THIS ESSAY explores the bawdy humour of Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and Patsy Abbott, three working-class, Jewish, stand-up comics who were hugely popular in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Largely forgotten or dismissed today, they released best-selling LPs known at the time as ‘party records’, which, though intended for respectable, middle-class consumers, were often sold under the counter and banned from airplay. The records were therefore typically enjoyed in the privacy of one's home, and, by most accounts, the primary consumer was likely to be Jewish. The period in which these comics flourished was one in which many working-class Jews experienced upward mobility and suburbanization, the beginnings of the redefinition of Jews as racial whites, and substantial pressures to assimilate into mainstream American culture. Jewish identity was central to the routines of these comics, as was a highly sexual subject matter. Here I explore how this group of entertainers positioned themselves at the intersection of gender, Jewish ethnicity, class, and whiteness in the 1950s, as well as the significance that their humour had for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. With their earthy, shtetl sensibility and their smatterings of Yiddish, these performers, who attained their greatest popularity in their middle years, railed against societal mores that told them to be quiet, well-behaved, and sexually passive.

Both in the means by which it was disseminated (LP records) and in its content, the trio's comedy illustrated the importance of the home in negotiating Jewish identity in 1950s America. Their party records pierced the boundaries of ethnic privacy by bringing the decidedly public setting of stand-up comedy performance into the living room. As these records were often played during cocktail parties or more intimate gatherings in suburban Jewish homes, they created a semi-public context of performance in the heart of the domestic sphere. Cheaply made and affordable, the party record fitted in perfectly with the more geographically dispersed suburban lifestyle of 1950s America that increasingly relied on mediated forms of leisure such as television. Unlike that more mainstream form, though, the party record was marked as transgressive.