"The Rabelais Foundation" by Robert Wexelblatt

Jackie Whitman, né Joseph Rabinowitz, died two years ago.  He had a long, so-so run in stand-up comedy.  The high point of his career may have been landing a minor role in Hopeless Heroes, a Vietnam era movie that aimed both to glorify and mock war and accomplished neither. 

Whitman’s adolescence coincided with the Golden Age of the comedy LP record.  He wore out disks by Bob Newhart, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, Don Adams, Stan Freberg.  He loved all of them, but he adored the edgier, more political monologues of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce.  Bruce and Sahl affected Jackie the way Bocaccio did Chaucer; that is, he wanted to be himself and also just like them.

During the summer of his fifteenth year, Whitman moved schmattes for his uncle in Manhattan.  The next two summers, he wangled a job bussing tables at Grossinger’s in the Catskills and started writing jokes.

Back in Queens, he tried his material out on Billy Bachrach and Sammy Schein, his bowling and pool pals.  They weren’t entirely discouraging, which was better than the reaction he got from his sister Nancy, who was.  But he persisted.  With a little help from his uncle, Jackie got into NYU where he joined an improv group and went to open-mic nights around town.  To assuage his parents and sister, he majored in finance and even made Dean’s List, but he didn’t give up his dream.

He knew he had to have a stage name.  Jackie was favored by comedians.  Jackie wasn’t threatening.  Jackie suggested somebody funny.  There was Jackie Mason (Yakov Moshe Maza), who started out as a rabbi before converting to ethnic hilarity.  There was rotund Jackie Vernon (Ralph Verrone) famous for voicing the likewise stout Frosty the Snowman, and there was Jack E. Leonard (Leonard Lebitsky), who always insisted on that middle initial.  At the top of the heap, there was Jack Benny (Benjamin Kubelsky) who made it on both radio and TV.

Jackie signed a contract with a third-string manager, Charlie Shumsky.  Shumsky didn’t have many connections but, under his cynicism, he had lots of heart and a stubborn optimism.  Jackie played every dive Shumsky booked for him on both coasts and in between.  He was heckled, stiffed, fired, but only got beaten up once.  “You’re paying your dues,” remarked the ever-encouraging Shumsky.  The truth was that Jackie wasn’t all that good as Nancy observed with satisfaction whenever she deigned to come to one of his gigs.  Nancy was the anti-Shumsky.  She was like Eugene Ionesco, the acerbic Franco-Romanian jester who cracked, “Nothing makes me so pessimistic as optimism.”

Jackie may have been a mediocre comic, but he turned out to be spectacularly good with money.  Starting with a tiny stake, he played the market the way Heifetz did Hebrew Melody.  He bought real estate too and, over the years, Jackie accumulated a considerable fortune.  He married twice— in both instances with ironclad prenups—and divorced twice.  He fathered no children and therefore had no grandchildren.  To nobody’s surprise, Nancy was a spinster, so Jackie had no nieces or nephews.  He never saw his three cousins and lost touch with Billy and Sammy.  His only real friends were fellow comedians.  So, when Dr. Berkowitz delivered his irremediable diagnosis, Jackie decided to set up a foundation and made five comics his trustees.  Justifiably modest, he decided not to name the foundation after himself but his favorite Frenchman whose shtick was his favorite reading in his French 201 class at NYU.

François Rabelais was the best kind of humane humanist.  He managed to piss off both John Calvin in Geneva and Pope Paul in Rome. Whitman was especially inspired by Rabelais’ last words which also served as his last will and testament: I owe much; I have nothing; the rest I leave to the poor.

Jackie’s charge to his trustees was to solicit grant applications and “fund the ones you think would have made me happy if I weren’t dead.”

The first successful application to the Rabelais Foundation was from a neuroscientist at a third-tier university in Texas.  The fellow proposed research to discover if different parts of the brain were stimulated by different categories of jokes.  “Puns like the slogan a colleague suggested for a local school bus company: We’re the Kindertoten Leader.  Mother-in-law jokes such as the reply my sister gave to an inquiry about how her hypochondriacal mother-in-law is getting along: “Enjoying ill-health, as usual, thank you very much.”  Offensive jokes like this riddle: “Who won the [insert ethnic group here] beauty contest?  Answer: Nobody.”  The researcher not only claimed to be a fan of Jackie Whitman, but he only asked for two grand.  Other proposals trickled, then poured, in.

A waggish literary scholar from Cambridge (no less) asked the Foundation to buy her release time so she could carry out research for an article “comparing and contrasting poems written with fountain pens, those composed with ballpoints, on computers, via dictation, and AI.”

The Foundation’s largest grant was to a community organizer in the Bronx who proposed sending half a dozen homeless people for a week-long stay at an exclusive Caribbean resort to assess the effect on the indigent on the affluent and vice versa.  “Of course, I’ll need to go along too.”

What became the Foundation’s final grant was to a bunch of bitter, indignant, and sarcastic Florida public-school teachers calling themselves Moms for Purity, Positivity, and Patriotism.  They proposed what they called, rather old-fashionedly, a “happening.”  They didn’t ask for much money—not to begin with anyway.  The budget would cover the rental of a hall, the printing up of promotional flyers and eight phony book covers.  They said they would furnish their own cheap cosmetics, unflattering clothing, and unbecoming hairdos.

One of the trustees had gig in Jacksonville and decided to attend the event, which drew a surprisingly large and raucous crowd.  The “Moms” appeared on stage seated side-by-side on folding chairs behind a podium, a galvanized steel trashcan, and two stacks of books.  They all glared at the audience.  A woman in a purple track suit, stepped to the podium, called for quiet, and kicked things off with a heated speech about the subversive, dishonest, ungrateful, misleading, guilt-inducing, anti-family, traitorous books that had wormed their way into school libraries or—worse yet—on to course syllabi.

Some in the crowd booed; others cheered.  Impossible to say who was being ironic and which was in earnest.

The next speaker, dressed in a scarlet pants suit with power shoulders devoted ten minutes to incorrectly defining Critical Race Theory and anathematizing all things Woke.  “It’s our job to get our kids up and off to school in the morning, but the last thing we want is for them to be woke when they get there!”

Next up were a brace of Moms, both in white blouses, black skirts.  The one who wore sneakers snatched a book from the top of one stack and held it up for the audience to see.  It was a hardbound edition of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.  The cover depicted Jo reading to her sisters as Marmee looks on with loving approval.

“This book is called a classic,” scoffed one woman, making air quotes around classic.  “My daughter’s school library has four copies, and it was on her summer reading list.  Oh sure, it looks sweet and innocent, but it isn’t.  A classic?  Really?  That’s just because it’s old, not because it’s good. This book is a piece of disguised propaganda, an early manifestation of the Radical Feminist Agenda, undermining family values and tainting the minds of little girls.  What’s it actually about?  A single mother, a rebellious daughter, and an absentee father off supporting the War of Northern Aggression!”

Into the galvanized trash can the woman dropped Little Women. When it hit the bottom, it made a sound like a struck cymbal.  Then the woman picked up half the remaining stack of books while her companion hefted the other half.  They all went into the can.  Bang, bang.  A third woman stepped forward with a squeeze bottle of Kingsford Charcoal Lighter Fluid and sprayed it generously and grinningly into the trashcan.  The first speaker came forward with a box of kitchen matches, struck one, and dropped it into the can.  Whoosh!

The crowd leaned back in their seats and gasped.  But then another of the moms, in stretch pants and a hideous sweater, hastened forward and put a lid on the flaming trashcan.  “Good riddance!” she declared.  “Not to worry, though.  We have replacements right here.” She nodded toward the second stack of books. 

One by one, the moms held up the phony books from the unoxidized stack.  With pride they announced the title of each:

         
America’s Gifts to Its African Immigrants
Joyful Camping Tales of Japanese-Americans
Real Democracy: Andrew Jackson and Indian Welfare
Heroic Generals of the Vietnam War
America’s Exceptional Exceptionalism
Red-Lining: A Prudent Policy of the Federal Housing Administration
The Myth of Inequality
Andrew Johnson: Economic Savior

Some of the audience laughed and applauded, others started arguing with one another, some with raised fists, then four local policemen marched in and broke up the meeting. 

The event was widely covered by in the press. It emerged that all the women were public school employees or had been.  The State of Florida had all the teachers it hadn’t already fired fired.  The teachers sued the State.  The State petitioned the Federal District Court to have the Rabelais Foundation dissolved as a subversive organization.  The Foundation hired lawyers to defend itself and also paid for the teachers’ attorneys.  Legal expenses piled up fast.  In just six months, they consumed nearly all of Jackie Whitman’s fortune.

So, in the end, the eponymous Foundation could justly claim for itself Rabelais' last words.  It had nothing left in its account; it owed much in court costs and attorneys' fees; and the rest might indeed have been left to the poor.