Morris Dickstein
URBAN COMEDY AND MODERNITY:
FROM CHAPLIN TO WOODY ALLEN
Most attempts to analyze comedy turn on how it is con–
sumed: the psychology of the audience or what makes people laugh.
But it should prove equally useful to examine the cast of mind of the
author or actor: what kind of people need to make other people laugh?
No doubt there are as many different answers to that question as
there are kinds of comedy, but here I'd like to explore the relation be–
tween comedy and insecurity or feelings of marginality. My main
exhibit is the work of Charlie Chaplin, the most celebrated comedian
of the twentieth century, whose tramp-hero is the marginal man
par
excellence.
Closely related to the pathos and defensive humor of
Chaplin's antihero is a long tradition of Jewish humor which–
whether naive as in the famous Chelm stories or sophisticated, as in
the work ofS. J. Perelman, Nathanael West, Nichols and May, and
Woody Allen - feeds on anxieties with which an audience can easily
identify.
This kind of comedy becomes increasingly important as
modern life becomes more urbanized and industrialized, as it
dissolves traditional social ties and replaces them with more imper–
sonal economic ones. The city, as Georg Simmel has written, "grants
to the individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which
has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions." Yet at the same
time it creates uncertainties of identity and status unknown in rural
and small-town society . Under these conditions the Jew, with his
long experience of marginality, his painful history in every society in
which he has been an uneasy guest, becomes a modern Everyman.
This helps explain why Jewish humor proves to have an enormous
appeal beyond its natural constituency. Humor is rarely exportable,
but Jewish vulnerability - and the impulse toward defensive self–
mockery - seems to be something that many other people have ex–
perienced.
All through his career in a Hollywood built by Jewish moguls
out of an immigrant's fantasy of the American Dream, Charlie
Chaplin played cat-and-mouse with the idea of being Jewish. Dur–
ing the thirties and forties he was universally assumed to be at least
partJewish. (Hannah Arendt, for example, devoted several pages to
