Ask A Genius 719: Jewish Comedy
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/11
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is Jewish comedy?
Rick Rosner: Modern comedy emerged after World War II. Comedy went from Vaudeville; guys just standing on a stage telling jokes that weren’t specific to the comedian to very personal comedy that originated mostly in the ‘60s. Then really exploded in the ‘70s and ‘80s where a bunch of comedians; Ray Romano, Letterman, Leno. Not Letterman and Leno because they just got jobs being comedians but comedians like Ray Romano got sitcoms built around their comedic personae. This is the guy I tell jokes about, I tell stories about myself on stage “Okay let’s turn you and those stories into a sitcom,” that happened a lot. But the deal is that all this happened after World War II where the Jews in World War II were the ultimate outsiders to the point where they were murdered by the millions.
The picture of Jews as comedy emerged was as outsiders; people who were picked last when you’re picking teams in gym class, guys who have to scramble to get laid because they were not tall blonde jocks. Jewish comedy is the little guy; the guy who’s not in power scrambling to make a light and then the outsider can be critical of winter life, the borderline loser because he’s qualified to be a critic because he’s not getting the benefits of being the tall blonde jock.
There’s also the trickster aspect of comedy where I can fuck with you, I can make fun of you; that’s my role and I’d say that that dynamic has changed because time passes and can’t beat Lenny Bruce for 50 years. And the culture has become more inclusive; everybody’s found a peer group or more people have found a peer group via social media than in the ‘60s and ‘70s when there was the Delaware, the peer culture. People who had the most friends were jocks who had teams, who were the popular people. In the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s the dominance of popular people; of good looking, blonde, fucking ass-less people, that was the dominance of jocks say was facilitated by what culture didn’t offer which was the ability to cast a wide net to find peers. If you were popular in high school you could be on sports teams and that automatically gives you dozens of fucking friends and everybody’s pointed in the same direction ‘go team win’, everybody, their fraternities, and all that shit and then like the skulking sulking losers were more isolated. And shit’s changed, people can find each other over social media and also nerd chic emerged in the ‘90s where you started getting Tech billionaires and most people are tech savvy and it became chic to call yourself a nerd. Supermodels on talk shows saying I was such a geek, a nerd growing up. So the shit has shifted.
It’s harder to be an outsider and also the people who are outsiders now are more fucking sinister and not fucking good at comedy at all. The fucking basement dweller, 4chan, Incell, Anti-vax, QAnon; these are a bunch of angry dumb shits who are not fucking funny at all. They’re dangerous and they’re stupid.
Looking at Sarah Silverman; she’s always come across with a sweet on stage persona and early in her career she used her sweetness to say awful things and that was the theme of a lot of her comedy and then eight years ago maybe at last she decided to become fully nice. I mean she’s still funny as fuck but she decided to nicify herself. I follow a bunch of comedians on Twitter and it’s fairly universal that everybody is just distressed at the way the world is going and there’s a tendency to want to have solidarity and to use comedy to say fuck you to the gullible Incell right-wing idiots who are fucking everything up. The outsiders have pulled together and the true outsiders now are dangerous unfunny assholes. The dangerous unfunny assholes have also pulled together or have been pulled together into a force of dangerous stupidity.
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[Recording End]
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