Whaddya call an old Jewish comic dead from lung cancer? ...

an old Jewish comic dead from lung cancer? Alan King.

The former Irwin Alan Kniberg of Brooklyn, son of Russian immigrants, wasn't the first nice Jewish boy to become a Friar, but he was one of their few abbots, which probably guaranteed him his heaven.

A teenage protege of the late, great Milton Berle, King worked his way through the hard 1950s in titty bars and dives, often to no audience. According to a 1991 interview, fellow up-and-coming comic Danny Thomas taught him his most valuable lesson: Talk to the audience, not at them. And so, in King's act, the style currently known as observational comedy came into existence. His brand of humor was always more "inside" than "out": fatherhood jokes, marriage jokes, suburban jokes, working-stiff jokes and so on. All the trappings of modern American living were filtered through his gritty, damn-right-I'm-from-New-York delivery.

Today, observational comedy is a limp-wristed and so-not-funny take on daily life, with domestic foibles and Have ya ever noticed? meshugas infecting the clubs and every show on Comedy Central. Its long-standing comedic dominance suggests that the good comedy of the 50s and 60s-the stream-of-consciousness, free-referential riffing of, yes, Lenny Bruce-never even existed. Instead we get: Didja ever notice how your wife always has a headache when you have a hard-on? and What's with those little umbrellas they put in drinks?

Seinfeld, that navel-gazing slice of urban spinelessness, should have been the endgame for this brand of hyperanalytical comedy. Seinfeld, the man, is just Alan King's adopted lovechild with the worst traits of Woody Allen-only raised by Long Islanders, not Upper West Siders, and never allowed to play ball with other kids.

King's death reminds us that he was the last great comic of first-generation American Jews. Though the 50s saw him in seedy holes, and hazily informed people in the 60s often confused him with Allan Sherman (who was much funnier), King's play-it-safe borscht-suburbia struck a chord with the Forest Hills set. His death leaves a void in the direct line of descent between the Catskills tummler and the hot, large-nosed, self-obsessed Jewish comic selling out Caroline's. Jeffrey Ross' filthy Henny Youngmanisms, anyone? America's favorite screen-yid, Ben Stiller?

Just how long this sad state will last depends on how long super-ironic humor will play to an America that's conspicuously non-ironic. That's why King and his descendants-not always, it must be admitted, princes of the punchline-have reigned and will continue to reign over New York, that city that, for better or worse, has enough irony for the rest of the world.