Funny People
I was watching last night’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart where he interviewed Judd Apatow for his new film Funny People. Somewhere in the middle of the interview, the two made a joke about being Jewish, and I had one of those ‘Usual Suspects’ moments where your mind starts replaying clips of past memories and eventually makes sense of something you never realized.
I knew that Jews played an important role in shaping American comedy, but still I have a pretty hard time distinguishing Jewish people from other ‘white’ people. If Jon Stewart didn’t make so many self-referential Jew jokes, for instance, I’d have no idea he was Jewish. And so I kind of had a “oh yeaa…” moment when I realized that this successful American filmmaker, whose comedies focus almost always on mainstream outsiders, who had roomed with Adam Sandler (Jewish) while both were struggling comedians, was in fact Jewish. He even casts the same group of Jewish actors in his films, all of which of course I had no idea were Jewish until just now.
After this realization of Apatow’s ethnicity I immediately wanted to know more, so I googled ‘Judd Apatow Jewish”. I found this article to be pretty interesting: Judd Apatow’s kind of Judaism.
On Jewish sensibility:
Apatow’s brand of comedy is decidedly different from that of Brooks’s generation, but what they share is a Jewish sensibility. For them, being Jewish is a distinct way of reacting to the world around them. It’s about the attitudes, beliefs and personality traits that have developed out of a shared outsider status and a history of persecution. Apatow’s angsty male stoner culture could be seen as a reaction to overwhelming Jewish ambition, the need for success and wealth and power, which in itself, is a response to never having had any. Let’s not mention the role of the oppressive Jewish mother in all that.
[W]hile Apatow’s movies are beloved by the larger culture, they are mostly about people on the fringes. People who are quirky and weird and unordinary. People who crack jokes because they’re smarter, but they’ll never belong.
related post
No Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
