Jewish characters have been on television since its infancy. But with rare exceptions such as Judd Hirsch in “Taxi,” they were relegated to supporting roles (Morey Amsterdam’s Buddy on “The Dick Van Dyke Show”) or turned into TV Wonder Bread (“Bridget Loves Bernie”). In the late 1980s, a few breakthrough characters emerged, notably “thirtysomething’s” sensitive hunk Michael Steadman. Now, it seems, Jewish leading menschen have become nearly as plentiful as bialys at a bar mitzvah. On the heels of Dr, Joel Fleischman on “Northern Exposure,” and Jerry Seinfeld on his eponymous sitcom, shows such as “Flying Blind,” “Mad About You” and “Love and War” offer highly verbal, slightly neurotic-and unmistakably New York Jewish-heroes. “Their sensibility is fatalistic and ironic, filled with the possibility that disaster is right around the corner,” says “Flying Blind’s” writer-creator Richard Rosenstock. “There’s an element in Jewish humor that says, ‘Look out!’”
So where did these guys come from? For one thing, Jewish stand-up comics are increasingly bringing their humor from “The Tonight Show” couch to prime time. Jackie Mason’s “Chicken Soup,” which had a brief run on ABC in 1989, awkwardly attempted to transplant Mason’s borscht-belt jokes to a sitcom format. The same year Richard Lewis played opposite Jamie Lee Curtis on the witty but short-lived “Anything But Love.” “I was seminaked on TV with a sex symbol, trying to count how many Jewish leading men had done that on prime time,” he says. Many Jewish TV comedy writers, inspired by the humor of Woody Allen, Nichols and May, and Philip Roth, have felt freer to invent characters taken from their own experience, and a new generation of network executives has encouraged them. “Jews in Hollywood have hidden behind other groups, going back to the early days of movies, when Jewish moguls presented idealized WASP families,” says Larry Charles, supervising producer of “Seinfeld.” “Now, we’re allowing ourselves to be who we are, and not to be ashamed of exposing it.” Rosenstock points to “Marty” and “The Catered Affair” by Paddy Chayefsky as classic examples of programs in which Jews were disguised as other ethnic types. “The key to comedy used to be ‘Write Jewish and cast Gentile.’ Not anymore.”
With the shackles off, some writers are beginning to fly. One “Seinfeld” episode was a hilarious setup from a Jewish nightmare: being face to face with venomous anti-Semites. Jerry and sidekick George (Jason Alexander), mistaken for leaders of the Aryan Alliance, are trapped in a limo with neo-Nazis going to a rally. Hard-up George eyes an icily beautiful acolyte. “Did you see the way she was looking at me?” he asks. “She’s a Nazi, George. A Nazi,” says Jerry. “I know … She’s kind of a cute Nazi.” Threatened with exposure, George fakes a tirade: “Astroturf? Well, you know who’s responsible for that, don’t ya? The Jews. The Jews hate grass. Always have.”
That kind of humor-raw, hip, unflinching-would have been verboten on prime time just a couple of years ago. “Like our audience, we’re coming from cable, from late night and from the comedy clubs,” says Charles. “We’re maturing at the same time, becoming mainstream.” Seinfeld is so mainstream that he never remarks on his Jewishness; unlike the beyond-therapy humor of Richard Lewis or the us-against-the-goyim routines of Jackie Mason, Seinfeld’s ethnicity is an unspoken part of his shtik, which focuses on life’s tiny absurdities. Is there a more useless gift than the paperweight? he wonders. “Where are these people working that the papers are just flying off their desk? On the back of a flatbed truck?” But fly Seinfeld’s kvetching parents up from Miami and it’s curtain up on a Neil Simon play. That’s why, says Rosenstock, “‘Seinfeld’ is the most Jewish show since the Yiddish theater closed down.”
Maybe he hasn’t seen “Mad About You” on NBC. Angst oozes from the soul of New Yorker Paul Reiser, another former stand-up. Like Seinfeld, he fixates on life’s minutiae-and much of it drives him nuts. “Slacks? I hate [trying on] slacks, because you got to do the whole shoe thing,” he complains in a store. As with nearly every other TV show featuring a Jewish leading man, much of the humor comes from his interplay with a cooler WASP goddess, deftly played by Helen Hunt. Such female characters not only provide comic foils, but they may also offer an all-American complement to make the pair more palatable to a mainstream audience.
“Flying Blind” and “Love and War” tackle the boy-meets-goy theme with uneven results. “Love and War” juxtaposes Jack’s abrasiveness with Wally’s Martha Stewart sensibility. “Last night I was ready to buy a burial plot with her,” Jack says after mucking up his first date. “Now I’m a schmuck with cold feet.” On “Flying Blind,” a Jewish boy from the ‘burbs (Corey Parker) becomes enmeshed with a Downtown space cadet (Tea Leoni). After he puts on her Balinese death mask, she tells him he may be cursed. “I’ve been living with one ever since I spilled that glass of Manischewitz extra-heavy grape on my aunt Ida’s white carpet,” he replies. “Flying Blind” is far wittier than “Love and War”-but both lean on gags about circumcisions and other stock Jewish humor.
Much of Hollywood’s creative community welcomes the trend, saying it proves that the American mainstream is finally ready to embrace Jewish characters wholeheartedly. But writer Janis Hirsch (“Anything But Love”) wonders why all the new Jews are men: “Have you ever seen a cute little Jewish girl on TV?” For the most part, she’s right. Hirsch blames it on the “myth that the Jewish woman is loud and abrasive”-and in TV-land terms, not as sexy as the shiksas. Other writers are wary of perpetuating old stereotypes. “When we cast the [Joel Fleischman] part, we thought it was important not to cast a nebbishy Jewish guy,” says Joshua Brand, cocreator with John Falsey of “Northern Exposure.” Some of these shows, says Brand, “offer a parody of Jewish experience.” At their worst, like the mass-produced bagels you can buy in grocers’ freezers from Maine to Cicely, Alaska, TV’s new menschen can be stale and tasteless. But at their best, they address painful subjects with a crispness and humor seldom seen in prime time.
