“Comedy is the most unfeminine profession,” stand-up comic Judy Gold proclaims, “besides being a urologist.” Onscreen, Gold sits in Katz’s Deli in Manhattan with fellow comediennes Jackie Hoffman, Cory Kahaney and Jessica Kirso. The foursome’s banter brackets the action in Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women, a new documentary that traces a funny-girl genealogy beginning with vaudeville stars Molly Picon, Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice and running through late-20th-century icons Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner and Wendy Wasserstein before reaching that third generation gathered in the deli.
Directed by Rachel Talbot and produced by the Jewish Women’s Archive, the documentary travels between present and past, its tale illustrated with photographs, film clips and interviews. It’s at its best when focused on the gutsy brilliance and personal sacrifices of bygone legends Tucker, Picon and Brice, outsized talents shaped by restrictive cultural corsets.
When Tucker left a husband and small child in Hartford, Connecticut, to take to the stage at the start of the 20th century, she was all but disowned by her family. “She had balls!” Kahaney remarks. Tucker could sing—and sing loud—but because they deemed her unattractive, early managers turned her into a caricature, making her perform in blackface. Once she managed to shed the hated disguise, she came out full-fleshed and earthy, using her gravelly voice and ample body to put across suggestive numbers like “Nobody Loves a Fat Girl, But Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love.” “My songs aren’t about vice,” she once explained. “They’re about sex.”
The film casts Fanny Brice as “the first woman willing to play the clown without restraint.” Brice, née Borach, performed for years with a thick Old Country accent even though she knew barely a hundred words of Yiddish. Picon, meanwhile, not only sang but wrote lyrics for Yiddish songs—some 200 hits with titles like “Abi Gezunt” (“As Long As You’re Healthy”). The sweetly smiling Picon played a Jewish “America’s sweetheart” but also floored audiences by effortlessly singing, dancing, piano-playing and even swinging from ropes. “She had so much energy and so much pizzazz,” comments Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan in the movie. “I don’t know what the Yiddish for ‘pizzazz’ is, but I’m sure there is one.” This, the film maintains, is the mantle—or rather, the feather boa—passed on by Picon and her generation to later Jewish icons.
What is this “Jewish” essence discerned in so many of the last century’s funny women? When Christopher Hitchens recently declared in Vanity Fair that men are funnier than women, he allowed one exception: Jewish women. “Jewish humor,” he said, “boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.”
If anyone proves him right, it may be Joan Rivers, who steals the film’s second half. Rivers recalls how she bombed on the Catskills’ Borscht Belt circuit but found an audience in Greenwich Village. “Gays,” she declares, “love strong women.” In one performance clip, she mimics her longstanding gig as a celebrity red-carpet fashion interviewer: “Seventy-two-fucking-years-old,” she rasps, “standing out in the sun like a hooker in Miami going, ‘Who you wearing?’”
Rivers’s foul-mouthed candor and searing self-mockery presaged the wildly popular contemporary Jewish comedienne Sarah Silverman—who, surprisingly, is not included here—and also helped clear the way for Saturday Night Live to blithely skip through material that once would have been banned from TV. The film’s profile of Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer in 1989, includes clips of taboo-smashing SNL skits like a tush-wiggling ad for “designer” label “Jewess Jeans” and, improbable as it sounds, hilarious takes on bulimia, from which Radner actually suffered.
In a TV skit with Garry Shandling, we see a close-cropped Radner returning to the air after undergoing cancer treatment, to make fun of herself some more. In its poignancy, her appearance echoes one of the film’s earlier clips, of a petite, white-haired Picon telling a television variety show audience about how she performed in Europe for Jewish refugees made homeless by World War II. An internee approached her from the audience, she relates, baby daughter in her arms, and said, “I don’t want her to grow up without hearing people laugh.”
Thanks to Molly, Fanny and Sophie and the bold women who followed, that didn’t happen. This film shows why. —Mandy Katz
“Comedy is the most unfeminine profession,” stand-up comic Judy Gold proclaims, “besides being a urologist.” Onscreen, Gold sits in Katz’s Deli in Manhattan with fellow comediennes Jackie Hoffman, Cory Kahaney and Jessica Kirso. The foursome’s banter brackets the action in Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women, a new documentary that traces a funny-girl genealogy beginning with vaudeville stars Molly Picon, Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice and running through late-20th-century icons Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner and Wendy Wasserstein before reaching that third generation gathered in the deli.
