Jen Richler: Hi, it's Jen Richler, here with another episode of Can We Talk?

Jen: First, a word from our sponsor, Film Independent—presenting Always Remember, in partnership with the Cayton-Goldrich Family Foundation and Claims Conference. Always Remember is a series of free, virtual screenings that raise Holocaust awareness through cinema. The series features films that amplify unique voices and exclusive interviews with some of the filmmakers. At a time when Holocaust awareness is at an all-time low and antisemitism is on the rise, our commitment to Always Remember is more important than ever. Learn more and register at filmindependent.org/alwaysremember.

Now, onto the show.

Jen: Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet.

[With New York accent]"Can we talk?"—that was Joan Rivers’ famous tagline. But before Joan Rivers, there was another Jewish woman who broke ground as a stand-up comedian. Her name was Jean Carroll. Here she is on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1959.

[clip plays]

Jean Carroll: Let me tell you something, I have a husband, I must tell you about my honeymoon with him because he is the sweetest guy. We had reserved a honeymoon suite in a very nice hotel and right after the wedding I went up and I got into a— you know, I went into my room, he was in his room— and I got into this negligee. Beautiful, chiffon, I wanted to look as pretty as I could possibly look, and I brushed my hair and I put mules on my feet and I thought, Well, gotta get in that room tonight unless you want to annul the marriage! [audience laughs] So I started back in and when I saw him I stopped dead. He never looked more virile, more masculine in his life. Handsome, his hair was slicked down, he had a pipe in his mouth, a maroon smoking jacket on, bedroom slippers and white silk pajamas… oh, he looked so nice I hated to wake him! [audience laughs] I went over, I shook him, I said, “Honey, it’s your wife!” He said, “Quick, hide me!” [audience laughs]

Jen: Jean Carroll was innovative. Few comedians were using this conversational, storytelling style when she started doing it in the ’40s. She was successful, with regular gigs in the big comedy clubs, appearances on Ed Sullivan, and even her own ABC sitcom for a brief time in the ’50s. And she was elegant—always on stage with perfect hair and makeup, a form-fitting gown, and a string of pearls.

Grace Kessler Overbeke: She was glam, and that was a choice. She’s really trying to make the case that a Jewish, funny, outspoken woman can also be a glamorous, sophisticated lady.

Jen: Grace Kessler Overbeke is the author of the brand-new book, First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America’s First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedian. She’s a theater professor at Columbia College in Chicago and has been researching Jean Carroll for years.

Grace has always been interested in comedy and performance—maybe thanks to her parents, who named her after Gracie Allen, George Burns’ wife and comedy partner.

Although Jean Carroll was a household name in the ’50s and ’60s, today she’s largely been forgotten. Grace wants to change that.

In this episode of Can We Talk?, I talk with Grace about why Jean Carroll deserves to be remembered for changing both the face of comedy and people’s ideas about what a Jewish woman could be.

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Grace: I think Jean Carroll’s status as the first Jewish woman to do stand-up comedy comes from the fact that what she was doing was, like, a different genre from the other Jewish women comedians who came before her. Part of that was because there just, there wasn’t a thing called stand-up comedy. So, when you look at, like, what Jewish women like Fanny Brice were doing, it’s mostly musical. It’s mostly, like, song parodies. The whole notion of just stringing together jokes and stories wasn’t really a genre. It wasn’t really a thing until the time period when Jean Carroll and her male contemporaries developed this new performance style.

Jen: Male contemporaries like Lenny Bruce, a Jewish comedian known for his biting social commentary. There was also Moms Mabley, a Black woman who appeared unassuming on stage in a house dress and floppy hat, but talked about edgy topics like racism and sex.

The new comedy style was about talking, not singing. But sometimes, in a subversive nod to the old style, Jean would start her routine with a song and dance.

[clip plays, starts with Jean Carroll singing]

Jean Carroll: It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, for me to be… [music fades down[

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Jean Carroll:I don’t want to sing, I want to talk about love. Love! What is love—does anybody know?

Grace: And I think it’s a fun way to play with people’s expectations because generally, when there is a woman up on stage by herself, people think she’s going to sing a song for you. And so then, when she breaks out of that, it’s really surprising and exciting.

Her early reviews are so funny because the critics are flummoxed. They do not know what to make of this strange entertainer who is not singing.

Jen: So let’s go back a little bit and talk about Carroll’s earlier career. Can you say a bit about how she got into show business?

Grace: Sure. You could start in a number of places. She found out that there was prize money being offered for this, um, kids' talent show, and this was a longstanding, historical phenomenon. Like, lots of entertainers got their start in these kids' talent shows that local Vaudeville theaters would have.

Jen: Jean started doing this when she was 11 or 12, in the early 1920s. One night, she was about to take the stage at a theater in a German immigrant neighborhood in Manhattan, when the announcer asked for her name.

Grace: She said, “I’m Sadie Zeigman.” And he said, “No, no, no, you’re not Sadie Zeigman here. This is a German audience. They’ll kill you.” So he said, “You’re Jean Carroll.” And she said, “Okay, I’m Jean Carroll.”

Jen: As Grace explains in her book, Jean readily accepted the stage name because, even as a child, she understood there were advantages to "passing" as non-Jewish.

Jean earned money at these talent shows as the “lemon act.” She was paid to purposely bomb her performances for the audience’s entertainment. After that, she joined a more legitimate song-and-dance troupe that did musical comedy revues. Her official entry into comedy happened when she found herself in the right place at the right time.

Grace: She was just backstage goofing off, and this fairly seasoned Vaudevillian, uh, named Marty May notices her. And he says, “You’re really funny. Do you want to come join my act?” And she ultimately agrees. Her basic job was to, like, feed him punchlines and, you know, stand and look pretty.

She noticed that she was getting a lot more laughs than would have been expected based on the script. And so, she started to ask for equal pay.

Ultimately, he did agree to at least give her a raise, although I’m not sure that she ever got the same pay as he did.

Jen: In the early 1930s, Jean met a Vaudeville performer named Buddy Howe. They got married in 1936 and also joined forces as a comedy act.

Grace: It’s Carroll and Howe; it’s not Howe and Carroll. So, she was much more of a comedian in this act. She didn’t have to be the stooge. She was not only getting to, like, have all the funny lines, but she got to write the material.

[clip of Carroll and Howe]

Jean: You know what you should do, Buddy, really?

Buddy: What?

Jean: You should learn how to play a musical instrument. For example a trumpet—a trumpet, that’s the thing!

Buddy: Can you play a trumpet?

Jean: Can I play a trumpet? Now you’re talking! Can I play a trumpet?!

Buddy: Well, can you?

Jean: No.

Jen: In 1943, Buddy went off to war, and Jean got to try out a solo comedy routine.

Grace: And it starts to go really well. Really well. Like, she’s even more successful, and people are responding more to her alone than they did when she was doing the double act. So when Buddy Howe comes back from the war, he’s like, well, let’s not stop a good thing. Instead of going back to the double act, you keep working on your own, and I’ll be your manager.

Jen: And can you talk a little bit about the style that she takes on as a solo performer?

Grace: I think one of the throughlines is storytelling. There are definitely stand-up comedians, especially in this time period, who kind of seem like living joke books, and that wasn’t what she was doing. She was much more of a storytelling, um, comedian and much more personal.

Like, she’s talking about what happens when she’s trying to lose weight.

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Jean: As a matter of fact, today all I ate all day— you wouldn’t believe it, one piece of fruit. A watermelon. [audience laughs] But you know, it’s so, it’s so easy to come up with excuses, honestly. Every time I have to do a show on TV, like before, five days before I have to do the show, I go on a real mad crazy crash diet and I hate the world, I’m so irritable, I’m so nasty, I snarl at the dog and it’s… [audience laughs] Honestly, it’s awful! And then after the show is over with and I can finally breathe again, you know, then I go back to eating again. People say to me, gee, you have such a wonderful disposition, you’re always making jokes and blah blah. Well, I’m not always making jokes, sometimes it’s a sort of a barrier. It’s a defense mechanism that I develop 'cause I’m… um, self-conscious about being overweight. Uh, actually I’m not that fat, I still wear a size twelve dress—but I break the seams every time I get in, you know! [audience laughs]

Grace: Or she’s talking about how she always wanted to have kids—her whole life, all she wanted was to be a mother.

[clip plays]

Jean: Finally came the big day in my life, I had my baby. Oh, I was so happy! I couldn't wait… to send her to camp.

Grace: I mean, these are not—they’re not like “chicken cross the road” jokes. Like, they’re about her experiences.

Jen: In what ways was her comedy feminist, even if she didn’t see it that way?

Grace: I mean, first of all, you could say that by succeeding in a cohort of men, taking up her space at a microphone in the world of stand-up—that was really, I mean, to say it’s dominated is an understatement. It was almost entirely populated at that point by men.

I think it’s also cool that she’s standing up at a mic and giving a woman’s point of view without denigrating other women…or even denigrating herself. She’s demanding that people see her as being funny without being ridiculous. She felt like a lot of women who did comedy would lose their dignity. They would make jokes about how disgusting they were or how unattractive. And she didn’t do that.

Jen: And in fact, the way she presented herself physically and the way she put herself together on the stage—can you say a little bit about that kind of intentional choice?

Grace: The book is called First Lady of Laughs because that was a moniker that she embraced. It was about being a lady, with all of the connotations that come with that. Her comedy was often, uh, a bid for a certain kind of assimilation. Like, she saw that the people with the greatest degree of power and privilege in the country were the, sort of, white, um, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, wealthy people. And that was not how Jews were seen. But she’s trying to embody, to, like, show people that actually, yeah, a Jewish woman can be this perfectly manicured, white, wealthy, um, college-educated lady.

She’s trying to align herself with this group and just kind of shove her way in, even though nobody wants to see her as part of that.

Jen: She didn’t often—if ever—talk about her Jewish identity explicitly, but were there things that made her comedy distinctly Jewish nonetheless?

Grace: Yeah, I mean, definitely, especially in her earlier years.

Her comedy really plays a lot with, um, stereotypes of Jewish women—like the force-feeding mother, the, uh, materialistic obsessive shopper, someone who is just too much, wants too much, demands too much, talks too much.

[clip plays]

Jean: I’ll tell ya, I love these places where they have, you know, uh… bargain, bargains, drastic reductions, this sort of thing. Like there’s a place on 14th Street, I won’t tell you the name, women go there to get… well, they really go to hit each other [audience laughs]. But, you know,  like they fight over a thing. One woman came out wearing a dress that was so tight, the other lady was still in it! [audience laughs] But you see…[clip fades out]

Grace: The stereotypes that she’s playing with in her comedy are the exact stereotypes that people were putting on women, especially Jewish and other immigrant women. And so the fact that these are the stereotypes at the center of her work, but she’s deflating them and humanizing them, I think is a Jewish part of her comedy.

If you look at the stuff that she’s doing in the late '60s and through, like, the early '70s—um, you know, we’re in a post-Fiddler on the Roof world, and people can talk about Jewishness more, and you see it on stage. You see it in the jokes that she’s telling.

[clip plays]

Jean: You know, today parents can hardly wait for their children to grow up. It’s a fact! Years ago, you gave a child time to grow up. Today a kid is born, the day the little boy is born his father runs out and brings a present to his son in the hospital. His bar mitzvah suit. [audience laughs] You think that’s funny? You don’t know how funny, it’s ridiculous! The kid is Irish! [audience laughs] But he does come from a mixed marriage, a mother and father. But I’ll tell you something…[clip fades out]

Grace: She never would have done that kind of material in her early days, but it’s just kind of a fun way to see Jewishness become more accessible for people to talk about in mainstream media.

Jen: As she’s becoming this successful comedian, um, she is also a mother. How was her role as a comedian in tension with her role as a mother?

Grace: Being a comedian—especially doing this personal comedy the way that she was doing it—involves talking pretty candidly about your life, and your family is a major part of your life. So she was talking pretty candidly and sometimes, um, less than diplomatically about her experience as a mother.

One of her, like, throughlines was, uh, the “my rotten kid.” She would tell all these funny stories and jokes about her rotten kid. That could be difficult for her daughter to hear. These strangers would come up to her, and they would have their eyes all lit up and kind of maniacal-looking—or at least that’s how she saw it. And they’d be like, “Oh my gosh, you’re the rotten kid! You’re the rotten kid!”

Jen: It makes me go back to the subversiveness of it... Maybe now it’s commonplace, certainly for comedians in general, including female comedians, to complain about their kids. But I can imagine that when she was doing it, that was quite—that was a pretty radical thing to do for a woman, because you were expected to, sort of, be an adoring and devoted mother who only, you know, had the best things to say about their children and about child-rearing.

Grace: Absolutely. There were a couple of articles where it’s Jean Carroll talking about this tension between being a mother and being a comedian, and how one time her daughter said, like, “Why can’t you just be like all of my friends’ moms and, like, stay at home and make chocolate chip cookies?”

Jen: You’ve said that Jean Carroll’s story, despite the amazing success she had, has largely been forgotten. Why do you think that is?

Grace: She’s just kind of an outlier in a lot of ways that don’t make her convenient for certain storytelling purposes. And what I mean by that is, like, she gets left out of Jewish histories or, like, histories of Jewish comedy, because she’s not “Jewish enough.” She gets left out of stand-up histories because stand-up histories tend to talk about how there were no women in stand-up until Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller. And then the only reason Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller were successful is because they were so self-deprecating—they were just saying the same kind of anti-women jokes that the men were saying, but aiming it at themselves.

It sort of disrupts the pattern to be like, no, before Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller, there was a woman doing stand-up without doing that intense self-deprecation or misogyny that they were doing.

Jen: Right. In some ways, though, despite the differences that you’re pointing out in her style, she did pave the way for some of the female comedians—including Jewish female comedians—who came after her.

Grace: Yeah, I mean, she did, in a way, set the stage for Joan Rivers, for so many others. You know, Lily Tomlin talks about dressing up like Jean Carroll when she was a kid after watching her on The Ed Sullivan Show. And Joy Behar, Rita Rudner, Anne Meara—so many other comedians have talked about seeing her and seeing a potential place for themselves.

Between the 1920s and the 1970s, when her career was happening, there was this notion that Jewish women are a certain way, and she wanted to break the mold—to say, no, actually, funny Jewish women can also be assimilated, wealthy, conventionally feminine white ladies.

At the time, this was an expansive way of thinking. And today, I think we’ve kind of gotten that point. Mainstream US media has generally—albeit contingently—accepted the way that Jewish women and assimilated white ladies are not mutually exclusive. You know, we’ve got our Amy Schumers, our Iliza Shlesingers, and our Chelsea Handlers—and those are just the blonde ones. [Jen laughs]

But I think what Jean Carroll was doing—and I’m hoping this is the part of her legacy that grows and expands—is showing that we can break the mold open even further to where it really needs to get. To show that funny Jewish women can also be Black women like Tiffany Haddish or Rain Pryor, or queer women like Judy Gold or Robbie Hoffman, or trans women like Dana Friedman. Whatever it is, just expanding this notion of what Jewish women are like even more.

I think, even if you’re not doing stand-up, if you’re expanding people’s notions of what a certain kind of person is like, then that’s following in her footsteps.

[clip plays]

Jean: [singing] I’d wish that you’d care, I know that you care, how wonderful to be with you!

Announcer: Thank you Jean!]

[theme music plays]

Jen:  Jean Carroll died on January 1, 2010, just shy of her 99th birthday.

Grace Kessler Overbeke’s new book is called First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America’s First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedian.

You can also read the entry about Jean Carroll that Grace wrote for the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women at jwa.org/encyclopedia.

If you want to hear more about Jewish women in comedy, listen to our two episodes about Joan Rivers at jwa.org/canwetalk. Joan Rivers died ten years ago this month, at the age of 81.

Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Our team includes Nahanni Rous and Judith Rosenbaum. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble.

Want to be the first to get podcast news? Sign up for our newsletter at jwa.org/signup.

You can listen to Can We Talk? at jwa.org/canwetalk, or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can help spread the word about the podcast by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jen Richler. Until next time.

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