Mickey Katz/Klezmorim connection

[Solidarity Foundation <svzandt...>]

As I've already said, I think the style of the Klezmorim probably owes much
to the style of Mickey Katz. But I just realized an interesting, and I think
significant, difference of context.

Mickey Katz used to do take-offs on actual popular "hit-parade" music of the
time. Thus, "The Call of the Wild Goose" became "The Geshray of the Vilde
Katchke." The music was transposed into Jewish modes, and the words were
similarly subverted, with lots of Yiddish thrown in. The music was a kind
of insane form of klezmer. It was strictly an "in" joke, of a kind absolutely
typical of Yiddish humor. Harvey Kurtzman was doing the same thing, at the
same time, with words and pictures: Mad Comics and the first several issues
of Mad Magazine. On television, in a slightly more subtle way, the great
Jewish comedy team of Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris were also
doing it (with the indispensable help of Imogene Coca and later, Nanette Fa
Fabret). 

Mickey Katz's humor was making fun of Jewish life, but it was also making
chopped liver of the "respectable," non-Jewish life of 50s America. 

The Klezmorim, on the other hand, were making chopped liver of klezmer music
itself. For people who, supposedly, had never heard it before, who had never
had the opportunity to hear the actual "dusty old 78s" that the Klezmorim were
taking off on, an audience that, supposedly, didn't even know what Klezmer
music was.

Interesting. That's not at all what Statman and Feldman were doing, nor what
Kapelye was doing.

Itzik-Leyb Volokh