A few weeks ago, I found myself in the audience at a dark, musty comedy club in San Francisco’s Mission District, among a crowd of mostly 30- and 40-something gay men. There were a few drag queens thrown into the mix. And also, I was sandwiched in between my parents. It was not, shall we say, a typical family Friday night.
Typical or not, the three of us were happy just biding our time for the main attraction: my cousin Nadya Ginsburg, a comedian based out of L.A., was performing her first San Francisco show in years. This crowd was pretty typical for her fan base.
Almost 15 years older than me, Nadya (who’s half Italian and sometimes promotes herself as the Jew-talian Stallion) has always been the best example, in my mind, of how to be a fun grownup. She busts out dead-on impressions of movie stars and (shh) certain family members with what seems like zero effort.
Her one-woman stage shows feature both much-loved Madonna and Cher impressions (hence the gay following) and a number of original characters. And behind each one — even the most abrasive characters — there’s a self-deprecating tenderness. Which is to say, she comes from a proud tradition of raunchy, fearless female Jewish comedians.
As Saul Bellow once put it, “Oppressed people tend to be witty.” Modern-day Jewish comedians from Andy Kaufman to Garry Shandling to Larry David have built careers on that delicate brand of dark humor that makes us laugh because there’s a larger grain of truth in its worldview than we’d sometimes like to admit.
But at my cousin’s show that night, I realized I’d been thinking specifically about the role of female Jewish comedians in pop culture at large since seeing last year’s excellent documentary “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.” In it, we see a woman who presents herself as having been continually punished for being a female who speaks her mind.
Outspoken Jewish women may be an undeniable presence in our families, but it’s worth remembering that for all intents and purposes, in mainstream America, being Jewish and female still amounts to a double-whammy of “otherness.”
Perusing the Jewish Women’s Archive online, I found this from Joyce Antler, a professor of American Jewish history and culture at Brandeis University:
“There is something unique about female Jewish comics which distinguishes them from male colleagues and peers … whether they are openly rebellious, using bawdy, sexually frank routines in the manner of a Sophie Tucker, Belle Barth, Totie Fields, Bette Midler or Joan Rivers, or whether they present more gentle challenges, with portrayals of innocent, endearing characters — think Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, Gilda Radner and Goldie Hawn — these comediennes have stretched the boundaries of conventional thinking about gender roles and stereotypes. The laughter they engender is powerful, and it can be subversive.”
Subversive. There was the word I was looking for. There’s an inherent power in making people laugh, and if you belong to two different groups of people who have fought difficult battles to attain any degree of power in society, it becomes that much more of a source of strength.
While I may not always be in the mood for Sarah Silverman’s particular brand of gallows humor, I can always recognize the value in it. The reaction she provokes in a lot of viewers is, “Hey, nice Jewish girls aren’t supposed to say things like that.” And if that reaction encourages even a small percentage of her audience to question what, exactly, they assume Jewish girls are “supposed” to say, then I’m all for it.
After roughly two hours of watching Nadya do what she does best (which is make you double over in fits of laughter, sometimes at gags you feel vaguely guilty about laughing at, but you can’t help it), I walked my parents back through the Mission to their car for their drive home. Was it something we normally would have attended as a family if Nadya hadn’t been involved? Probably not. Was it a traditional Shabbat activity in any way? A resounding no. Did we all have giant, silly grins plastered on our faces? Absolutely. Here’s to pushing boundaries.
Emma Silvers lives in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].