David Freedman
Encyclopedia
David Freedman was a Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

n-born American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...

 and biographer who became known as the "King of the Gag-writers" in the early days of radio.

David Freedman was born in Botoşani
Botosani
Botoșani is the capital city of Botoșani County, in northern Moldavia, Romania. Today, it is best known as the birthplace of many celebrated Romanians, including Mihai Eminescu and Nicolae Iorga.- Origin of the name :...

, Romania, as the first child and only son of Sara and Israel Freedman. Israel, a political refugee, immigrated with his young family to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 in 1900, where four years later, David’s sister Sophie became the first Freedman born in the U.S.

Freedman graduated from the City College of New York
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...

 in 1918, the first in his family to complete a formal education beyond high school. In September 1918, he married Beatrice (née Rebecca Goodman), a fellow New Yorker, who was born in the city on September 27, 1899 (her parents had fled from Kishinev
Chisinau
Chișinău is the capital and largest municipality of Moldova. It is also its main industrial and commercial centre and is located in the middle of the country, on the river Bîc...

, Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

). Within five years they had three sons, Benedict (1919), Noel (1922 - now known as David Noel Freedman
David Noel Freedman
David Noel Freedman , son of the writer David Freedman, was a biblical scholar, author, editor, archaeologist, and ordained Presbyterian minister ....

), and Toby (1924). A decade later their only daughter, who is now known as Laurie Hayden, arrived.

From 1924 on, Freedman was a self-employed writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

. He created sketch
Sketch comedy
A sketch comedy consists of a series of short comedy scenes or vignettes, called "sketches," commonly between one and ten minutes long. Such sketches are performed by a group of comic actors or comedians, either on stage or through an audio and/or visual medium such as broadcasting...

es for musicals
Musical theatre
Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...

 and had shows on Broadway almost every year from 1926 through 1937. His novel Mendel Marantz (1925) featured a Jewish father who frequently made witty remarks. His first play, Mendel, Inc., debuted in 1929. When radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...

 replaced vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

, Freedman—who already enjoyed a reputation as a popular, versatile writer—was ready for the new medium. He was prolific, creating as many as six entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment consists of any activity which provides a diversion or permits people to amuse themselves in their leisure time. Entertainment is generally passive, such as watching opera or a movie. Active forms of amusement, such as sports, are more often considered to be recreation...

 programs a week for several years, and eventually worked in movies as well.

Freedman was also a biographer and wrote about industry insiders. His first biography, the Eddie Cantor
Eddie Cantor
Eddie Cantor was an American "illustrated song" performer, comedian, dancer, singer, actor and songwriter...

 memoir My Life Is in Your Hands (1928, "as told to" Freedman by Cantor), became a bestseller
Bestseller
A bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on lists of currently top selling titles that are based on publishing industry and book trade figures and published by newspapers, magazines, or bookstore chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and...

 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...

. Freedman and Cantor collaborated on a biography of showman Florenz Ziegfeld
Florenz Ziegfeld
Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. , , was an American Broadway impresario, notable for his series of theatrical revues, the Ziegfeld Follies , inspired by the Folies Bergère of Paris. He also produced the musical Show Boat...

; Ziegfeld: the Great Glorifier (1934) was used for the film Ziegfeld Follies (1945). Similarly, Phantom Fame (1931) became the basis for the movie The Half-Naked Truth (1932).

In the mid-1930s Freedman contributed scripts for short comedies produced by Educational Pictures
Educational Pictures
Educational Pictures was a film distribution company founded in 1919 by Earle Hammons . Educational primarily distributed short subjects, and today is probably best known for its series of 1930s comedies starring Buster Keaton, as well as for a series of one-reel comedies featuring Shirley...

 in New York. The best known is probably Blue Blazes
Blue Blazes
Blue Blazes is a 1936 short comedy film featuring Buster Keaton. Buster becomes a fireman, but not a particularly good one. He has a chance to prove himself, however, when three women are trapped in a burning building.-Cast:* Buster Keaton - Elmer...

(1936), starring Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton was an American comic actor, filmmaker, producer and writer. He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".Keaton was recognized as the...

 as an inept fireman.

Freedman suffered a massive heart attack on the evening of Monday, December 7, 1936. By the morning of the 8th, he was dead, leaving Beatrice, his partner of 18 years, and their four children, who ranged in age from just under 17 to just under 2 years.

Legacy

According to his son, David Noel Freedman, it is unlikely that contemporary audiences would appreciate most of David Freedman's work (though his jokes about the stock market still ring true), because most of his jokes played on the peculiarities and sensitivities of his era. Freedman’s stories, however, have a timeless quality. As the years passed, his family honored his memory with the posthumous publication of The Intellectual Lover (1940, repr. 2007), a collection of short stories that were originally published individually between 1922 and 1928.

Of the countless pieces Freedman wrote between 1920 and 1936, Mendel, Inc. (1929) is the only fully realized play. A product of the beginning of his brief career, it embodies the mature thoughts of a humorist/playwright. On June 2, 2004, this classic comedy
Comedy
Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...

 about an immigrant Jewish family living in the uncertain times of 1929 of the Lower East Side was read to a packed house at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach, California
Solana Beach, California
Solana Beach is a city in San Diego County, California. The population was 12,867 at the 2010 census.-Geography:Solana Beach is located at ....

. Mendel, Inc. was also used as the basis for the 1932 Warner Brothers film The Heart of New York. a vehicle for Jewish-dialect comedians Smith and Dale, with comedian George Sidney as the pivotal character, Mendel Marantz.

Four books by Freedman were translated into Russian and published by Ogonyok in 1926; they enjoyed tremendous popularity for a short while, and Mendel's witty "definitions" were quoted everywhere, but within a year they were eclipsed by the comic writings of Ilf and Petrov
Ilf and Petrov
Ilya Ilf Ilya Ilf Ilya Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Faynzilberg and Evgeny or Yevgeni Petrov (Yevgeniy Petrovich Kataev or Katayev were two Soviet prose authors of the 1920s and 1930s...

 and Mikhail Zoshchenko
Mikhail Zoshchenko
-Biography:Zoshchenko was born in 1895, in Poltava, but spent most of his life in St. Petersburg / Leningrad. His Ukrainian father was a mosaicist responsible for the exterior decoration of the Suvorov Museum in Saint Petersburg. The future writer attended the Faculty of Law at the Saint Petersburg...

, and were soon forgotten, although Anatoly Rybakov
Anatoly Rybakov
Anatoly Naumovich Rybakov was a Soviet and Russian writer, the author of the anti-Stalinist Children of the Arbat tetralogy, novel Heavy Sand, and many popular children books including Adventures of Krosh, Dirk, Bronze Bird, etc...

 has a character quote Mendel in Children of the Arbat
Children of the Arbat
Children of the Arbat is a novel by Anatoli Rybakov that recounts the era in the Soviet Union of the build-up to the 'Congress of the Victors', the early years of the second Five Year Plan and the circumstances of the murder of Sergey Kirov prior to the beginning of the Great Purge.Principally...

(set in 1933).

A fictionalized version of David Freedman appears as "Harry Goldhandler" in the novel Inside, Outside
Inside, Outside
Inside, Outside is a 1985 Herman Wouk novel telling the story of four generations of a Russian Jewish family and its travails in Russia and America. The book is a first person narrative told from the viewpoint of Israel David Goodkind, the third of the four generations in the book...

by Herman Wouk
Herman Wouk
Herman Wouk is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author of novels including The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance.-Biography:...

.

Books

  • The Intellectual Lover and Other Stories (1940 and 1986)
  • Ziegfeld: the Great Glorifier (1934)
  • Your Next President! (1932)
  • Phantom Fame: The Anatomy of Ballyhoo (1931)
  • Yoo-Hoo Prosperity! The Eddie Cantor Five-year Plan (1931)
  • Between the Acts (1930)
  • Caught Short! a Saga of Wailing Wall Street (1929)
  • My Life Is in Your Hands (1928 and 2000)
  • Mendel Marantz (1925 and 1986)

Shows

  • Betsy
  • Crazy Quilt
  • Forward March
  • Life Begins at 8:40
    Life Begins at 8:40
    Life Begins at 8:40 is a musical revue with music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ira Gershwin and E.Y. Harburg, and sketches by Gershwin, Harburg, David Freedman, H.I...

  • Mendel, Inc.
  • The Show is On
  • Sweet and Low
  • White Horse Inn
  • Ziegfeld Follies
    Ziegfeld Follies
    The Ziegfeld Follies were a series of elaborate theatrical productions on Broadway in New York City from 1907 through 1931. They became a radio program in 1932 and 1936 as The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air....

     of 1934
  • Ziegfeld Follies of 1936

Films

  • Ziegfeld Follies
  • The Half Naked Truth
  • The Heart of New York
  • Palmy Days

Sources

  • Auerbach, Arnold
    Arnold M. Auerbach
    Arnold M. Auerbach was an American comedy writer, especially for radio, television and newspapers. Auerbach wrote radio and television scripts for Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Fred Allen, Frank Sinatra and Phil Silvers, among others...

    , Funny Men Don't Laugh (Doubleday, NY, 1965); this book is a memoir, largely covering Auerbach's period of apprenticeship with Freedman, but the name "Lou Jacobs" is substituted in place of "David Freedman"

  • Bercovici, Konrad
    Konrad Bercovici
    Konrad Bercovici was a Jewish-American writer.-Biography:Born in Romania into a Jewish family in 1882, he went to university in Paris, where he met his wife. Together, they moved to the Lower East Side, Manhattan, New York City. He worked in sweatshops and gave piano lessons. He went on to write...

    , introduction to The Intellectual Lover and Other Stories by David Freedman.

  • Morris Buckley, Patricia, "Long-lost Play Resurrected for Jewish Arts Festival", North County Times, May 26, 2004.

  • Various New York Times articles.

  • Additional sources include the credits listed in the items in the Select Anthology and confirmation of the contents of this article by Herman Wouk (December, 2004, Palm Springs, CA), David Noel Freedman (December, 2004, La Jolla, CA, and other members of the Freedman family in 2005), and members of the Cantor family (2006).

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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