Stop Picking on Brooklyn

Who knowed dem tuff muggs in Brooklyn was sensitive?

The U.S. isn’t as New York-centric as it once was. The New York of the first half of the 20th century no longer exists. So you don’t hear jokes about Brooklyn any more.

How different it was in the days of vaudeville at the Palace, Jack Dempsey at Madison Square Gardens, and gossip columnists on Broadway! Brooklyn was looked down on, a working-class place with a working-class baseball team. Radio shows out of New York made fun of it, though there might be a small rustle of applause by denizens of Flatbush when the name of their borough was mentioned.

Some people didn’t like it. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who may never have stepped foot out of certain sections of Manhattan, pointed out in her “Voice of Broadway” column of March 6, 1956:

Fred Allen's innocently intended quip about a contestant's name on "What's My Line?"—he commented: "Boyd; that's a bird in Brooklyn, isn't it?"—inspired more than 500 dead serious natives of the borough to besiege the Society for the Prevention of Disparaging Remarks About Brooklyn with demands for action.

Yes, there was such a humourless organisation. Its founder was a PR flack. It’s hard to tell how serious he was about it. He eventually quit the group, got fed up with Brooklyn and moved out, saying it was no place to raise a child. He got a pile of publicity, though. Both United Press and the International News Service published feature stories about the group in 1949. The first is from July 29th, the second from May 17th.

Brooklyn Society Rebels Against Television Gags
By JOHN ROSENBURG
United Press Staff Correspondent
NEW YORK — (UP) — The television people better say “Brooklyn” without a smile. And without a pun.
Sidney Ascher says he has them “eye and earmarked” for possible trouble.
Ascher is president of The Society for the Prevention of Disparaging Remarks About Brooklyn. It's a tough job, he admitted his organization boasts a following of 600,000 members, most of them from Los Angeles, Calif., Hollywood, Fla., and 19 towns named Brooklyn.
• • •
“FOLKS JUST DON'T seem ever io get tired of saying unkind things about Brooklyn,” he sighed wearily.
It wasn't so bad. he said, until radio came along.
“All of a sudden ‘Brooklyn’ became a standard joke for every fellow with a microphone,” he said. "They would say ‘Brooklyn’ and everybody would laugh ‘Brooklyn Ha. Ha’.”
He really couldn't understand it, he said.
"But we fixed radio,” he continued.
"Take the time a certain New York radio wise guy learned a guest on his program was from Brooklyn, just across the river. ‘Now don't hurry your lines,’ this guy says, ‘the last train for Brooklyn doesn't leave for an hour yet’.”
VERY FUNNY, Ascher said sourly. The next day, members of the society's New York chapter mailed 600 letters in protest to the offender He promptly apologized Ascher said the moat popular radio "jokes" about Brooklyn seemed to be based on the following situations.
(1) That people need a passport to get in and out of the town.
(2) That Brooklyn water has to be distilled before drinking.
(3) That Brooklyn's citizens are illiterate.
(4) That Brooklyn is an Island off the northeast coast of North America and outside U.S. territorial waters.
“WHAT CORN,” Ascher shuddered "Completely unfunny.”
Ascher said complaints against disparaging remarks about his favorite town hit a high of 8,437 in 1941. In 1942, they dropped to 2,623. With the rapid advance of television, however, they began to climb.
"The number of complaints may set a new record this year,” he said. "But we’ll take care of television, just as we did radio. Television will learn there is nothing funnier in Brooklyn than there is in any town in the South, where they say you-all,' or in the West, where they say 'pod-nuh'."
"You-all and pod-nuh." he said. "Can you imagine that? You-all and pod-nuh."
He laughed heartily.

Brooklyn Strikes Back
By INEZ ROBB
NEW YORK, May 17 (INS) — Brooklyn strikes back!
That is the big news today from the borough across the bridge which, with some puny aid from Texas, won the second world war singlehanded.
Sticks and stones may break this borough's bones, but it is the harsh yak-yak of so-called radio comedians that has at least brought to a berl the proud blood of Brooklynites from Moitle Avenue to Greenpernt.
As an answer to such joiks and for the general information of the world at large a group of public spirited Brooklyn citizens has just published one of the most elaborate civic brochures in American municipal history.
Here, between symbolic gold covers, is proof in word and elaborate pictorial illustration that Brooklyn is a class jernt, full of culture, tradition and high-type sensitive feelings.
Until this brochure dropped into my hands. I was unaware of the fact that from the very beginning Brooklyn has been a more expensive real estate development than Manhattan.
Shares In Whales
At least it cost a lot more to buy Brooklyn from the Indians than the $24 for which the Dutch got Manhattan. The Brooklyn Indians, born realtors, sold their acreage a tract at a time, and under old agreements the Brooklyn "Lodge of Poor Lo” is still entitled to "a half interest in all the whales washed up by the winds and waves” of Jamaica Bay. As of 1949, the other half interest is lodged in the sanitation department.
I never knew, either, that from the very beginning, Brooklyn attracted a very superior class of settlers. Lady Deborah Moody moved over from England snd settled there in 1643 at a time when it is doubtful if Manhattan boasted a lady of any type.
The brochure proudly points out that Ebbets Field was not always sacred to Dem Bums. Oh. Ebbets Field has had its moments, all right! There was the time when camels and elephants shambled over its outfield in what ta still pridefully regarded aa the biggest — if not the best — production of Verdi's "Aida" ever produced in the new world.
Music, the brochure would have us know, has always been the life blood of Brooklyn. And not be-bop or Juke box, either, but strictly from long hair. Indeed, thia 96-page tone poem on Brooklyn has been published by the founders of the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, a young organanization started in 1945 by a bunch of music-hungry Brooklyn G. I.’s in the ruins of Manila.
At $2 a copy, the brochure is selling like gold bricks in Brooklyn, especially to former G. I.’s who are mailing it, wholesale to every point on the globe to prove to overseas acquaintances that it's true what they say about Brooklyn.
Not only is the brochure expected to spread the glad cultural tidings, but another organization is working night and day to shame the clowns who make light of Brooklyn.
The Society for the Prevention of Disparaging Remarks About Brooklyn has just celebrated its tenth anniversary with a membership of more than 600,000 and active chapters strung from London to Hong Kong.
Sidney Ascher, a Brooklyn boy, started the SPDRB as a joke. But it is no joke to those who live in Brooklyn. Before he knew it, Ascher had a large and going brotherhood on his hands. Ascher says there is no such thing as a Brooklyn accent, and adds that "dese, dem, deys and dose, T'oid Avenoo, erl and jernt” are common to all parts of Greater New York City inhabited by the Illiterati.
Members of the society are always calling up Ascher to report any new indignities heaped on Brooklyn. The Brooklyn boiling point is low. and Ascher and the society have even forced major radio programs and studios to apologize for unwarranted slurs on the beloved borough.
Sometimes, though, Ascher kind of wishes he could get away from it all. Not long ago, an angry Brooklyn women called him at 3 a. m. She had been listening to a radio program about the oil business. And the commentator had "oil, or erl, as they call it in Brooklyn.”
"This woman was mad as hops,” Ascher remembers, and adds sadly: "She said to me, 'Mr. Ascher, when I heard that stupe making fun of Brooklyn. I can tell you it made my blood berl!’ ”