(Jewish Group) Neil Simon, A Yiddish-Influenced Wisecracker
(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)
In his heyday, the playwright Neil Simon, who died on August 26 at age 91, produced a series of long-running plays, some of them winners of significant awards, that tickled audiences as the height of the wisecrack genre.
Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985), Broadway Bound (1986), and Lost in Yonkers (1991) capped a long-running career with semi-autobiographical chortles about American Jewish experience. The verbal rhythms of Simons writing held willing audiences captive. They had paid Broadway prices to laugh at a Neil Simon comedy and fully intended to do exactly that even if the literal meaning of some jokes did not live up to the snappy sound of the repartee.
Susan Koprinces Understanding Neil Simon cites an exchange from Broadway Bound in which Eugene Jerome reacts to his grandmothers disappointment that the Statue of Liberty lacks Yiddishkeit: That would be a riot. A Jewish Statue of Liberty. In her left hand, shed be holding a baking pan
and in the right hand, held up high, the electric bill.
The line works in the theater, likely because of the vaudeville tradition, explained by the character Willy Clark in Simons The Sunshine Boys (1972) that words containing the consonant k, such as baking and electric, are inherently droll:
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