She starts Sunday's column with the dialogue from a Myron Cohen routine. Who? Precisely. Not many people are able to even know who he was, let alone recite one of his jokes.
And that's what a comedian of his era did—they told jokes as short stories. They didn't use blue language, and the topic of sex was perhaps how it was going with the wife. Always the wife.
YouTube is a gem of a repository for taking in some Myron. I didn't know prior to his frequent appearances on Sullivan's show he was on the Kate Smith show in the very early '50s. This is the absolute dawn of television. But there he is, sort of Dumbo ears, bald with Clarabell hair on the side of his head, thick Yiddish accent, suit and tie going through a routine of funny jokes, complete with all the facial expressions and shoulder shrugs you could count on from a Jewish comedian.
My memory of Myron comes from the reference Maureen makes to his appearances on the Ed Sullivan. Show. Maureen is younger than me, so she couldn't have seen Myron be introduced by Kate.
Myron was a silk salesman in New York City's garment district. Anyone who knows anything about the Garment District of the '50s and '60s knows it was basically on 7th Avenue in the 30s, and that it was dominated by Jews.
I remember walking through the area in the '60s and at lunch time there was an army of guys standing on the sidewalk, in their overcoats if it were cold out, smoking and just waiting to go back upstairs to what were really small offices scattered throughout small buildings.
Myron Cohen apparently loved to tell stories. He must have had a lot the tell, because he was encouraged by his colleagues to pursue a career in telling jokes for a living. How he broke into show business I have no idea, but he became well known on the TV variety show circuit, the Ed Sullivan show in particular.
To this day I use one of his famous tag lines for a variety of situations: "Well, everybody's got to be someplace." In the joke, the line was uttered by the guy who was suddenly found by the husband who came home early, found his wife in bed clearly having just had sex, and suddenly flinging the armoire door open to reveal the naked Tom cat trying to cover his private parts with his hands and arms stammering to explain the situation. Surprises all around.
Maureen uses one of Cohen's jokes as a metaphor for the Goliath/shrimp comparison now emerging between Ukraine's Zelensky and Russia's Putin. The weak looking are performing mightily.
Picture a skinny little guy, a shrimp, a nothing. He walks into a lumber camp looking for a job.
The foreman is skeptical, so the shrimp steps up and fells a towering oak in 90 seconds.
"Where'd you learn that?" says the foreman.
"In the Sahara Forest," replies the guy.
"You mean the Sahara desert," the foreman corrects.
"Sure, now" the guy says.
This is a typical Myron Cohen joke with a tag line twist like an O Henry story. He ate well off a lot of those jokes.
I am genuinely impressed Maureen knew one.
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