Milt Gross (1895-1953), a Bronx-born cartoonist and animator,
first found fame in the late 1920s, writing comic strips and
newspaper columns in the unmistakable accent of Jewish immigrants.
By the end of the 1920s, Gross had become one of the most famous
humorists in the United States, his work drawing praise from
writers like H. L. Mencken and Constance Roarke, even while some of
his Jewish colleagues found Gross' extreme renderings of Jewish
accents to be more crass than comical.
Working during the decline of vaudeville and the rise of the
newspaper cartoon strip, Gross captured American humor in
transition. Gross adapted the sounds of ethnic humor from the stage
to the page and developed both a sound and a sensibility that grew
out of an intimate knowledge of immigrant life. His parodies of
beloved poetry sounded like reading primers set loose on the Lower
East Side, while his accounts of Jewish tenement residents echoed
with the mistakes and malapropisms born of the immigrant
experience.
Introduced by an historical essay, Is Diss a System? presents
some of the most outstanding and hilarious examples of Jewish
dialect humor drawn from the five books Gross published between
1926 and 1928--"Nize Baby," "De Night in de Front from Chreesmas,"
"Hiawatta, Dunt Esk," and "Famous Fimmales"--providing a fresh
opportunity to look, read, and laugh at this nearly forgotten
forefather of American Jewish humor.
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