Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado as a Cypher for Jewishness inPostwar American Films

They (Never) Would Be Missed: Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado as a Cypher for Jewishness inPostwar American Films, Talk by Samantha Cooper at Sonic Representations of Jewishness on Screen and Off at UCLA, April 19-21, 2026. In the postwar era, American Jews helped Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, or the Town of Titipu cross from the stage to the screen. While on its surface, this satirical British operetta depicting stereotyped Japanese characters seemed to have little to do with American Jews, it nevertheless gained an unruly foothold in American Jewish culture, where it was repeatedly put to work in service of the Jewish community throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Cooper 2023). Recognizing The Mikado as a platform for American Jewish expression, Jewish cultural creators and audiences subsequently treated the operetta as a recurring yet malleable sonic cypher for Jewish identity formation in the rising medium of film. Three case studies illustrate The Mikado’s shifting role in postwar Jewish screen culture: Groucho Marx’s “New Yawk” KoKo in the Bell Telephone Hour (1960), lampooned as lacking musicality in ways that echoed the music libel against the Jews (HaCohen 2011); the operetta’s conspicuous absence from the 1959 film Marjorie Morningstar, where Shakespeare supplanted its centrality in Wouk’s original storyline; and Mel Brooks’s ironic insertion of a Mikado excerpt into The Producers (1967, 2005). Together, these examples demonstrate how an operetta without clear connections to Jewishness accrued coded Jewish meanings on screen, whether through hyper-Jewish inflection, erasure, or ironic appropriation. In the process, the songs and characters of The Mikado became tools to perform Jewish difference and assimilation for broad Anglo-American audiences at the mid- century (Stratton 2001, Bial 2005, Goldman 2013). Dr. Samantha M. Cooper is the Robert M. Beren Assistant Professor in Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas. Her research examines the many intersections of music and sound with American Jewish culture between the late nineteenth century and the present day. Her first book, American Jews and the Making of the New York Opera Industry, 1880-1940, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press with the support of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award and the Vice Chancellor for Research and Friends of the Hall Center Award from the University of Kansas. Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Opera Quarterly, American Jewish History, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. Samantha’s doctoral dissertation received both the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award, and the Salo Wittmayer Baron Dissertation Award in Jewish Studies. She has previously held postdoctoral fellowships in Jewish Studies at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and received her PhD in Historical Musicology from New York University. Cooper is the host and producer of The Sounding Jewish Podcast, and the Co-Executive Director of the Jewish Music Forum, A Project of the American Society for Jewish Music.