Meet the Parents

A couple appears on a bare stage. He’s short and unprepossessing; she’s tall and striking. His name is Heschy “Hesh” Horowitz, a name so odd and unfamiliar that he makes a point of slowly spelling it: H-O-R-O-W-I-T-Z. Her name is Mary Elizabeth Doyle: D-O-Y-L-E. Brought together on a first date thanks to a seemingly infallible computer, the couple soon discovers they have nothing in common. And yet, they hit it off. “Mary Elizabeth, I like you,” Heschy tells her. “I like you, too,” says she with a tentative smile.

At first blush, there’s nothing new here: the differences between a Jew and a Christian had long been a staple of the vaudeville and Borscht Belt circuits. What made this sketch fresh was its undercurrent of technological anxiety. The joke was on the computer. (Or was it?)

“Computer Dating,” was written and performed by a married couple, a comic duo called Stiller & Meara. It aired in 1966 on the Ed Sullivan Show, on whose immensely popular Sunday night television show the comedians would appear dozens of times. Household names throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara traded on the anomalousness of their personal relationship, rendering it their stock in trade, their signature. In nightclubs, on television, and on radio where their commercials for Blue Nun wine were a big hit, they played their contrasting styles and sensibilities, backgrounds and looks for laughs until audiences grew tired of it – and them. In the 1990s, Jerry Stiller came out of involuntary retirement to become one of television’s most beloved, if snarliest, characters: Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza, whose cries of “festivus for the rest of us” and “serenity now” filled the air. The role of Arthur Spooner, the equally cranky father and father-in-law in King of Queens, a popular television sitcom of the 2000s, soon followed.

When Stiller & Meara first tread the boards in the America of the 1960s, intermarriage was steadily on the rise and no laughing matter, prompting both the Catholic Church and the American rabbinate to inveigh loudly against such unions. The couple, like their comedic forebears, capitalized on the context but with a twist: Where earlier generations of performers sought to take the sting out of mixed marriage, their comedic routines a form of reassurance, Stiller & Meara’s act was an exercise in normalization. Look at us, it declared; we’re doing fine.

On paper, they shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t just that Stiller was Jewish and Meara Catholic (she subsequently converted to Judaism); they were also physically miscast. She towered, he hovered. They differed, too, in their attitude toward performance. She “flowed,” while he was given to exacting preparation. And she drank; he, not so much. Instead of diminishing their appeal, these and a host of other differences which the couple did little to hide enhanced it. Audiences, well aware that Jerry and Anne were a real-life couple with challenges not unlike their own, warmed to them.

Married for over sixty years, Stiller & Meara had two children: Amy, who went on to become a modestly successful actress, and Ben, her enormously successful brother. Among his many roles, he played Rabbi Jake Schram in the 2000 film Keeping the Faith, whose Friday night entreaty to his flock to be more “Shabbat Shalomy” became the equivalent of a meme. Ben Stiller gained even greater fame as Greg Focker, the anxious Jewish son-in-law with the decidedly non-mellifluous name, in the long-running Meet the Parents film series.

Years after their actual parents’ respective deaths in 2015 and 2020, while in the process of emptying out their cluttered Upper West Side apartment, Amy and Ben decided to transform a chore into a project: to make a documentary about their parents’ lives, excavating their relationship and its impact on their own. Their father made it easy for them. An inveterate pack rat, a fierce camera hound, Jerry Stiller left behind reels of labeled home movies and stacks of cassettes, rows of framed photographs and box after box of documents whose contents ran the gamut from mushy love letters to hard-nosed reviews and marked up scripts.

At once absorbing and choppy, loving and gimlet-eyed, the resulting documentary, Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost, now streaming on Apple TV, focuses on the porousness between Stiller & Meara’s act and their daily lives. Whatever the setting—the messy confines of their apartment, a professional gig that doubled as a family vacation—there wasn’t much of a divide between the two, confounding their offspring who often couldn’t figure out if the angry words their parents exchanged was the stuff of rehearsal or for real. On screen, as grown-up Ben and Amy recount tales of their childhood, sometimes tearing up and at other moments wanly smiling at the memory, or as they watch their younger selves clowning about, performing for the camera in one of the many clips their father took for posterity, hurts tumble out and accumulate.

The critics ate it up. From the LA Times (“lovely”) and The Guardian (“sweet, affectionate, unexpectedly poignant”) to Roger Ebert (“lovingly crafted”), words of praise rained down on Amy and Ben’s heads. The filmmakers were commended for trying to understand their parents when they could just have easily settled scores.

Neither the critics nor the filmmakers made much of the family’s Jewishness. It’s alluded to in passing but never developed. I don’t recall there being a single sustained reference to a Jewish holiday, ritual or food. Ben tells us that his father was a “very spiritual person,” but doesn’t elaborate, a curious omission in that intermarriage was key to his parents’ success as a professional couple. What’s more, in the postmodern era when Seinfeld ruled the roost, discussing whether or not the characters of George Constanza and his father Frank were really, really Jewish had all the earmarks of a parlor game.

At first blush, the relationship of the Stillers to their Jewish identity does seem attenuated and strained, at half-mast, especially in comparison with that of their much more exuberantly Jewish neighbors on the Upper West Side. Were we to reframe it, though, a different picture emerges, one in which they wholeheartedly flag their ethnic and religious identity: Jewishness as a comic sensibility. Drawing on its constellation of sounds, rituals, foodstuffs and characters for their material, Stiller & Meara are nothing less than inspired.

Lance and Harriet are out to dinner in a nice restaurant. She’d like to share a bottle of wine but frets that their selection of different entrées makes it difficult to choose one to satisfy both palates. Reassuringly, he suggests Blue Nun, the imported white wine that’s “correct with any dish.” Relievedly, Harriet comments on Lance’s growing sophistication. “You noticed,” he says proudly, before turning to the waiter to request a bottle of Blue Nun—and two straws.

Let’s hear it for Stiller & Meara.