THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Friday, May 3, 1985
25
Did you
hear the one
about •
BY HEIDI PRESS
Local News Editor
on't ask Allan Gould to
stand up and do 20 min-
utes of Borscht Belt
schtick. He's not that
kind of a guy.
What he will tell you — at length
and peppered with his wit, if you let
him — is how jokes came to be and,
particularly, how Jewish humor
evolved.
One does not meet Allan Gould;
one experiences him. Tall, bearded
with a college professor look about
him, Gould is unpretentious. He rarely
uses the Dr. title he earned with his
degree in English from York Univer-
sity in Toronto. But, as soon as he
opens his mouth his presence is clear.
Gould shoots straight from the lip,
about growing up in Detroit, teaching
in Canada — his home for the last 17
years — about appearing on Canadian
radio and TV, and about his kids.
Especially about his kids.
A proud father, today he is often a
househusband because of budget cuts
by the Canadian government which
resulted in pink-slips from both his
teaching job at the University of To-
ronto and radio and TV shows. Gould
proudly shows off the pictures of his
kids, Judah, 11, and Elisheva, 6.
He says he doesn't socialize much
— "My real life is sitting at a typewri-
ter and being very lonely" — and calls
wife Merle his best friend. Mostly, he
writes. He writes for about 20 Cana-
dian periodicals, among them
Homemaker's Magazine, Canadian
Business, Influence and Toronto Life.
He has three books to his credit, in-
cluding The Unorthodox Book of
Jewish Records and Lists, co-written
• with Danny Siegel, and he is currently
writing a book on the Holocaust.
In Detroit recently as guest lec-
turer for a program at Cong. Beth
Shalom, Gould was a little over-
whelmed by the 1,000:plus audience.
He was told to expect several hundred.
But he made light of the situation:
"It looks like Yom Kippur out
there," he remarked. "Would everyone
pull down the tabs on their pledge
cards."
Gould was always a funny guy ac-
cording to those who knew him in his
Bagley, Hampton and Muthford days,
but it was comedy that came from
tragedy.
"I was not a happy, well-adjusted
kid," he explains. "I didn't have friends
until high school. I was short, fat and
had a bad self-image. I didn't get along
with kids."
He says he downed around to at-
tract friends, but instead it attracted
the bullies. "The bullies used to beat
me up — Jewish bullies."
Businessman Ben Craine, a
buddy since high school, concurred.
"He had a sense of humor, but didn't
have the positive self-image he has
now." Craine said that in their
closely-knit group of six, Gould could
be himself, but outside the group he
was beside himself.
"In his humor he was very bold. In
his personality he was not."
Craine said this has changed,
mostly because of Gould's marriage to
the former Merle Benjamin, a native of
Toronto, who Craine said "had an im-
pact on him cleaning up his act."
"What you see now is a polished
person. He benefitted from marrying a
very lovely wife. She straightened him
out."
In meeting Gould, one sees an
academic, an eloquent speaker, but
still a joker looking around to see if his
humor has made its mark. He speaks
rapidly, shooting words from his
mouth like machinegun bullets. He
gestures wildly and doesn't sit still for
very long. But he has a lot of interest-
ing things to say — if you can stop
laughing long enough to listen.
Gould didn't plan to be a come-
dian. "I wanted to teach. I wanted to be
a university professor. The tragedy is,
I'm not a scholar. There's a gift to
teaching and I have it and I know I
Continued on next page
Bill Pugliano
Always a comic,
Detroit-born Dr. Allan
Gould would rather
take an intellectual
look at humor.