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Jewcy Overthinks Gawker
By Izzy Grinspan / July 30, 2007
Ever since columnist Mark Caro published a rant against Gawker’s Jewish quips on the Chicago Tribune’s entertainment blog, we’ve been wondering what the Jewcy take should be. An e-mail debate took off as soon as The Forward published their thinkpiece, which some of us found…not so thoughtful. Because we’re all extremely fascinating, we’ve reprinted the discussion below. Highlights include adorable ignorance on the part of web developer/office naïf Craig, an impassioned speech about Elaine’s by our messianic leader, and, somehow, an earnest mini-dialog about the death of Jewish humor.
Michael started the conversation by saying what we were all thinking:
Oh God, that's like the eighth article The Forward has written about this subject. They used to include [Jessica] Coen and [Jesse] Oxfeld in their Big Jews of the Year roundup. In short: Old, old news.
Craig seconded the notion :
Yeah, even before reading Mike's, all I could think of was, "Why should we have done this first?"
This article sucks. Without really paying attention, I assumed I was on a news site's shitty "special report" section. Slow news day, I figured. I don't know why I would care about anything this article has to say. It appears to say "Gawker makes Jew jokes. Why is that?" and the obvious answer is that they're Jews in New York. There's no big picture. We did right to steer clear of this sort of cop-out article.
p.s. Tell Gabe I like his fried chicken with eleven different herbs and spices.
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I think I must have forgotten. The final e-mail reads like some kind of manic nervous breakdown.
did everyone take their meds that day?
A couple of Christmases ago, after fufilling the central mitzvah of the holiday at the Vegetarian Dim Sum House, we went to the show "What I Like About Jew" featuring one of the professional pop-culture snarksters from VH1. To be fair, there were two very clever songs - "They Tried to Kill Us, We Survived (Lets Eat)" – a mishmash of holiday celebrations and modern American Jewish paranoia; and the "J-Date Song." But on the whole, the show reached for the broadest, blandest humor – predictable cracks about circumcision, Bar Mitzvah boys and puberty, Jews not believing in Jesus, yada yada yada.
On another floor of the same venue, headlining a fundraiser for a shul, was comedian Elon Gold, at the time the star of a Fox sitcom that had about 20 viewers per episode. Taking advantage of having a "network" celebrity, Gold was invited on stage to do 10 minutes of standup. To my great surprise, he was brilliant. It turns out Gold comes from an M.O. background – and used it to craft particularly clever barbs at the various contradictions of modern Jewish life. (A particular highlight was his rabbi employing talmudic reasoning the the question of "why did the chicken cross the road.")
The contrast between the two performances highlights the real problem with Gawker-style "Jewish humor", which is that those "oblivious to the rhythms and texture of Jewish life" generally have little to no material to work with. As a result, you get the same tired cliches about Jewish mothers spiced with "ironic" winks to anti-Semitic tropes like the "greedy Jew." It commits a sin far worse than being offensive – its offensive without being funny. In contrast, Jewish humor that is spiced with the reality of Jewish life today, be it Eli Valley's brilliant Hipster Judaism mad-lib, Yisrael Campbell's frum schtick or the annual "Shushan Channel" Purim spiel – is irreverant and genuinely entertaining.
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