How Jewish Is American Comedy?
Are Jews as dominant at being funny as blacks are at playing basketball?
Charles Murray tweets:
Let’s start with comedy screenwriters. Here are some (but by no means all) top comic screenplay writers as counted by their Oscar nominations for Best Original plus Best Adapted screenplays. (However, some of their nominations were for dramas or comedy-dramas. And some are shared nominations: e.g., Billy Wilder almost never wrote alone.)
Woody Allen (Annie Hall) — 16 nominations
Billy Wilder - (Some Like It Hot) - 13 nominations
Coen Brothers - (Fargo) - 7
Paul Thomas Anderson (One Battle After Another)- 6
Pete Docter (Toy Story) - 5
This is by no means a complete list.
I’d say that with Wilder, Allen, and the Coens, Jewish comic film writers tended to have the longest runs near the top. This is not to say that they were necessarily the most brilliant at one point in time, just that they could keep up being funny at a high level for decades.
It’s possible that gentiles tend to achieve more originality, but burn out faster. E.g., in American book writing, perhaps the two funniest books of a generation or two ago were Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.
But neither man could keep it up.
Another metric would be the top Simpsons writers from its Golden Age before 2000. Unlike it’s rival for greatest comedy series of the 1990s, Seinfeld, The Simpsons was set in Mid-America. (Although note that Jerry and George, though they now live on the Upper West Side, are fairly average suburban middle class Americans by upbringing. They are into baseball and comic books, while Woody Allen — whose parents sometimes spoke German at home — was into basketball and European philosophy.)
On the other hand, The Simpsons tended to be written by former Harvard Lampoon wits. My next-door neighbor back in 2000, who wrote for the fine meat-and-potatoes sit-com Married With Children, always had terrible things to say about the “Harvard Mafia” who were, in her view (although not mine), ruining sit-com writing.
The most productive 1990s Simpsons writers would appear to be, in roughly this order:
John Swartzwelder (my best guess as to ethnicity: gentile), Al Jean (gentile), Jon Vitti (gentile), Ian Maxtone-Graham (gentile), Dan Greaney (gentile), Jeff Martin (gentile), David X. Cohen (Jewish), Bill Oakley & Josh Weinstein (one gentile and one Jewish), Mike Scully (gentile), George Meyer (gentile), Jay Kogen & Wallace Wolodarsky (both Jewish), Mike Reiss (Jewish), and Sam Stein (Jewish and perhaps the single most important influence on turning The Simpsons into a juggernaut in the 1990s), David M. Stern (Jewish), and Greg Daniels (Jewish). Conan O’Brien is only credited with 4 screenplays compared to Swartzwelder’s 59, but by all accounts, he had a big impact during his brief tenure.
My apologies to everybody I left out.
The show’s three co-creators were cartoonist Matt Groening (gentile), comedy all-timer James L. Brooks (Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Terms of Endearment — he is said to have given The Simpson’s “more heart” and he air-dropped in Holly Hunter’s girl-boss character from his hit film Broadcast News to be Lisa Simpson’s personality), and Sam Simon, the workhorse of the three.
So, I’ve got 20 names who played a key role in writing The Simpsons, with 11 of them gentile and 9 Jewish.
What about stand-up comedians?
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