Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Comic Reader (Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish Studies, 16) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814748236 ISBN 13: 9780814748237

Publisher: NYU Press, 2009

Synopsis

Milt Gross (1895-1953), a Bronx-born cartoonist and animator, first found fame in the late 1920s, writing comic strips and newspaper columns in the unmistakable accent of Jewish immigrants. By the end of the 1920s, Gross had become one of the most famous humorists in the United States, his work drawing praise from writers like H. L. Mencken and Constance Roarke, even while some of his Jewish colleagues found Gross’ extreme renderings of Jewish accents to be more crass than comical.
Working during the decline of vaudeville and the rise of the newspaper cartoon strip, Gross captured American humor in transition. Gross adapted the sounds of ethnic humor from the stage to the page and developed both a sound and a sensibility that grew out of an intimate knowledge of immigrant life. His parodies of beloved poetry sounded like reading primers set loose on the Lower East Side, while his accounts of Jewish tenement residents echoed with the mistakes and malapropisms born of the immigrant experience.
Introduced by an historical essay, Is Diss a System? presents some of the most outstanding and hilarious examples of Jewish dialect humor drawn from the five books Gross published between 1926 and 1928—Nize Baby, De Night in de Front from Chreesmas, Hiawatta, Dunt Esk, and Famous Fimmales—providing a fresh opportunity to look, read, and laugh at this nearly forgotten forefather of American Jewish humor.

About this title

About the Author

Ari Y. Kelman is Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. He is the author of Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States and Shout to the Lord: Making Music in Evangelical America.

Reviews

Before becoming a forefather of the graphic novel with the wordless romance-adventure parody He Done Her Wrong (1930; unexpurgated ed., 2006), Gross forged a huge reputation as a verbal as well as cartoon humorist. His newspaper column “Gross Exaggerations” presented four families of immigrants in the same New York tenement via the conversations shouted up and down a common airshaft. They spoke a dialect of Gross’ invention, heavily Yiddish-accented and inflected but using English loaded with malaprops that were then twisted by wholesale mispronunciation. Though Gross regularly employed it in parodies of chestnuts by Poe and Longfellow as well as, via a mother’s storytelling to her baby, famous folk- and fairy tales, he didn’t write jokes or banter but made comedy primarily out of funny-sounding speech. In a long, invaluable introduction, editor Kelman emphasizes that Gross’ writing is best read aloud (in fact, that’s often the only way to make it comprehensible), that it aroused mixed feelings, offending assimilating Jews while delighting hoards of Gentiles, and that it almost never trades in ethnic, especially Jewish, stereotypes. Magnificent Americana. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814748236
• ISBN 13: 9780814748237
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 308
• Editor: Kelman Ari Y.