Shows With Jewish Targeted Humor?

I was talking with a friend of mine who is also into musicals, about shows with humor which is aimed at Jewish people, obviously The Producers is the one that springs to mind, was this the first show to make fun out of Jewish people? Can you think of any other shows and what they say?

Any Jackie Mason show.

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Fiddler on the Roof

"You won't succeed on Broadway if you don't have any Jews."

New York City's theatre scene has a massive Jewish presence (actors, directors, writers, etc.) and Jewish jokes, culture, and tradition thus play a pretty major role in shaping the industry. I'm not saying it's positive or negative, it just is.

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Pacific Overtures

Watch your phrasing! The word "targeted" in your subject line and the phrase "make fun out of" make your post seem to be offensive, at least to American ears.

Assuming your post was NOT anti-Jewish, the answer to your question is that Irving Berlin was probably the first, starting around 1910, with a series of songs he wrote for Jewish-dialect comedians, like the young Fanny Brice, with titles like "Yiddisha Nightingale," "Becky Is Back in De Ballet," "Jake! Jake! De Yiddisha Ball Player," and the classic "Sadie Salome, Go Home!"

In this clip from the 1936 movie The Great Ziegfeld, Fanny Brice sings the 1910 "Yidl, With Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime":

http://youtu.be/NTwq_Fxr5ak


Here's an interesting page on "Sadie Salome":

http://sadiesalome.com/about.html?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=600&width=800

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Updated On: 11/27/11 at 09:08 PM

"A Broadway Musical" had a camp number called "Yenta Power," literally about the power Jewish matinee ladies had to control a show's success or failure.

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Jane- there were jokes throughout the producers about Jews like, "let's play a game where there's absolutely no sex: The Jewish princess and her husband."

I don't know if it was lines like this that made the OP think that.

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Rags had that Hamlet number that's rather cute.

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Make Me A Song, which is half revue and half Falsettos, has songs such as "Four Jews In A Room Bitching" and "Passover". William Finn is Jewish and a lot of his work has either traces of what can be called Jewish humor, or is just outright loud and proud of it's Jewish humor.

My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding (Not on Broadway - at Toronto Fringe and NYMF)