Left, Fanny Brice as Swan, courtesy the Fanny Brice Collection. Right, Barbara Streisand as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl, film still.
“The joke of a Jewish swan—flatfooted, coarse, crude—may be as funny now as it was in 1930, when Fanny Brice first skewered the classical femme ideal on film in the black-and-white movie Be Yourself. In that movie Brice spoofs Michel Fokine’s 1905 solo The Dying Swan as one of the many charades in her nightclub act, a divertissement of comic proportions in the first “talkie” featuring a female lead. The role, written for Brice and inspired by her real-life star status, follows her as she sustains her performing career while becoming a boxing manager, falling in love with a prizefighter, whom she trains with life smarts and business savvy. But as a man’s boss and not his beauty, Brice’s role picks up on the pain of the Jewish female, entirely too independent for men. This barrier in love brings added life to the Jewish swan number, as Brice’s ugly duck swan contends with this frustrated fate.
Brice’s swan, arguably the funniest among her filmic nightclub acts, embodies all that the classic swan has never dared to be. She is salt of the earth, ideal for chicken soup, and not the sweet stuff of a white swan’s weightless elegance. A bird of parody, she is the mocking companion of upwardly mobile middle-class concerns. Inverting the swan’s iconic uplift, she wades instead of glides, darts instead of developés, and is fully frank, opting for direct confrontation with audiences, when the swan figurine is supposed to be artfully ethereal, evasive—the effervescent material of fantasy and metaphor.1 A bawdy body and a dancing duck, the Jewish dying swan takes her end of life in stride, without a fuss.
Transfixing stage and screen audiences with her funny girl body, always already fallen from grace, Brice and her dying swan are a clear influence on Barbra Streisand’s rendition of Brice and her Jewish swan shtick in Funny Girl (1968), a film about Brice’s life and loss of love. Viewed together, the films make a convincing case for the swan as site of Jewish female self-reconciliation, where physical and vocal humor foreground frustrations tied to appropriate feminine codes. Made at distinct moments of American movie history that span a period of forty years, the depictions of Brice and her swan act in two films sing and dance of a female self-sufficiency that brings both pleasure and pain. A critical look at the pleasurable embodiment of enduring Jewish female stereotypes helps unpack a comic legacy of the funny girl body, unfit for love.
By foregrounding the funny dancing of Jewish swan parodies in both films, I illuminate a comic dance legacy with layered implications. I argue that ballet parodies of the white swan allow Jewish actresses to ridicule elitist pretentions of all kinds through Yiddish-inflected comic relief. In physical representations of funny women dancing ballet badly, Brice and Streisand’s Jewish swans offer duckish dance alternatives to demure femininity, much to the delight of on-screen audiences. Their comic critiques are stage show acts within film narratives focused on self-sufficient performance women. But as each film plot follows a female protagonist whose stage career overshadows her romantic aspirations, I argue for reading the swan dance scene as emblematic of larger representational dilemmas. As the funny girl body in swan send-ups invites laughter amid otherwise serious relationship dramas, she personifies a Jewish lead’s double longing for love and critical comment on womanhood. In what follows I thus question how the humor of ballet parody and the swan specifically constructs the Jewish funny girl body, adored by audiences but denied by the men they desire.”
-- from “Ballet Bawdies and Dancing Ducks: Jewish Swans of the Silver Screen,” by Hannah Schwadron, in Oxford Handbooks Online, Dance and Music, 2017.
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