Who are Mike and Ike? I mean, the dudes who give their name to Mike and Ike candy? I thought I knew, but it appears the extensive folk etymology I constructed over the years was largely erroneous.
My mother’s mother, Augusta Jewett Street, was born in 1890 and raised a Methodist in Cleveland, Ohio. Like so many Protestants of her time and place, she had an enormous disdain for Irish Catholics, and was infuriated when her son named his first son “Michael.” Years after the fact, she “explained” to me that when she was a girl she heard endless “Mike and Ike” jokes, about stupid Irishman and penny-pinching Jews, and she hated to think that her grandson should have such a name.
Later on, I added to my Mike and Ike lore the “knowledge” that the two bell-ringing statues in Herald Square in New York City were referred to as Mike and Ike, rather in the manner that the two lions in front of the New York Public Library are known as “Patience and Fortitude,” the motto of three-term mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Recently, however, I sought to confirm all this on the web, and it turns out that either I got it all wrong, or the historical record has been seriously expunged.
In the first place, I can’t find any Mike and Ike jokes displaying the Irish/Jewish prejudices described by my grandmother. In the few Mike and Ike jokes I’ve found, either they’re both Irish or else they’re just two dumb guys. In either case, the jokes awful, so I’m not linking to them. There are also “Mike, Ike, and Mustard” jokes, which are pretty bizarre and thoroughly unlinkable as well. “Mike and Ike” was apparently once slang for “salt and pepper,” which explains a few things, but not many. The 2006 film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang referenced these jokes, setting off a minor ferment of speculation on the Internet.
Somewhat earlier—in 1907, to be precise—the cartoonist Rube Goldberg (obviously Jewish) introduced “Mike and Ike (They Look Alike).” Here, there is no use of ethnic humor at all. Both “brothers” (I guess that’s what they are) speak standard English, at a time when dialect humor was rampant in the funnies.
As for Mike and Ike in Herald Square, well, I guess I got that one wrong too. Herald Square, at 34th and Broadway, draws its name from the long-departed New York Herald newspaper, which once had its headquarters there. The building, constructed in 1894, featured bronze statues of two seven-foot printers wielding hammers, who would appear to strike a bell on the hour, although the bell is actually struck from behind. When the Herald building was torn down, the bell-ringers were reworked as a statue in the square, the whole thing recently revived and put in working order as a monument to Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
Bennett was immensely wealthy and “colorful,” spending a great deal of time and money in Europe. Supposedly, he would amuse himself in Paris by strolling through a three-star restaurant, pulling the tablecloths from the tables as he went. Then he would buy, not drinks, but dinners, for the house, to be washed down with the finest champagne. His name was used in Great Britain as a euphemism for “Gor Blimey,” in itself a euphemism for “God blind me”.1
Bennett was obsessed with speed and racing, and sponsored contests involving almost any vehicle imaginable, from yachts to balloons. He was also obsessed with owls, which decorate the monument in Herald Square, and whose eyes glow green every couple of seconds. According to this fascinating post, which includes some nice photos of the green-glowing owls, Bennett planned to be buried in a 125-foot high owl-shaped mausoleum, to be designed by legendary architect Stanford White, a project cut short in 1906 when White was murdered by Harry Thaw, enraged by White’s affair with Thaw’s wife, actress Evelyn Nesbit.
Yeah, but what about Mike and Ike? Apparently, that ain’t them. The two dudes in the Square are known, as far as I can tell, as “Stuff and Guff,” and no one seems to know why. Which leaves me 0 for 2. Still, Irish-Jewish relationships were the source of much scarcely correct humor back in the day, so Grandma didn’t get it all wrong. For example, the scarcely subtle Abie’s Irish Rose was once the longest-running (2,327 performances) play on Broadway back in the Twenties, though it could, I’m sure, scarcely hold the stage today, despite a denouement dipped in Broadway brotherhood, when the priest tells the rabbi, or the rabbi tells the priest, “We’re just taking different roads to the same place,” (At the time, I think you’d be hard pressed to find a priest or a rabbi who would agree with those sentiments. But the WASPs thought it was funny.)2
There were other, less famous, Irish-Jewish plays back in the Twenties, including Corporal Eagan, an Irish lad whose best bud was one Izzy Goldstein. Corporal Eagan was given a performance in Oxford, Mississippi back in 1921, and I can only wish for a time machine to deliver me there, for the role of Izzy was taken by a young literary lad by the name of William Faulkner.3
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Or maybe for the rarely heard “God and St. Bennett.” ↩︎
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In the fifties, someone came up with the terrible idea of turning Abie’s Irish Rose into a musical, to be called East Side Story (yes). Someone else came up with the great idea of moving the show to the West Side and making the conflict turn on race rather than religion, along with the even greater idea of pretending that the whole thing was inspired by Romeo and Juliet and not Abie’s Irish Rose. ↩︎
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Faulkner had been to New York by 1921, so he knew what Jews talked like (sort of). Whether he attempted a “Jewish” accent, which would have been hysterical, is unknown. ↩︎
