Mike Nichols. Elaine May, Mel Brooks, and Woody Allen's "New Cabaret": underground Jewish humor and the evolution of the new Hollywood aesthetic

It was not simply that cultural and aesthetic innovation “articulated a strong opposition to the prevailing rules, morality, and aesthetic standards of the time” (Sobral 3), or that the “culture/counterculture divide was facilitated by the prosperity of post-war America” (Gair 4). The filmmakers here did not share the same counterculture values of their generational peers but instead developed a unique Jewish post-Holocaust sense of guilt by not being a part of an enabled underground resistance, projecting this guilt onto American society, and revamping a cabaret model of cultural and aesthetic resistance, what is here called “New Cabaret.” This research originally explores this “New Cabaret” aesthetic: the technical elements of the films as well as the cultural set of principles underlying them and how the two interact.

Analyses show that the mixture of small forms intrinsically part of the cabaret stage metamorphosed into important cinematic aesthetic diminutives. These diminutives are examined in numerous readings that support the broader, comprehensive conclusion that these filmmakers rely on the externally produced, Old World representational images of Jews, simultaneously fusing these with their own personal identities, to unravel the power dynamic between American Jewish and Gentile cultures and commercial Hollywood.