Larry Hart and Dick Rodgers were both bright Jewish boys from Manhattan who at one point or another went to Columbia, but there the similarity in their backgrounds ends.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I feel very fortunate to have been associated with people such as Rodgers and Hammerstein. I think they were geniuses of their time.
I know a lot about Jewish comedians.
Manhattan, though, was an entirely different ballgame in a whole different kind of world, with a man who was brilliant and at the same time terribly charismatic.
T.J. Miller and Kumail Nanjiani I met when I was in Chicago, learning how to do comedy.
Alan King, a comedian I adored, was considered society, and I was considered the Jewish kid from the neighborhood.
I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.
My family were Conservative Jews. My parents were both born in this country, but my father grew up on the Lower East Side, and my mother was born and raised in Harlem when there was a large Jewish 'colony' there. Eventually, they moved to Jersey City to get away from New York.
I was born in New York City, but I was raised in New Jersey, part of the great Jewish emigration of 1963.
I grew up on Jerry Lewis and Abbot and Costello, the Marx Brothers.
I grew up on Don Knotts and Jerry Lewis and all the guys from Second City.