[메모] FROLICS AND DETOURS OF A SHORT HEBREW MAN

출처: Kenneth Tynan. "FROLICS AND DETOURS OF A SHORT HEBREW MAN", The New Yorker, October 30, 1978.

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다른 출처: Kirsten Fermaglich. "Mel Brooks' The Producers : Tracing American Jewish Culture Through Comedy, 1967–2007." American Studies, 48:4 (Winter 2007): 59-87.

※ 발췌 (excerpt):

In its first year on Broadway, Mel Brooks' 2001 musical, ^The Producers^, wowed critics, charmed audiences and shattered records with its 12 Tony awards, and its $100 tickets. Brooks' story of two producers who fail in their scheme to get rich by producing a sure-fire flop, "Springtime for Hitler," became the toast of New York, even in the wake of the attacks of September 11. The extraordinary success of ^The Producers^ in the millennium is particularly surprising for those aware of the extremely mixed reactions audiences had to Brooks' original movie, ^The Producers^, first released in 1967. Some film critics panned the film, while others loved it; the film sold out in some cities and barely attracted an audience in others. ^The Producers^ won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, but rather than becoming a classic, it became a underground cult film for many years.

Given this history, contemporary theater critics, newspaper columnists, and religious leaders offered a number of different interpretations for the wild and unexpected success of Brooks' 2001 musical. One rabbi argued that ^The Producers^ was a healthy "coping mechanism" for victimcs of the Holocaust.[주]1  The editor of the ^Forward^ argued that audiences had gained enough distance from the Holocaust to be able to laugh about it.[주]2  And novelsit Thane Rosenbaum expressed concern that contemporary American culture had "eventually grow[n] weary of the pieties surrounding the Holocaust."[주]3 


( ... ... ) I would like to offer a different explanation for Brooks' success. This explanation hinges on an historical understanding of both the original 1967 movie, ^The Producers^, and the musical play version of 2001: although they were substantially similar, each reflected the era in which it was produced, and their ability to speak to different audiences in separate era helps to explain their very different critical responses.

The film version reflected the upheavals of the 1960s in the U.S., and particularly in American Jewish life: generational and political divisions, as well as the changing social status and cultural preoccupations of Jews during this era reshaped the American Jewish community, and Brooks' wild film reflected this moment of very loud and visible change. The tamer Broadway musical version of ^The Producers^ in 2001, on the other hand, reflected a very different country, and a changed Jewish American experiences in the 1990s. While issues like abortion and homosexuality moved to the center of public discourse in virulent culture wars during this decade, Jews moved more decisively, if quietly and unobtrusively, into the white mainstream. This changing dynamics in American Jewish life can help us to understand why "Springtime for Hitler" could be viewed as an outrage by many in 1967 and a triumph by most in 2001. Jews in 1967 were still anxious about anti-semitism, fearful of fascism, and just beginning to express rage publicly about the murder of millions of Jews during World War II. In this context, many Jews believed that the idea of a play produced by Jews glorifying Nazis was not only tasteless but also despicable and even dangerous. In 2001, however, many American Jews, comfortably ensconced in the American middle class, embraced the outrageous premise of the play as a signal of their triumph over Nazism, their success in the U.S., and as a nostalgic reminder of their youth.

A brief summary of ^The Producers^'s film plot is necessary for understanding these different responses to the film and the musical. The film is set in New York in the 1960s. Flamboyant, egomaniacal Broadway producer Max Bialystock (played by Zero Mostel) teams up with neurotic, timid accountant Leo Bloom (played by Gene Wilder) in a fraudulent scheme to oversell shares in a flop. Since investors do not expect to receive returns on failed plays, the men plan to produce the worst play ever, and pocked investors' money when the play folds. Bialystock seduces little old ladies into buying shares of ^Springtime for Hitler^, "a gay romp with Adolf and Eva," written by an escaped Nazi, Franz LIebkind. In order to ensure that ^Springtime for Hitler^ fails, the men hire Roger de Bris, an abysmal, flamboyant gay director, and cast an addle-brained hippie named L.S.D. as Hitler. Although the audience is initially disgusted by the opening musical number, "Springtime for Hitler," they find the spacy Hitler's dialogue hilarious, and the play becomes a huge success. Bialystock and Bloom, after failing at blowing up the theater, are put in prison, where they are last seen overselling shares for their new musical, ^Prisoners of Lover^.


^The Producers^ in 1967

The 1967 film production of ^The Producers^ reflected the generational and political divisions that affected American, and American Jewish, life during the 1960s. Like other young Americans, but perhaps even more intensely and disproportionately, young Jewish people in the U.S. in the 1960s joined the growing youth movement of the era. They participated in civil rights sit-ins, travelledto Mississippi during freedom Summer in 1964, joined the Berkeley Free Speech movement, and helped to organize and attend countless protests agains the escalating war in Vietnam.[주]4  Even more young Jewish men and women were a part of an emerging youth culture that shaped both political activism and cultural life in the 1960s: iconic Jewish figures such as Bob Dylan and Abbie Hoffman symbolized the ways that many young American Jews identified themselves with an alternative youth culture that rejected the bourgeois culture of their parents.[주]5  Many older Jewis men and women, meanwhile, embraced their newfound middle-class status, and even though their children's politics might have sprung out of their own liberal or radical backgrounds, still found their children's rejection of many American middle-class values troubling and puzzling.

Alongside and interwoven with these generational differences, Jews also experienced political division during this era. Although the Jewish community overwhelming voted Democratic throughout the 1960s, Jews nonetheless divided significantly over such issues as the Cold War, civil rights, and the Vietnam War. ( ... ... )

^The Producers^ reflected these generational and political divisions in the 1960s in a number of ways. For example, the film was part of the 1960s wave of "black" or "sick" humor that infused general American culture. ( ... ... ) Black humor was particularly appropriate to a generationally divided era in which existentialism made inroads on college campuses, and civil rights and antiwar activism consistently made headlines. As young activists began to protest openy the absurdities of their parents' Cold War politics, hip humorists similarly delights in breaking taboos, gently and ironically jolting the bourgeoisie.

^The Producers^ flouted a significant taboo of American popular culture in the 1960s: humor about the Nazi regime. Both before and during the World War II, ridicule of the Nazi state and its leaders had been a familiar feature in American popular culture, as people viewed that humor as a weapon in the war effort. Political cartoons by artists like Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), animated cartoons such as Walt Disney's ^Der Fuehrer's Face^, and feature-length films such as Charlie Chaplin's ^The Great Dictator^ (1940) and Ernst Lubitsch's ^To Be or Not To Be^ (1942) had all ridiculed the Nazis, poking holes in their pretentions to military grandeur and racial purity, and helping to legitimize American war aims.[주]9 

( ... ... ) Moreover, in the fantastic musical sequence, "Springtime for Hitler," in ^The Producers^, Brooks transgressed another convention of cold-war America by actually equating American society with Nazi Germany. ( ... ... ) Brooks' portrait, morover, of the uptight and tasteless middle-class audience uproariously embracing the play, "Springtime for Hitler," presents the American bourgeoisie as insensitive, tasteless, and so amoral that they might be willing to embrace fascism itself if it were presented in a palatable or funny form, in much the same way that the real Hitler had initially seemed to many a harmless comic nobody in Weimar Germany. With this trenchant criticism of American show business and its middle-class audience, Brooks became one of a number of American Jewish writers in the 1960s who transgressed the conventional cold-ward comparison between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and instead used the symbolism of Nazi Germany to critique American society from a liberal perspective.[주]14 

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