Lou Jacobi died Friday, at the age of 95. Damn. Another of my heroes I'll never get to meet.
Jacobi was a fixture in my household growing up, almost entirely through a series of comedy albums made with titles like You Don't Have to be Jewish and When You're In Love, The Whole World is Jewish. And while I confess that when I was young, these recorded sketches on the subject of being less Christian than most in the neighborhood seemed stereotypical and cliched--but only because they were.
My parents and grandparents would listen to these records and roar with laughter--again and again. I'd cringe a little bit, until I started to appreciate the comic timing of the cast and the way they could milk a laugh from the audience even when the punchline could be seen coming a mile away. I'm sure listening to them now would be a much different experience--I'll bet I'd appreciate the jokes better, and the cast even more.
And the best of the bunch was Lou Jacobi.
Jacobi, a Canadian-born actor whose first major splash was made in a dramatic part in The Diary of Ann Frank on Broadway (and in the movie), was a fixture "guest star" on 1960s television shows from That Girl to The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and struck a chord with me because he was exactly like a member of my family (I'm not saying which one), only funny.
Later one, as he specialized in comedic middle-aged men of a certain Semitic persuasion, Jacobi was almost the poster boy (poster man?) for middle class Jewish men. He showed up on television and in movies, most notably playing a highly unlikely transvestite in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and a jovial florist in Arthur with Dudley Moore.
But for me, the crowning achievement of Lou Jacobi's movie career was as Uncle Morty in My Favorite Year, an underappreciated 1982 comedy sprung from Mel Brooks's experience shepherding Errol Flynn through a guest appearance on Your Show of Shows when he was the junior writer on the Sid Caesar program. No, Jacobi didn't play Errol Flynn (or in this case, Alan Swann, who was brilliantly portrayed by Peter O'Toole) nor the Mel Brooks prototype Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker).
He was the shlumpy brother of Benjy's mother (the impossibly irrepressible Lainie Kazan), who "drops by" conveniently just as Benjy is bringing Alan Swann to his mother's Brooklyn apartment for dinner. And the ensuing scene, designed to embarrass Benjy in every possible way, is stolen by Jacobi, who never once winked at the camera--he played the scene straight and let the situation create the laughs.
It was like having dinner with lost relatives, in both good and bad ways.
I'll miss Lou Jacobi, even though he hadn't acted in 15 years at the time of his death. But I can still watch My Favorite Year, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and Avalon and any number of other Jacobi-aided gems.
I never met him, but I think I knew him really well.
Rest in peace, Lou Jacobi.
