Feb 23, 2025
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based on a true story…
This was posted on March 5 but I just saw it today lol
It is freaking HYSTERICAL!
Jewish comedy at its best 😊
Nobody Wants This (2024 - )
An agnostic sex podcaster and a newly single rabbi fall in love; discovering if their relationship survive their wildly different lives and meddling families.
This is such a delightful, sweet, feel-good, and funny show that I highly recommend to everyone. It's totally worth your time. Great comedy, charming and likeable characters, and yes, the Hot Rabbi is really wonderful!
I’ve been taking a great free class on Jewish Comedy through YIVO (the Yiddish Institute) online. Don’t worry; it’s in English and when there’s Yiddish, there are subtitles. Definitely check it out! It’s mostly videos and discussion questions.
The man who gave Woody Allen his big break
This article isn’t actually about Woody Allen. Instead, it’s a look back at the life and forces that shaped the prolific comedian Sid Caesar. He was born to a Jewish family in Yonkers, New York in 1922. He grew up hanging around his family’s 24/7 diner, then he intended to have a career as a musician. But he found his niche in comedy and ended up a fixture on TV, working with fledgling talents like Allen and Mel Brooks.
This 2010 interview, a few years before Sid died, gives an overview of his career and his perspective looking back. He’s humble when he talks about how proud he is of his work, but also how he had long periods of being personally miserable off stage. (Sounds familiar for many comedians, sadly.)
He also has a good take on the outsized role that comedy can play for Jewish people. “Jews appreciate humour because in their life it's not too funny. We've been trodden down for a long time, thousands of years. So we've had to turn that around because if you take it all too seriously you're going to eat yourself. And we're very good at being self-deprecating. Either we do it or somebody's going to do it for us. We might as well do it first.”
Obviously I’m really into various comedies from the 60s-80s (Monkees, Ghostbusters). And I grew up watching comedies from the 90s-2000s and beyond (many of these shows ending up in syndication or on streaming services today). But this year, I want to learn more about the earlier origins of modern comedy. People like Caesar and his contemporaries, as well as earlier talents like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy.
Some humor is universal. Some humor is more tailored to a certain context. We live in an era where, thanks to modern technology, we can access almost anything that we want! And I plan to take advantage of that more fully in 2024.
Don’t get me wrong, I spend a lot of time browsing YouTube and scrolling social media. I’m not giving up on that. I just want to use my time a bit more intentionally to understand the past and how it’s shaped our present. I think I’m going to have fun watching the source material.
Fran Drescher on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” (2003).
Hotel Anchovy 1934 {B&W Classic Comedy Short}
The Ritz Brothers were a comedy team operating predominately in the 1930s and ‘40s, peers of the more recognized Marx Brothers. While the Marxes were notable for their various differing personalities playing off one another and whoever was unfortunate enough to be their target, the Ritzes went about things like three rapid-fire versions of the same screwball, a dancing, silly-voiced three-man tornado.
The above is the first picture they made, the 1934 two-reeler Hotel Anchovy. Harry played the hotel manager and eldest brother Al the hotel detective while baby brother Jimmy played a bellhop. They come together to, basically, screw with guests at a hotel until the owner can get it sold. Unlike the Marx Brothers, who would’ve been cast as “legitimate” operators that indulged in farce, probably because they were all conmen, the Ritz Brothers were hired (in the short) to be wacky and zany, which they pull off with aplomb. This is seriously one of the funniest things ever put to film.
Three of four brothers (brother George was their manager) and a sister (Gertrude) born to a couple in Newark, NJ, to an Austrian-born Jewish haberdasher and wife named Joachim, Al was the first to enter showbiz as a vaudeville dancer. Seeing “Ritz” on on a laundry truck, he took it as a stage name. Harry and Jimmy eventually joined, and the brothers soon incorporated comedy bits into their dancing routine. Unlike the Marxes manic wordplay or the Three Stooges (which included brothers Moe, Curly and Shemp Howard along with Larry Fine) outrageous slapstick, the Ritzes specialized in precision-timed jokes and rampant silliness, drawing on their considerable skills as dancers to compliment the vocal gags. Rubber-faced Harry acted as leader with Al and Jimmy following along in his wake. Starting out on vaudeville and working nightclubs in the ‘20s, by the early ‘30s they were headliners
After making Hotel Anchovy in 1934 for Educational Pictures, the home of stone-faced funnyman Buster Keaton, the Ritz’s signed a picture deal with 20th Century Fox, playing usually in musicals using their boisterous zaniness to liven up some rather pedestrian pictures. Their first film was 1936′s Sing, Baby, Sing with no one you’ve probably heard of, and they got their first staring role with 1937′s Life Begins At College.
Unfortunately, the Ritz Brothers never got the good writers and top gag men the Marx Brothers (initially) got, and their films are, well... pretty dull. Their scenes are always a treat but the rest is usually a slog. One rare exception is the 1939 take on Alexander Dumas’ well-worn The Three Muskateers staring Don Ameche (Trading Places and Cocoon). Staging a walkout over the low-quality scripts they were being given, particularly 1939′s woeful The Gorilla featuing an already slumming Bela Lugosi, and Fox basically told them to get stuffed. They made one more picture before signing with Universal.
Unfortunately, Universal didn’t treat them much better, regulating them to B-movies and cameos. The Brothers stuck it out until 1943′s Never A Dull Moment, which actually wasn’t that bad comparatively, before quitting the movie business. They went back to working mostly in nightclubs with the odd appearance television appearance for the next 20 years.
In 1965 while appearing at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans (which is still in operation in the CBD) Al Ritz died of a heart attack. Always very close, the two surviving brothers were devastated but carried on the act for a few more years. They appeared in a pair of ‘30s B-movie homages in the mid ‘70s, Won Ton Ton, The Dog Who Saved Hollywood and Blazing Stewardesses. The later movie they replace the Three Stooges, as an aging Moe Howard was too sick to participate. Harry also cameoed in Mel Brooks’ 1976 paean to classic Hollywood Silent Movie.
Eventually retiring, Jimmy Ritz died in November 1985. Brother Harry’s own health was too delicate and he was never told of his brother’s death. He passed away five months later.
While they’re often compared to the Marx Brothers, who would occasionally turn on the speed-of-light tomfoolery like the examination scene in A Day At The Races, the comparison really wasn’t fair. The Ritz Brothers never really let the pace down long enough to engage in the sort of deadpan give-and-take double-talk humor Groucho and Chico excelled in. Indeed, it was rare to see a scene where one sole Ritz engaged with anyone else, a la Grouch’s insult-laden flirting with Margaret Dumont or Thelma Todd. And up until Irving Thalberg’s death at least, the Marxes just flat out got better scripts and jokes.
But as Hotel Anchovy proves, with the right material the Ritz Brothers were as funny as anyone in the golden days of Hollywood. They influenced everyone from Jerry Lewis and Sid Caesar to George Carlin and the TV show M*A*S*H. Harry Ritz was said to be the “funniest man in Hollywood” by many, including Norman Lear. The Brothers got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1987 in response to a campaign led by Milton Berle and Phyllis Diller.
Their movies are hard to find but to be frank, they’re for the most part not worth the effort. However, Hotel Anchovy is a scream, a lost nugget of Hollywood. Check it out.
