Rachel Brosnahan in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. Photo supplied You Don’t Have to be Jewish, so the Bob Booker/George Foster comedy song, circa 1965, goes. You’d think the television comedy writer-director Amy Sherman-Palladino was Jewish, and she sort of is, but sort of isn’t. She said as much in a guest column she penned for Vulture, where she wrote, “My father was a six‐foot‐two Bronx Jew. My mother was a five-foot‐one Mississippi Baptist. Let the hilarity ensue.”
She explains that, though there’d been scarcely any Jewish ritual in her California home growing up, and visits to temple were as rare, this extremely noisy woman was once a very quiet little girl who, bored one day, wandered off and into a converted garage where she found a “beat-up record album stuffed behind the Freudian books that I desperately wish my dad had read”.
Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, “the record that introduced Brooks’s 2,000-year-old man character. Something stirred in me. Possibly it was heatstroke since we had no air-conditioning and we were living in the freaking Valley,” she wrote in Vulture.
“Carl is interviewing Mel, the 2,000‐year‐old man. ‘But I don’t look more than sixteen, seventeen hundred, right?’ It wasn’t just the words. It was the way he said everything. And then it dawned on me. That was Jewish. That’s how it’s supposed to sound. And feel. It’s fast and furious and human and exhausted and hilarious.
“And that was it. I instantly adopted a New York accent. I became Van Nuys via Brooklyn (well, Brooklyn in the Forties). I was never prouder than when people would say to me, ‘You’re from California? I thought you were from back east.’ I would dream of the Catskills. I would worship at the altar of Woody Allen. I would stay as far away from white bread and mayo as I possibly could. If my mother would not convert, if I could not have a bar mitzvah, if I could never truly learn the rituals, the words, the point of leaving a chair open at Passover, at least I had them. I had Mel. I had Carl. I had found my inner Jew.”
If, like me, you watched Sherman-Palladino’s many trips to the stage at the Emmy Awards last week to collect her and the show’s trophies, you can only be gobsmacked to discover that, no, she ain’t no New York Jewess. But it matters not, because whatever her Southern Baptist Ma brought to the party, the Jewish funny gene sure got through. Her writing, and her wit, are as New York Jewish as a boiled bagel or a hotdog from the takeout truck at the corner of 42nd and 6th.
Having heard that Carl Reiner/Mel Brooks recording, she somehow transformed herself into the evident New Yorker she became, and the ultimate result of that — via, significantly, Gilmour Girls, her first massive success after some minor achievements in writing comedy on shows such as the original Roseanne and Love and Marriage — is a very fine and funny piece of television art titled The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, which comes complete with the American misspelling of “marvellous”, but we’ll let that go.
Watch the trailer: