Nothing To Be Ashamed Of I Parodist Allan Sherman helped invent the American Jew of today, says biographer Mark Cohen. David Holzel Washington Jewish Week F fifty years ago, a bittersweet nov- elty song about a boy at summer camp hit the airwaves and caught fire across the globe. Just two weeks after its release, "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" had sold 300,000 copies. But its writer and singer, Allan Sherman, was no one-hit wonder. Over the previous year, he had become stratospherically famous. Sherman's 1962 Jewish-inflected albums of song parodies, My Son, the Folk Singer and My Son, the Celebrity, were back-to- back comedy hits. In a world that had not yet met the Beatles, mania for Sherman's comedy was unprecedented. Now, in 1963, he was turning his tal- ent for finely tuned wordplay to the new obsessions of the American middle class, which happened to be the new obses- sions of Jews: suburbia, lawns, television commercials and technology. In "Hello Muddah," he defined summer camp anxi- ety for at least a generation. Sherman was a self-destructive talent. One of the greatest decisions he ever made was to marry his girlfriend, Dee — a very important step in the direction of sanity and health. Then he became famous, and when he had the opportunity through fame and money, when he was going on tour, to indulge all his vices — drinking, smoking, whoring around, gam- bling — it became the best thing that ever happened to him and the worst thing that ever happened to him. By the time he died in 1973, days before his 49th birthday, both his talent and bank account were tapped out. Yet, he always maintained a philosophy that childlike innocence was the best way to approach the world. Mark Cohen tries to make sense of this funny, talented and troubled man and his meteoric rise and sad fall in his new biog- raphy, Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman (Brandeis). A New Generation With his deceptively simple parodies of well-known songs, Sherman was at the head of a new generation of American Jewish entertainers, born in this country and American in every way. Their task, according to Cohen, was to figure out what it meant to be a Jew in a society that was quickly dropping its barriers to them. "Sherman helped to invent the American Jewish personality that we see everywhere today" — consciously Jewish, 56 September 12 • 2013 "How's by your': Allan Sherman meets First Fan President John F. Kennedy in 1963. yet not self-conscious about being Jewish, anced parody of a popular song. "They Cohen says by phone from New York. "It's work so well because they're at such great a normal, regular part of everything about odds with the original, but keeping the us. It's not some special, hidden, weird theme of the original, and turning it inside part that we have to be embarrassed or out:' Cohen says. ashamed about, or make excuses for." Take "The Ballad of Harry Lewis:' In But Sherman never would have suc- it, Sherman tells the story of a garment ceeded beyond what Variety worker who perishes in a called "the Miami-Catskills fire, heroically remaining axis" if there hadn't been at his machine cutting a mass market for Jewish- velvet for his employer, inflected humor. My Son, Irving Roth. Sherman set the Folk Singer debuted his lyrics to "Battle Hymn at the exact moment that of the Republic:' America was developing an "He keeps, in mock acceptance of and appetite fashion, the whole theme for ethnic culture. In its first of heroism and martyr- two months, the album sold dom and death, but he more than a million copies. turns the whole thing "[My Son, the Folk Singer] into a story of this poor revealed that when no shnook, Harry Lewis, who one was looking, the line stood by his machine while the fire was raging:' between Jews and everyone Author Mark Cohen else had blurred:' Cohen The song contains what on Allan Sherman: writes. may be Sherman's finest Though ultimately a "Sherman's tremendous pun: self-destructive talent, success with the general Oh Harry Lewis "Sherman helped to invent public at large also antici- perished the American Jewish pated the general acceptance personality that we see In the service of his lord of explicitly Jewish comedy, He was trampling through everywhere today." whether it was Mel Brooks the warehouse or Woody Allen or today's Old Jews Telling Where the drapes of Roth are stored Jokes show:' says Cohen, whose books "It was a personal challenge to include Missing a Beat: The Rants and Sherman:' Cohen writes, "to discover a Regrets of Seymour Krim and Last Century song parody hiding within the original ... of a Sephardic Community. so that the original lyrics are transformed into straight lines for his punch line:' Sherman's medium was the finely bal- Dysfunctional Parents Sherman's explosion into popular culture was so big that he appeared fully formed. But Overweight Sensation describes the influences, both malign and salutary, that went into making Sherman. "It was clear that his parents were crazy:' Cohen says. Sherman's mother, Rose, had multiple marriages and seemed particularly drawn to con men. His father, Percy Copelon, left his wife and son when Allan was 8. To determine custody, they asked the boy to decide which of the two he would prefer to live with. As Cohen writes, it was a trauma Sherman never recovered from. He found refuge with his grandparents, who had immigrated to the United States as adults and never quite left Eastern Europe behind. "They had all the immi- grant paraphernalia — the accent; the very, very strong Jewish identity; com- pletely un-Americanized despite decades in this country," Cohen says. In contrast to his parents — who immi- grated as children and wanted to put as much distance between them and Judaism as possible — Sherman's grandparents were at home in their Jewish skin. Unlike all of them, Sherman — and the generation to which he belonged (he was born in 1924) — was American to his bones. So what kind of Jew would he, and, by extension, his generation, be? "Sherman rejected his parents' approach, was inspired by his grand- parents' approach, but he couldn't just pretend to be a European immigrant; Cohen says. "So his did something very important, and I think we're still living in the Allan Sherman moment." This is the moment of the hyphenated Jew, in which each part of the identity struggles with and enriches the other — and the wider culture. Sherman's Jewish personality was free of sentimentality and saccharine, Cohen says, and thoroughly contemporary. "Sherman's Jews are living in contem- porary 1962 America, whether they're speaking dialect English and working in the garment center (Marry Lewis') or going down to Miami on a business trip (`The Streets of Miami'). Or they speak contemporary New York Jewish English like in 'Sarah Jackman' — 'How's by you?" Sherman also took aim at suburbia ("Here's to the Crabgrass") and what Cohen calls "the love/hate affair between the suburbs and the cities. That's still going on today:'