Kill Adolf

Have you ever wondered what life would be like if you hadn’t taken that job, or gone to that school, or moved to that neighborhood?

In other words: what if you were living in an alternative reality?

Alternative history is a genre with a long pedigree, especially in the realm of science fiction. After all, who can resist wondering, “What if…?”

The epic saga of the Second World War, with its action, tragedy and larger than life heroes, has inspired many “alternative histories”, from the “The City on the Edge of Forever” episode of the original Star Trek, to the 1992 novel-turned-mini series Fatherland, which depicts a world in which the Nazis defeat the Allies. The promise and allure of the subject matter is so great, in fact, that over the course of eight long years, two British teenagers who’d lived through the Blitz filmed their own alternative history movie on that same theme, called It Happened Here: The Story of Hitler’s England (1966).  Read more

Year One: Biblical Blasphemy is Back

Sunday school just got a lot more interesting. The new movie Year One is an Old Testament version of the classic Monty Python comedy The Life of Brian.

 

Now, for some people, that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. Not everybody approved of the Pythons’ outrageous spoof of Biblical epics, which featured something to offend everyone. Yet, thus far Year One hasn’t generated anything like the controversy the latter did decades ago. Why not?

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An open letter to New York Magazine

“Tone down the Jewishness so everybody can enjoy it,” says the studio exec played by Ricky Gervais in the recent indie-film-within-a-film For Your Consideration. “I don’t go around saying I’m a gentile.”

While I was writing my book Shtick Shift: Jewish Humor in the 21st Century (Barricade Books: 2008), those lines kept coming back to me. As I write in the book – and as New York magazine pointed out in its May 24 story on Woody Allen’s latest film – the “Jewish” aspect of “Jewish comedy” is now so all pervasive it’s become nearly invisible.

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