by Rabbi Dov Fischer in The American Spectator
When I was a cute, sweet little boy back in 1960s Brooklyn, every Friday night after family Shabbat dinner I would lie on the floor in our living room. My dad would be lying right there, nearby on a couch, reading Newsweek to catch up on the news he could not follow all week since he was gone 12 hours daily from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. six days weekly, working from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. at his brother’s wholesale store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side at 114 Ludlow Street (now a parking lot), selling toys, games, and paper reams to retail storeowners who then sold those things to the public in an era before Toys “R” Us, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples. (The longest sentence I have written in three years.) I lay alongside, spreading out our weekly issue of the Jewish Press, a 100-plus-page newspaper that had all the news and inside dope on everything interesting Brooklyn Jews, who in those days were all the Jews who mattered. There was news, zillions of ads for wig makers to cover the hair of married Orthodox women, clothes stores with modest dresses, skirts, and tops for Orthodox women, travel agencies offering flights to Israel (some even offering flights back!), kosher foods, hotels and bungalow colonies in the Catskills, and other stuff.
(Good news to Harvard, Columbia, Penn, and MIT anti-Semites: Those bungalows since have been decolonized.)
There was news about Israel, about Jews in Brooklyn, about the small diaspora in Queens, Lower Manhattan, and the Bronx. If there were any Jews on Staten Island, they did not count anyway. As for the rich Upper East Side “Reform Jews,” we deemed them all “Goyyim” — that is, non-Jews. No point in reading news about them.
There still isn’t.
And there was Arnie Fine.
I got my sense of humor from four sources: (i) my father of blessed memory, (ii) Sunday nights alongside my dad, watching Nat Hiken’s NBC weekly series Car 54, Where Are You?, (iii) Arnie Fine, and (iv) Jackie Mason. Arnie wrote a weekly column called “I Remember When.” In it, he would reminisce in the 1960s about stuff in the Brooklyn and Lower East Side of the 1910s and 1920s. Ten years of reading Arnie was like a college course in New York Jewish history. And Arnie wrote with a sly and clever eye for humor.
I think back to Arnie because I never expected to be an old man reminiscing and wistfully thinking back 60 years. I still am not an old man in the Era of Biden. Me? This old man, he plays two, he thinks back as an older Jew, with a knick-knack paddy-wack give a Jew a bone, now it’s time to change my tone.
Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end. I miss an America when comedy was funny. When did we lose comedy?
I can forgive the Left for ruining basketball. I am only 5-foot-10 anyway. I can forgive them for ruining football. It’s only four months, and I am surprised how little I care about it now that I stopped watching a few years ago, thanks to Kaepernick. I can forgive the Left for ruining most news media; we still have The American Spectator (and also much else: Daily Wire, Free Press, Power Line, Israel National News, Federalist, American Thinker, New York Post, Townhall, FrontPage, Commentary, City Journal). I can forgive the Left for ruining the movies and TV. I can still stream oldies, and I never will have the time to see all those I want plus all the Ken Burns documentaries I want to see again. I can forgive the Left for ruining theater. There are so many revivals and excellent touring companies doing the great musicals and great classic comedies and dramas to keep me happy. I can forgive the Left for ruining awards shows like the Emmy, Oscar, Grammy, and Tony awards. Honestly, who needs ’em?
But I can never forgive the Left for ruining nationally unifying American comedy. Yes, I miss doctors’ house calls (so convenient, but I hated Dr. Lipsett’s frightful needle in the tuchus that is replaced today by “Tylenol” or “Advil.” I miss the Catskills and Grossinger’s and the Pioneer Hotel, with their baked herring, baked apples, chiffon pies, and unlimited portions of everything. I do not miss phone booths and the state of panic engendered by needing to call ahead to report an unanticipated delay in getting to a meeting or court hearing because of a highway/freeway car pile-up and, therefore, needing to drive off at the exit to find a phone booth to make the call, which meant you would not be 20 minutes late but an hour late — and then you had no dimes, so you had to pump in quarters.
But I miss comedy.
“I Remember When” all of America tuned into Johnny Carson at 11:30 p.m. for some inoffensive celebrity small talk, some great new stand-up comedians, and an occasional music number — all augmented by Carnac the Magnificent, and the insane way he blew the envelopes open, and sidekick Ed McMahon repeating the Answer for which Carnac would guess the absurd Question. Late-night TV continued its magic when Jay Leno took over for one audience and David Letterman for another. Jay did “Headlines,” reading unbelievably moronic news stories or ads, often the result of typos or poor grammar or spelling that resulted in Doozies, and “Jaywalking,” where he predated Watters’ World by asking simple questions to idiot pedestrians at Universal City or on Hollywood Boulevard. And there was Dave’s “Top Ten” list.
There was Don Rickles. He insulted everyone — very un-PC — but no one minded because you knew he was not serious, and he never really aimed below the belt. There was Rodney Dangerfield (name changed from Jacob Cohen), and for a guy who “got no respect,” so many of us loved the guy and his constant nervous fidgeting at his neck with his too-tight tie. There was Jackie Mason. Red Buttons. Red Skelton. Joan Rivers.
And then there was Saturday Night Live. Gee, it was so drop-dead funny, and an entire country would be talking about its skits on Monday morning, with laughter in the coffee rooms heard down office halls. Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Jon Lovitz, Bill Murray, Dennis Miller, Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, so many of them. Just plain hysterically funny. Maybe they poked fun at the president, but it was good-natured, and it did not matter whether he was Democrat or Republican. They mostly were sort of fair.
How the Left has destroyed our comedy! Name five great comedians today. I will start with Steven Wright and Sebastian Maniscalco. After that, I draw a blank.
I am conservative and so do not find Colbert or Kimmel or Meyers watchable. I don’t mind parodying my guys as long as they parody the other guys too. Go ahead and make fun of Trump and the orange stuff. But make fun of Biden and his doddering. He falls far more often than Gerald Ford ever did, and Chevy Chase made a career out of those pratfalls. You think Alec Baldwin was funny doing Trump? Howzabout someone doing something about Alec Baldwin teaching gun safety? Not funny because he actually killed someone? Aha. So he can mock others even though he has killed more civilians than has the entire Congress.
Tina Fey as Sarah Palin? Spot on. But what about America’s No. 1 Public Idiot, DEI Kamala? There are not enough episodes of SNL to laugh up that giggling moron. And, talking about morons, what about that DEI presidential spokesperson? If you can mock Trump’s spokespeople — each and every one an intelligent, articulate, able representative — why not Biden’s hyphenated moron, with two French surnames, though she more realistically is French toast? And what about a DEI SCOTUS nominee who cannot define “woman”?
They destroyed SNL by making it hyper-partisan and bitter. The first sign was when SNL moved from the Washington Post Entertainment section to the actual news. SNL no longer was about entertaining and bringing a nation together in combined cultural references but instead had transmogrified into a vicious, nasty left-wing propaganda piece.
And SNL’s degradation never was clearer than when it reacted to extraordinary congressional hearings when Rep. Elise Stefanik grilled the president of the University of Pennsylvania and elicited remarkable testimony that it can be OK to call publicly for the extermination of Jewish people. There was so much to satirize in Liz Magill’s live self-immolation. Instead, hateful of a Republican “who done well,” SNL went after Stefanik for exposing anti-Semitism in the Poison Ivy league.
“I Remember When” Saturday Night Live was universally and almost uniformly funny. “I Remember When” late-night talk shows were a treat. “I Remember When” America laughed together.
I will never forgive the Left for taking comedy away from America.
Originally published in The American Spectator
Photo Credit: ANDERS KRUSBERG / PEABODY AWARDS on Flickr