By Bill Simons

In descending order, “Masters of shtick: part I” led off with Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, Woody Allen, Alan King and Elain May. With five final entries, Part II completes the comic minyan. 
6. Jerry Seinfeld. He didn’t invent observational comedy but brought it to a new level. Quintessential Seinfeld humor riffed on every day, mundane things. Until recently, Seinfeld eschewed the political, polemical and consequential. During the past year, however, he has generated controversy, claiming at a Duke University appearance that the Ku Klux Klan “is actually a little better… [than the Free Palestine movement] because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like Blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ OK, that’s honest.” In contrast, the primetime Seinfeld shtick of former days was “about nothing,” or more precisely commonplace experience, and it is that earlier Jerry who in under discussion. Classic Seinfeld typically dealt with topics as universally relatable as shirt buttons, relationships between elderly parents and their adult children, dating, phone messages and double-dipping chips. “What’s the deal with” was not a ubiquitous Seinfeldism, but embellished memory recognizes that it captures the ethos, if not the specifics, of Jerry’s heyday humor. 
“Seinfeld” (1989-98), his eponymous TV show, and decades of standup routines were both set in an implicitly Jewish milieu. The Seinfeld ensemble satirized overreaction to minor indignities, labeling an imperious food vendor “the soup Nazi” and equating the search for the identity of a New York Mets player who allegedly spit on an overzealous fan to John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. Seinfeld and his cohorts sometimes acted outrageously insensitive and selfish as when invading the space of an immunologically compromised “bubble boy,” ridiculing a blowhard with the phrase “Maybe the dingo ate your baby” or “making out” during a screening of Schindler’s List. 
7. Fanny Brice. With all due respect to Sophie Tucker, Brice was the first Jewish comedienne to generate a heterogeneous following in mass media. For continuing to inspire other Jewish women to take the stage, Brice earned her Top Ten niche. In addition to her comic popularity, Brice, a Ziegfeld Follies’ legend, displayed acting and singing talents on stage, film, record and radio. For a generation, her Baby Snooks routine – featuring a precocious, energetic, curious little girl pestering her exasperated father with endless questions – produced hilarity. During the 1960s, creative adaptation of Brice’s life on stage and film made Barbra Streisand a superstar. Herself an exemplar of chutzpah and courage, Beanie Feldstein, who played Fannie in a 2022 Broadway revival of “Funny Girl,” asserted, “Any Jewish woman who gets to be themselves on stage owes something to Fanny Brice. There’s no Bette Midler – there’s no Sarah Silverman. None of us would have had that ability if it wasn’t for Fanny smashing through that glass ceiling with that ferocious, you’re-not-going-to-turn me away-energy.”
8. Lenny Bruce. Bruce, aka Leonard Schneider, expressed his lineage through sensibility, proclaiming, “If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter even if you’re Catholic; if you live in New York, you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish.” No sacred cows were immune from Bruce’s scathing wit. Taking no prisoners, his improvisational standup comedy was cutting and on the mark. Religion, race, sex, morality, politics, commerce, illicit substances, celebrities and, indeed, the gamut of human experience were Bruce’s canvas. Oppression, hypocrisy, cruelty and stupidity of any sort were fair game. And he was devastatingly funny. At a historic Carnegie Hall performance on February 4, 1961, Bruce displayed sheer genius. 
In our own era, retrospective creatives imagined Bruce seducing Midge Maisel. But history records that the repressive establishment sent undercover detectives after Bruce, recording his performances. The silencing of iconoclastic comedians didn’t start with Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. Like Socrates in ancient Athens, Bruce was deemed a corrupter of youth, arrested, charged with obscenity and convicted, raising serious First Amendment issues. A self-destructive genius, Bruce, the dark prince of Jewish American comedy, turned to drugs that sapped his talent and cratered his audience. Derided by critics as sick, an observant commentator rebutted that Bruce wasn’t sick, rather he held a mirror up to the sick elements of our society. Socrates took the hemlock, and Bruce, dead at 40, the morphine. 
9. Sid Caesar. Big, muscular and physically imposing, Caesar was the ultimate counter to stories that began with “Did you hear the one about the little Jewish gentleman?” He looked like a gangster. During television’s 1950s golden age of comedy, his two live variety shows, “Caesar’s Hour” and “Your Show of Shows,” were “Must See TV,” even before that term was coined. Entertainment critic Gene Seymour termed Caesar “hilariously out of control,” and Todd Leopold highlighted his “anarchic” style. Caesar’s humor – broad, physically frenetic and uproarious – rendered him quite plausibly greatest-of-all-time amongst sketch comedians. 
Caesar satirized actual and fictive phenomenon. On his stage, the popular and critically acclaimed film, “From Here to Eternity,” recipient of eight Academy Awards, morphed into “From Here to Obscurity,” a hysterical farce. Dialogue in many Caesar sketches employed a bombastic faux immigrant language, sometimes laced with a few Yiddish expressions. However, Caesar’s comedy was Jewish more in its tone and sensibility than content, generated by his nonpareil team of Jewish gag writers: Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Selma Diamond and the young Woody Allen. Although Caesar lived into his 90s, the stress of performance and pace led to alcohol and drug addictions, marring the second half of his life and career. 
10. Sarah Silverman. At 54, Silverman is in her prime, still a work in progress. Nonetheless, her feats earn Silverman a place within this non-Orthodox minyan. Accessible, ingenious and devoid of restraint, she invites comparison more to Amy Schumer than Gertrude Berg. Standup is Silverman’s forte. Frequently profane, sexually explicit and controversial, Silverman, whose sister is a rabbi, shocks with routines on diarrhea, bed wetting, pornography, mothers and Hitler, often finding a hook to the Jewish American experience and to her own journey. Occasionally, she adopts the personae of a bigot to demonstrate prejudice’s moorings in ignorance. In appearance and demeanor, Silverman evokes novelist Philip Roth’s quintessential Jewish American Princess, Brenda Patimkin. Silverman’s routines are often simultaneously offensive and the source of uncontrollable laughter. 
Given the inevitability of dissent from my Comedian Minyan choices, I anticipate future columns on Jewish wit.