gifts. Arguing for Gross’s centrality to American popular culture, Ari Kelman unstintingly sings his praises. He wasn’t just any old cartoonist and humorist, Kelman writes in his astute introduction, but the inventor of an “audible slapstick,” a parodist of an insistent, highbrow culture of reading and elocution, as well as a major voice in the nation’s buzz about the “sound of America.”
In his championing
of Milt Gross, Kelman assumes his rightful place as a cultural archaeologist of American Jewry’s vernacular culture. He belongs, in fact, to a new generation of American Jewish intellectuals who are determined to recover?and to celebrate?what their forbears had consigned to the attic or dismissed as a curiosity: the musical stylings of
Bagels & Bongos
, the crude ethnic jokes that constitute the repertoire of
Jewface
, the clever parodies of Mickey Katz (“Duvid Crockett,” anyone?), the malaproprisms of Mrs. Feitlebaum. Supplanting disdain with approbation, they revel in the particular and the eccentric and the outre: not for them purities of language or lofty assimilationist ideals. No, Kelman and his confreres embrace the low road and its bumps with a vengeance.
Much as I applaud their collective determination to expand the parameters of American Jewry’s republic of arts and letters and, in the process, to set elite culture on its ear, I am concerned about their lack of attentiveness to the larger, and oftentimes darker, implications of their cultural project. Consider, for instance, the cruel fate of Yiddish in America, its range of motion drastically cut down to size in the New World. A mere shadow of itself, the Yiddish that most Americans know, if they know it at all, is not the language of literature and politics and scholarship and, and, and … but its raunchy, comic cousin, the stuff of curses and sex and one-liners, the patter of Mel Brooks rather than the poetry of Abraham Sutzkever. Yiddish has become a parodied language and a language of parody; a sentimental joke. Who is to blame? Why, modernity, of course, and the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment that demoted Yiddish from a full-fledged language whose value was self-evident into a jargon whose value was entirely suspect. But Milt Gross, for all his genuine fun, was also at fault. By reducing Yiddish to a mouthful of funny, unpronounceable bits, he helped to reduce that complex, age-old language to a punchline.