(Jewish Group) Neil Simon, A Yiddish-Influenced Wisecracker

[Behind the Aegis]

(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 Simon’s 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 Koprince’s “Understanding Neil Simon” cites an exchange from “Broadway Bound” in which Eugene Jerome reacts to his grandmother’s disappointment that the Statue of Liberty lacks Yiddishkeit: “That would be a riot. A Jewish Statue of Liberty. In her left hand, she’d 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 Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys” (1972) that words containing the consonant “k,” such as baking and electric, are inherently droll:

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