What’s it like to be Jewish in America today?
The easy answer is that it’s scary. Everywhere we turn, we’re reminded that “antisemitism is on the rise” and that Jews, especially those who are visibly Jewish, are feeling increasingly unsafe.
Comedian Eli Leonard will be the first to tell you he looks Jewish, like very Jewish.
That Jewish appearance hovers gently yet poignantly above his new show, “Good Showbiz,” which I saw Thursday night at the Elysian Theater in Echo Park (the show will have its New York Premiere at the SoHo Playhouse on Aug. 12).
In the show, Leonard, who’s worked on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and studied clown comedy in France, plays Jewish impresario Sandy Synagoguenstein as he takes us on a time-traveling journey through the Jewish comedy tradition. The show has been described as an “experimental, clown comedy and satire that fearlessly and provocatively explores Jewish comedy and theater throughout the ages.”
In a packed hour and fifteen minutes, Leonard throws it all in– vaudeville, Yiddish theater, Broadway, stand up, slapstick, prayer liturgy, you name it. At one point, he stages a bar mitzvah where he asks audience members to raise him on a chair (giving each a dollar) while the band plays “Hava Nagila” and he ends up crashing on the ground in apparent agony.
While comedy drives the show in a madcap way, Leonard wants the audience to know that entertainment is, above all, a serious business. He knows and the audience knows that if he can’t make us laugh, he has no business being on stage.
This has been true for the countless iconic Jewish entertainers who preceded Leonard in that same endeavor– making America laugh any way they could. Yes, comedy is one of the ways Jews have learned to survive through the centuries, and yes, the Jewish comics in America looked like they were all having a good time, because laughter has a way of lightening up the mood and covering up the serious stuff.
But that camouflage speaks to the unique power of comedy to register serious messages without the sanctimony of a preacher.
Throughout the show, for example, Leonard hands out dollar bills to any audience member who does as he says. Mocking a classic stereotype, he tells us we’re now working for him. But this serious “biz in showbiz” message is pleasantly submerged by the breezy and endearing way Leonard throws out the dollars.
By the time he riffs on the antisemitic Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice” (he asks the audience, jarringly, not to laugh during this part), you may well be thinking that you’ve never seen a show like this.
The show works on two levels. The obvious one is the time travel through the long Jewish comic and theater tradition. But the real bite of the show is provided by the Jewish “interruptions,” whether it’s antisemitism, a Shabbos dinner, a bar mitzvah, the Jewish dilemma of assimilation and, yes, even the Holocaust.
His treatment of the Holocaust dramatizes to the extreme the show’s running theme of comedy as a transactional business. Leonard brings up how Nazis would sometimes ask Jews to entertain them, so he proceeds to do the same with us, emulating the classic “Fiddler” scene of a rabbi dancing while balancing a bottle on his hat.
Hinting at a cruel and demanding Nazi audience, he decides to raise the ante. This is too easy, he says. Eventually, he puts a dog collar around his neck and orders an audience member to zap him at will (after giving her a dollar). He promises he will give each of us $250 if the bottle breaks. Throughout the dance, the crowd continues to laugh (if a little nervously), and Leonard ends up conveying the horror of the Shoah better than any scholar could.
When he touches oh so gently on the very topical matter of the rise in antisemitism, he announces a new venture he calls “pogrom insurance.” He’ll stand next to any Jew who’s afraid of being attacked. He doesn’t need to elaborate on why he’ll get attacked first.
Crucial to the show is his long-time show partner, the multi-talented Sarah Shtern, who plays different roles to accentuate the story lines, from an old-school Catskills singer to Leonard’s religious wife who wants him to sit down for Shabbos dinner after she made him chicken.
The ensuing “Good Showbiz or Good Shabbos?” dispute encapsulates the longtime dilemma of being Jewish in America. Do we stay attached to our ancient tradition that got us this far, or do we throw ourselves into the “biz” of the land of opportunity?
Like a good comic, Leonard is not there to provide answers. He’s there to shake us up. At their best, this is what great comics do. They shake us up from our slumber. They know we’ve seen it all. They know we live on social media. They know we’ve become cynical and political.
Leonard surely knows all this, and there’s a mischievous smirk on his face that suggests he can’t wait to take us on. He’ll use everything in his arsenal to crack us up, from his stereotypical looks to the dark undertones of the Jewish experience. Perhaps one unspoken message of the show is that Jewish comics have been so beloved in this country precisely because they’ve used everything in their arsenal.
For Eli Leonard, then, being Jewish in America means never forgetting that his world is a business and he better make us laugh. The only thing that must scare him is if he doesn’t kill on stage.
