Before Midge Maisel, there was Jean Carroll, a real-life trailblazing Jewish comedienne
In her new book, ‘First Lady of Laughs,’ scholar Grace Kessler Overbeke shines light on the oft-overlooked performer who created ‘a totally different model of funny Jewish women’
Reporter at The Times of Israel
In the 1950s and ‘60s, a Jewish woman balanced stand-up success with motherhood in the male-dominated field of comedy. In addition to getting laughs onstage, she made a name for herself with stylish appearances. It wasn’t Miriam “Midge” Maisel, the fictional heroine of TV’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” but the real-life comedienne Jean Carroll, whose trailblazing but forgotten life is getting a reintroduction to the public.
That reintroduction comes through a new book, “First Lady of Laughs: America’s First Jewish Woman Stand-up Comedian,” by scholar Grace Kessler Overbeke, an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre at Columbia College, Chicago.
“She was such a funny storyteller,” said Overbeke, whose book came out in September. “She had wit, she had humanity, she had just the right mixture of big picture and little personal details.”
“Not only was she the first Jewish woman to do stand-up comedy, but in doing so, she set up a totally different model of ‘funny’ Jewish women,” Overbeke writes in the book. “She modeled a Jewish woman who had assimilated into American upper-middle-class, white, heterosexual, attractive, and even glamorous, society. At the same time, her persona retained something markedly Jewish to those who knew how to discern it.”
Born Celine “Sadie” Zeigman in Paris to Ashkenazi parents making their way from Eastern Europe to the United States, the aspiring comedienne grew up in the Bronx. Later interviews addressed her tough childhood. She said her alcoholic father abused her mother, and that before competing in a kids’ talent show, the announcer spontaneously altered her stage name. She quoted him as being wary of alienating “all the German Bunds” in the audience.
“I think she was good at code-switching,” Overbeke said, “blending in when she knew she had to.”
Yet, the author noted, “the truth is, she was proud to be Jewish. It shaped a great deal who she was,” especially “among her people, Jewish circles, a pride in feeling what it means to be Jewish, how being Jewish had shaped everything about her experience — the food she ate, the language she spoke with her mother, the circles she ran in, the way she viewed herself as belonging to and outside the US.”
The book credits Carroll as an influence on future female comedians, both Jewish (Lily Tomlin) and non-Jewish (Joy Behar). Tomlin and Behar were among those participating in a Friars Club roast of Carroll in 2006, when the comedienne was 95 (she died at age 98 in 2010).
Her resume included headlining a short-lived ABC sitcom in the early ‘50s, “Take it From Me,” and branching out into a well-received 1960 record album, “Girl in a Hot Steam Bath.” She was a top-10 guest all-time on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” based on number of appearances — she had 29.
“She was there a lot,” Overbeke said. “For a time, she had an exclusive contract with Ed Sullivan.”
Their relationship had its bumps. He micromanaged Carroll’s appearances, and she didn’t get called back for two years after referencing a Cadillac onstage — the show was sponsored by rival Lincoln. Yet the pay was significant, at $10,000 per episode. And when it came time for a celebration of the show’s 13th anniversary in 1961, there was Carroll performing alongside co-stars Dorothy Louden and Marion Marlowe in a musical tribute. In a sign that mainstream America was becoming somewhat more tolerant of Jews and Jewish comedy, Carroll delivered her lines in Yiddish while holding up a copy of the Yiddish newspaper Der Forverts as part of the tribute.
Researching the book involved watching Carroll on the Sullivan show, which required paying a per-clip fee to the owner of the Sullivan archive, SOFA Entertainment. A grant proved fortuitous.
In black-and-white videos of Carroll on YouTube, the comic discourses on overaggressive saleswomen and underperforming husbands. In 2021, the “Ed Sullivan Show” Facebook page posted a clip from the September 23, 1956 episode. Carroll shares some disagreements with her husband over their New York City neighborhood: “He says, ‘It’s quiet at night.’ It is quiet — all you hear is a few screams for help.”
‘Jean Carroll has been scooped’
Fifties comedy is back in a big way with “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — which initially troubled Overbeke.
“When I first saw the pilot,” she recalled, “I kind of felt, ‘Oh no, we’ve been scooped, Jean Carroll has been scooped.’”
“But,” Overbeke added, “as the show went on, I began thinking more deeply. I gained a deeper appreciation for the show — a work of art in its own right. I began to see how it was not a competitor. These stories could be complementary.”
Asked about what inspired show creator Amy Sherman-Palladino to create Mrs. Maisel, Overbeke replied, “She talks about the inspiration for Mrs. Maisel as Joan Rivers quite a bit. She really talks about her father, Don Sherman, who saw himself as the original sit-down comedian… I don’t think Jean Carroll was on her radar.”
Ultimately, Overbeke described the narratives of Mrs. Maisel and Carroll as “quite different.”
While Mrs. Maisel’s marriage to husband Joel Maisel unravels early on, Carroll had a long if complicated marriage to fellow Jewish comedian Buddy Howe.
“They started out [as] partners onstage,” Overbeke said. “He realized it was a stronger act if she was by herself. He said, ‘I’m going to be your manager and you’re going to be the onstage talent.’ It served both of them very well.”
“He became president of one of the largest talent agencies in the world. His granddaughter said he had a special telephone that connected him anywhere in the globe… He was a very, very powerful man in the entertainment industry, partly [by] connections through his wife, partly his own acumen and work,” Overbeke said. “Of course, she benefited from his position. He was a booker for shows like Ed Sullivan and clubs like the Copacabana. He was tremendously helpful to her professionally.”
However, Overbeke added, “All of the interviews with her family suggest he was, like a lot of men at the time, not terribly present for their children. He focused on work and just wasn’t very interested in the caretaker side of the family.”
Another difference: Mrs. Maisel jolted ‘50s America with her frankness about sex — territory into which Carroll did not venture, opting instead for insights into her everyday life, from marriage to shopping to the PTA. While this might sound familiar to today’s audiences, it wasn’t so common back then. The book argues that it was a groundbreaking approach that created a bond between Carroll and the audience at a time when the few female comedians often displayed an outsized, improbable persona onstage.
“Not only did she pave a pathway for women who wanted to be funny without being ridiculous,” Overbeke said. “She changed stand-up comedy into something so much more personal and intimate than what it had been previously.”
Was Overbeke destined to study comedy, Jewish humor and Carroll? Her parents were vaudeville enthusiasts who named their daughter Gracie after Gracie Allen, who was part of a legendary marriage and comedic partnership with George Burns.
“I really grew up fascinated with vaudeville,” Overbeke said. “The more I studied vaudeville, specifically the more I studied ways vaudeville was so much a product of Jewish immigrants, I became very connected to it — not just as a theater enthusiast but as a Jew.”
In college at Wesleyan, she decided to do a research project about women in vaudeville due to what she described as a dearth of information on that subject. By the time she had compiled 52 pages of notes on Carroll, it was time to change focus.
“She’s nobody’s chapter one,” Overbeke said. “She’s a story unto herself.”
It took 18 years, continuing through (and beyond) her doctoral work at Northwestern. There were multiple breakthroughs. Filmmakers Stephen Meredith Silverman and Diane Krausz shared access to footage of a never-completed documentary on Carroll. An invaluable encounter with Carroll’s granddaughter, Susan Chatzky, yielded access to the comedienne’s scrapbook.
“A scrapbook is just so personal,” Overbeke said, “all of the ways a person wants to tell their own story, wants to be remembered.”
One way we can remember Carroll is through her jokes. Consider another zinger from that 1956 Sullivan clip.
“If you want heat, you know, the old-fashioned buildings, if you want heat, all you do is you knock on the radiator with a wrench,” she said. “Here you knock on the landlord’s head.”
First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America’s First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedian by Grace Kessler Overbeke
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