Zohan Restyles Jewish Comedy

Today’s Jewish entertainers would be unrecognizable to our bubbes and zaydes, who fondly recall Borscht Belt comedians in cheap tuxedos, telling corny (and more or less clean) mother-in-law jokes.

To get an idea of the difference a century of assimilation and acceptance can make, compare early Jewish vaudeville star Fanny Brice to Comedy Central’s Sarah Silverman. Brice made quaint tunes like “Second Hand Rose” and “My Man” famous, whereas Silverman’s notorious musical compositions include her paean to the elderly, “You’re Gonna Die Soon,” and the infamous “I Love You More” (“Than Jews Love Money.”)

That kind of irreverent, even offensive humor, with its “in your punim” attitude, is the lingua franca of young Jewish adults, whose common reference points now come from The Simpsons, not the synagogue. Even so, while they aren’t affiliated with synagogues and Jewish Community Centers anymore, these young people are still deeply engaged in Jewish culture, albeit in their own idiosyncratic way.

Today’s Jewish comics aren’t interested in blending into the mainstream, or apologizing for who they are. They are being themselves for better or worse, and have the confidence to laugh about their frailties. The understated “Jew-ish” flavor of the past – usually nothing more than adding a smattering of Yiddish to comic routines — has been replaced by a brutal matter-of-factness that would make earlier generations of Jewish comics cringe.

A movie like the upcoming Adam Sandler comedy, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Sandler plays an ex-Mossad commando who dreams of hanging up his Uzi and becoming… a hairdresser in New York City!

When Zohan arrives in the Big Apple, he discovers that leaving his past behind proves difficult, when local Arabs recognize him and try to ruin his new life. Movies like Zohan actually shine a spotlight on Jewish identity rather than downplaying it.

I call this new comic sensibility “the shtick shift.”

True, the Sandlers and Silvermans of this world can make us cringe, with their daring, no-holds-barred humor. Yet in today’s world, blighted as it is with conflicts and catastrophes, maybe contemporary comedy can help us all cope, and even overcome.

Now more than ever, we need courage. And let’s face it: it takes courage to laugh at ourselves.

Rabbi Simcha Weinstein is an internationally known, best-selling author. His first book Up, Up and Oy Vey! How Jewish History, Culture and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero, received the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Award for the best religion book of 2007. His second book, Shtick Shift: Jewish Humor in the 21st Century, will be published in fall 2008.