No matter how often I watch them, two classic comic routines have me in stitches every time. The first, the handiwork of Mel Blanc and Jack Benny, pivots around the sounds of “Sy, Si, Sue.” A marvel of timing and of linguistic ingenuity, the sketch is the verbal equivalent of ping pong as the two comedians sally back and forth and it’s really funny.
My other favorite bit is also bound up with language and features Sid Caesar, who died last week. You know it, I’m sure: It’s the one in which the comedian bamboozles his audience into thinking he’s a high stepping, much decorated military man when, in fact, he’s a doorman with a whistle.
What makes this sketch amusing is not just the way in which it confounds expectations, subverting our reading of clothing. What really tickles the funny bone is how Caesar plays with sound, barking commands in what seems to be German, the language of authority, when he’s actually speaking gibberish, the language of nonsense.
Here and elsewhere, the celebrated comedian was playing -- some might even say toying -- with Yiddish , a language whose cadences, rhythms and gestures he picked up from his immigrant parents, but whose literature and history and elevated aspirations eluded him, as it did so many of his generation.
Sounding off in Yiddish, and on national television, no less, Sid Caesar introduced millions of Americans to an age-old language with which they were entirely unfamiliar. But its public debut came at a cost: By rendering Yiddish comically, the stuff of silly business, much got lost in translation.
