Dear Sarah,

The letter thing works for me because, for some reason, I’ve always had strange feelings toward you, feelings I don’t usually reserve for entertainers, especially ones whose career highs include Greg the Bunny and School of Rock. That’s because ever since I first saw you play Wendy, the disgruntled new writer on The Larry Sanders Show, sometime in the mid-1990s, I thought you had a great chance of becoming one of those very rare and truly important comedians who not only deliver killer lines but also produce the sort of work that is insightful and devastating and that matures, and in special cases can even change the world. Lenny Bruce talked about race when the rest of America was terrified by it, and America laughed and passed the Civil Rights Act.

I was sure, Sarah, that you would grow up and become America’s first female comedian who was powerful as well as sexual and utterly hilarious. Lucy tried, and got spanked. Elayne Boosler tried, and wound up sad and alone in a bar in Chicago, or at least that’s how the comedy industry treated her. Roseanne tried, but being overweight and unattractive cushioned even her meanest and most meaningful blue-collar jokes. All Roseanne could do to really make us mad was grab her crotch while singing the national anthem, and we never really forgave her.

But you had another thing going. You were beautiful and intensely clever, which allowed you to construct this repulsive persona of a privileged, vile woman who distrusts anyone and anything except for her own self-worth. The critic Sam Anderson called this character a meta-bigot and placed you in the company of other mock-ignorant intolerants like Ali G and South Park’s Eric Cartman. He also noted that “unlike other meta-bigots, she doesn’t insulate herself with fictional characters: Her persona—an incestuous, genital-obsessed, racist narcissist—looks and sounds exactly like Silverman herself.”

Anderson is right. And that’s a big problem. As I watched you perform on stage, in movies, and on television these past two decades, I noticed you retreat further and further into shtick, your powers depleted, your promise gone. Jews didn’t find you funny anymore. Women never really found you funny. Post-civil-rights-era comedians are funny because they channel the forbidden Id of the group. So, whose Id are you, anyway?

Consider the following two jokes. Here’s one from earlier on in your career: “I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.” So much violence in so few words against so many sacred markers of identity politics, even if many Jewish girls of my acquaintance actually don’t find rape fantasies funny; they enjoy them.

Women didn’t like you, and you knew it. Men wanted to screw you, and you knew it. You were nasty but confused, and your act lost whatever focus it once had. In a recent comedy concert, you had this to say (I’m paraphrasing here, but only mildly): “What’s the worst thing about the Holocaust? The cost!” At best, this can pass as some weak attempt at sarcasm, but, more accurately, it’s a pun, a verbal non sequitur whose sole purpose is to convert uneasy emotions into easy laughs.

And that, I’m afraid, is your true legacy. Rather than open the door to women comics who wanted to be just as depraved as the boys, you created a new category of stereotype, one that urges the attractive and witty female comedian to retreat as far as she can into mock-cutesy unlikability, to mitigate her libido by laying on the bitterness and the bile, to abandon complex jokes that do real violence against real ills and adopt instead a sort of facile, sophomoric humor that reeks of years spent backstage smoking blunts. This is how you end up with an album filled with song titles like “Will We Eat Each Other’s Doodies?” and “Trimming Your Bush.” This is also how you end up with even blander, more put-together comics like Whitney Cummings, who currently has two network sitcoms and who seems to have begun her career already as a latter-day Silverman, all bark and no bite.

I’m not saying, of course, that you alone are to blame. You work within the system, and it’s not easy undoing decades of discrimination. But Tina Fey’s career is much, much more luminous than yours. Rather than flip the finger at Saturday Night Live for not getting her jokes, she fought uphill until she was the boss and could make cute kissy-faces at her vanquished rivals who once called her “Herman the German.” When she was offered the opportunity to write a memoir, she titled it Bossypants and produced a smart and funny and poignant essay on being a female comic in a male-dominated industry. It’s a book you can imagine may inspire real health-care reform, or at least help a few young girl comedy nerds to overcome their fears and get up on stage and maybe someday become the female Richard Pryor.

Your memoir, on the other hand, was called The Bedwetter. It included a fictional eulogy by God, who mourns your passing by saying: “She loved dogs, New York, television, children, friendship, sex, laughing, heartbreaking songs, marijuana, farts, and cuddling.” It’s the kind of book you can imagine may inspire young girl comedy nerds to say filthy things in a silly voice so that boys will think they’re hot. Daria did it first, and she was edgier and funnier than you are. And she was a cartoon.

These are harsh words, Sarah, but I’m only writing because I hope that there’s a project somewhere in the future, a script or a book or a stand-up show, that would bring back that same brilliant, fearless comic I fell in love with two decades ago, and that you’ll emerge from your scatological skunk-weed haze to once again tell the kind of jokes that people remember long after the fact and that leave us happy and horny and agitated. That, after all, is what comics do, and few can do it better than you when you are on your game, which last happened sometime before George Bush invaded Iraq and Steve Martin became a writer for The New Yorker. Sarah, I still think you’re hot, but I’m begging you: Please try harder.

Love,

Liel

The result is Woody Allen: A Documentary, a three-hour, two-part film for which Allen granted Weide extensive access to his life. It premieres Sunday night on PBS, as part of the “American Masters” series.

Weide joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss why he makes films about comedians, how Allen directs his films, and what made Woody finally say OK. [Running time: 18:51.]

The height of my athletic achievement was in eighth grade when I was point guard for my Jewish day-school [Solomon Schechter School of Westchester] basketball team. We played in a public-school league and, amazingly, went undefeated. I say “amazingly” because our power forward was 5’6”. After a number of our games, our opponents threw quarters at us. We took the quarters and bought sodas. It was a win-win.

Kroll’s childhood penchant for sports—and his passing reference to an overt act of anti-Semitism—may not be surprising given his role on The League, which begins its third season tomorrow night. Created by Jeff Schaffer, a writer who has worked on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and his wife, Jackie Marcus Schaffer, The League follows a group of Chicago-area high-school friends in their 30s who bond over a fantasy football league. Like Curb, the show’s scenes are outlined but not written, leaving most of the jokes to improvisation.

In some ways, Ruxin personifies the Woody Allen-esque paranoid Jew with a touch of Entourage agent Ari Gold’s coarseness and incorrigibility. Having never won the “Shiva,” the league’s prized trophy, he believes that his friends are scheming against him. In a second-season episode, he compels three-time champion Pete Eckhart (Mark Duplass) to testify in court as to whether league-commissioner Kevin MacArthur (Stephen Rannazzisi) and MacArthur’s wife, Jenny (Katie Aselton), are guilty of collusion. They are, it turns out, but the lengths Ruxin goes to prove it are absurd, if not unethical. (At the end of season two, long-suffering Ruxin finally wins the Shiva.) In another episode, Pete allows Ruxin to select Pete’s lineup, a plan that backfires on Ruxin when he lets Pete get inside his head. “I beat me,” he frantically proclaims after he loses, and shortly before smashing up his living room. “Pete beat me. Pete let me beat me!”

Ruxin’s neuroses extend into other areas of his life, particularly his sexuality. Ruxin’s sense of self-worth, tied most prominently to his performance in the fantasy league, is also dependent on his Hispanic wife, Sofia. Ruxin attends his high-school reunion only to show off Sofia to a former high-school bully and prove that he is no longer “the Herdsman,” a nickname he’d earned for dating overweight women. This behavior stems not just from the fact that Ruxin’s an asshole—which he is, and a funny one at that—but also from his jealousy. When Ruxin invites his friends over for lunch in a first-season episode, he develops a “stallion theory” as he watches Taco (Jon Lajoie), Kevin’s philandering and pothead brother, helping Sofia in the kitchen. The theory, Ruxin explains, describes horse breeders bringing in a “lesser horse” to tease the mare before they bring in the “breeding stallion.” Ruxin is the stallion.

But as much as Ruxin would appear to fit the mold of the paranoid, sexually frustrated Jewish male, The League veers away from how these traits conventionally play out. It’s not so much that Ruxin isn’t paranoid but rather that his neuroses are distinct from his being Jewish. In another first-season scene, Ruxin tells the newly separated Pete that he would never divorce Sofia because it would impoverish him while she enjoys sex with other people. He wouldn’t be able to have the same sexual freedom, he says, because he looks like “a Nazi-propaganda cartoon of a Jew.” (In a later episode, Pete refers to Sofia and Ruxin as “quinceañera Barbie and Bar Mitzvah Ken.”) The joke works not because Ruxin feels threatened by his Jewishness but precisely because he recognizes his physical inferiority to his “smoking hot” wife—a judgment that has at least a kernel of truth. What’s more, Ruxin’s inferiority complex doesn’t stop him from blindfolding his wife and tying her to their bed during “terrific lady night”—so that he can go make a fantasy football trade without her knowing.

Consider Ruxin’s bout with cold feet minutes before his marriage to Sofia, caught on film by Taco and shown at an anniversary party. “I’m worried that her family full of conquistadors is going to round up my whole family and stick us in a basement and put yellow stars on us,” Ruxin says. “Why couldn’t I just marry a nice Jewish girl, Andrea Greenblatt, in fourth grade?” This statement is as absurd as it is disingenuous, as Ruxin never again suggests that his Judaism conflicts with Sofia’s Catholicism. In fact, raising his child, Geoffrey, as a Jew never comes up as a subject of concern. On the contrary, when Kevin asks Ruxin what his mom thought of christening Geoffrey, Ruxin complacently retorts that he told her it was a “really progressive synagogue.” In another context, this reply could be taken as a serious indictment of the contemporary American Jewish landscape. But considering that Ruxin invokes his Judaism for the sake of a witty one-liner, it’s just funny.

Similarly, when the successful but toolish plastic surgeon Andre Nowzik (Paul Scheer) asks Ruxin on Halloween if he’s a “Jew dressed up as a WASP”—an insult directed at his ensemble of v-neck sweater and button-down shirt—this remark doesn’t stand out from gibes made at Andre’s own cliché-ridden parlance and complete lack of fashion sense. Ruxin’s paranoia makes him come across as a dick, but all the characters on The League are dicks. When Andre replaces the Shiva trophy with “the Dre” after he wins the league in season one, Ruxin disparages him for making “a God in your own image” not because Ruxin is an observant Jew but because Andre has acted in his usual asinine and self-indulgent manner. Fittingly, a solar eclipse occurs when Ruxin raises “the Shi-Dre” up to the heavens after winning in the season-two finale.

To be sure, some of the show’s most unsettling moments—many of which involve Ruxin himself—prove difficult for even the most relaxed viewer to disregard. When Kevin, a district attorney, begins plea bargaining with Ruxin in order to make a fantasy football trade, Ruxin bargains back. After his firm asks him to contribute to a Make-a-Wish project, Ruxin convinces a young boy suffering from melanoma to request a visit from a player from Ruxin’s fantasy team—Cleveland Browns wide receiver Josh Cribbs—instead of the child’s own favorite player, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Terrell Suggs. Even worse, Ruxin lies to Sofia about having a dead wife (whom he names after a coffee maker) after she overhears him trying to get advice from a fantasy talk show by posing as a grief-stricken widower.

Still, if Woody Allen’s neuroticism and Larry David’s stubbornness alienate them from others, Ruxin’s demeanor integrates him into the league’s fold. He is The League’s man you love to hate—but you can’t really hate him since, whether you want to admit it or not, there’s a little bit of Ruxin in us all.

But her new memoir, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, which arrived in bookstores last week, has pushed me over the edge into genuine fandom. And although I’d prefer to let the fact of Silverman’s religion exist in the background, passively enhancing my enjoyment of her bits on sex and “scatological matters” (her phrase), she makes a pretty good case in The Bedwetter for considering her in a less superficial way.

Silverman is known for telling jokes that make Jewishness (among other not-so-sacred cows) a punch line, and I expected The Bedwetter—a comedian’s memoir, after all, that was in the first place someone else’s idea to write—to be as blithely self-deprecating in this regard as she tends to be elsewhere. I figured it would be a breezy read, with text just slightly larger than what’s found in the average book, some gratuitous photos, a digression or two (or 20), and a few genuinely hilarious moments. I was right about all of that. She describes her career highs and lows with humor that is predictably off the wall and cheerfully rehashes the humiliations of her youth with just enough solemnity to let you know that while it may be a scream for her to title her probable bestseller after a problem that killed her self-esteem until she was 16—she’s nearly 40 and has her own show on Comedy Central—at the time, it was miserable. Silverman is a professional funny person, and it’s plain entertaining to read about her teenage traumas, her experiences as a struggling comic in New York, and the shenanigans of various writers’ rooms—even if what she tells us (and for the most part, how she tells us) isn’t surprising.

What is surprising is to find that Silverman is at her best when she’s dropping some version of the word “Jewish” into an otherwise unrelated conversation, as she does relentlessly throughout the book. It’s so frequent it’s unsettling, and that’s refreshing. In a recent email to the first guy she ever slept with (which she wrote as a way to fact-check her own memory of the event) she nonchalantly uses “I’m Jewish” as a sign-off. She explains that when she first moved to New York, people assumed she grew up here because she was outspoken and visibly Jewish. (“My dark features and name both scream ‘Jew’ like an air-raid siren,” she writes, and made her stand out in the place she actually grew up, small-town New Hampshire.) She says she really wanted to call her book “Tales of a Horse-Faced Jew Monkey.” (To say that her publisher was underwhelmed by this idea, she writes, “would be like saying that Hitler was underwhelmed by the Jews.”) She describes herself, accurately, as a “Jewy comedian reputed to have an unhealthy obsession with penises, vaginas and farts.” In total, she drops variations on the word “Jewish” 151 times in 240 pages, plus the jacket flap. (I counted.)

Given this, the final chapter—which contains the bulk of those 151 mentions and is titled, simply and unambiguously, “Jew”—feels like what the whole book has been building, or at least meandering, toward. “To be honest,” Silverman writes,” I would like to go about my life exploiting the subject of Jewishness for comedy, and not be saddled with the responsibility to actually represent, defend, or advance the cause of the Jewish people.” It’s an honest desire, and an understandable one—and she openly wrestles with it for the following 15 or so pages (amid jokes about her parents’ divorce and her belief that the Vatican should be sold to feed the hungry, of course).

Judaism is a pretty good religion, she concedes; she approves of how Jews don’t nag other people about their religion, that they “don’t make a habit of sexually violating their youngest and most vulnerable congregants,” that women can be rabbis (as one of her three sisters is), and that they don’t believe in hell. Still, she writes, “I talk about being Jewish in my act more than I’m really entitled to, considering that I’m an agnostic at best who has no background of participation in Jewish traditions other than nausea.”

Over the years, though, Silverman developed what she came to understand as “a mutually beneficial relationship” with Judaism. For a comedian, having an identity to play with like this can be a real gift, and she welcomed it. She appreciates how her Jewishness translates to a disarming “differentness,” which she can then use to make fans shift in their seats. She knows the feeling of awkward reassurance that comes with seeing a Jew in an unusual place: “When the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke, I wasn’t happy that our president had an affair, but I was kind of tickled to bits that it was with this sassy, chubby Jewess.” And she accepts that Jews embrace her because of the simple fact of her own surface-y Jewishness. “I have been deemed ‘good for the Jews,’ and from that there seems to be no going back,” she writes with some bewilderment, reflecting on the 2008 video she filmed to encourage young people to go down to Florida and convince their reluctant grandparents to vote for Barack Obama.

That video, for The Great Schlep, isn’t straightforwardly “pro-Jew,” she points out, since she was bluntly taking older Jews to task for their hypocritical prejudices (notably, as only an insider can). The many Jews who loved it may have gotten the message, but, she figures, they “ate it up because what they saw was a visibly Jewish, somewhat familiar woman saying words like ‘schlep’ and ‘Jew’ and ‘grandparent’ in a loving manner.” Silverman’s Jewish identity may not involve any of its more traditional elements, but she understands how the game is played. She knows how to strategically deploy Jewishness to make a point, to play off the idealized picture many Jews have of themselves, and to provoke them—sometimes all at once.

It’s no shock to learn that Silverman has spent time thinking about the identity that she makes the butt of so many jokes. But she’s crafted a remarkably earnest little essay about it here—essentially, a stream of consciousness rant about how being Jewish has affected her life and career, which I suspect a talented editor or two then shaped into coherence—embedded in a book that ostensibly cares more about the comic potential of genitalia. These final pages (they’re followed only by an afterword, purported to be written by God, and her acknowledgments) feel cathartic—both for the woman who wrote them and for admirers. I didn’t realize I wanted her to say these things until I was reading them, nodding along in agreement, and laughing so hard I risked having even more in common with her than I’d like.

And here is Carroll delightfully lampooning the snobbery of girls working in a dress shop (courtesy of Cory Kahaney):

Jean Carroll, 98, Is Dead; Blended Wit and Beauty [NYT]

Related: Funny Girls [Tablet Magazine]

Brooks and Reiner seem to agree. At first, “[We said] we can’t do it for anybody but Jews and non-anti-Semitic friends,” Reiner recalled. “The Eastern European Jewish accent Mel did was persona non grata in 1950. The war had been over for five years, the Jews had been maligned enough.” The television personality Steve Allen convinced them to put their character on an album, but they remained skeptical about the Man’s crossover appeal until, said Reiner, Cary Grant reported that the Queen Mum was a fan: “I said, ‘Well there’s the biggest shiksa in the world, we must be all right.’”

A Shtick With a Thousand Lives [NYT]

The Comedy Central Roast of Joan Rivers, which aired last night, was a bomb filled with deadly gay jokes and Madoff references, except for Carl Reiner, who “was adorable trotting out curse words he’d never had the freedom or chutzpah to use on national television before,” reports the A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin in a review today. Apparently, Reiner called the septuagenarian a “cunt”; Rivers, expressing her mock disgust for such “vulgar” language, excoriated him to save words like that “for home when the synagogue calls for money.” In another clip from the red carpet, Rivers chose Mel Gibson as her favorite Nazi and clucked her tongue at Barbra Streisand for marrying a non-Jew. Perhaps when you’ve spent 40 years mocking yourself, you’re destined to wield the sharpest sword at your own roast.

Comedy Central Roast of Joan Rivers [A.V. Club]

Funny People opens this Friday. You can watch the full-length trailer here.

Busting a Kishka [The Front Row]
What Makes Funny People Tick [Jewish Journal]

Homo Panic! at the Cinema [NYPress]
Related: Sitmom [Tablet]

French-Jewish Comedian Cancels Lebanon Gig After Rumors of IDF Service [Haaretz]

The kvetching about Woody Allen’s newest, Whatever Works, starring Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, and Patricia Clarkson, is just a bit more tempered. J. Hoberman at The Village Voice calls it “an exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia” that “goes out of its way to mock It’s a Wonderful Life [but] winds up even more lazily pandering.” Entertainment Weekly concedes that the script was written in the 1970s, “but still, the guy couldn’t maybe come up with some new spritz of nu?” The New Yorker says that Clarkson “just about rescues” the film, while blurb-machine Peter Travers of Rolling Stone says that while “not everything works,” fans won’t be able to resist “the comic mind–meld” of Allen and David, “On that level, at least,” he says, “there’s no need to curb your enthusiasm.”

Also in our newsreading and old, lazy jokes: hey, Ralph Blumenthal of the New York Times, it’s just hilarious to open your report about a panel at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on the Jewish roots of punk rock with the two-word paragraph “Who knew?” Oh, and also? Everyone who reads the Times knows.

Sick of ‘The Late Hate Show’ with Conan and Dave [NYP]
Punk, and Jewish: Rockers Explore Identity [NYT]

As a Jewish woman comedian, Cory Kahaney knows she’s in good company—think Roseanne Barr, Sandra Bernhard, Gilda Radner, Jackie Hoffman, Sarah Silverman. But it was a revelation when, a few years ago, she discovered the work of Jean Carroll, a master of deadpan wisecracks, and Totie Fields, a zaftig entertainer who expertly ridiculed social norms. They were among a handful of feisty Jewish female stand-up comedians who appeared regularly on variety television and radio programs in the 1950s and 60s.

Kahaney has since put together The J.A.P. Show, a stage production featuring stand-up routines from four contemporary Jewish women comics and archival tape of these “Queens of Comedy”—Carroll, Fields, Belle Barth, Betty Walker, and Pearl Williams.

Here, she shares stories of their lives and work, along with some of the best bits from her show.

Left: Totie Fields, as seen as co-host on The Mike Douglas Show in 1967. Shown with Mike Douglas. Right: Jean Carroll, circa 1953.

Photos: Totie Fields, copyright © CBS/Photofest. Jean Carroll, Photofest.

In addition to being an avid interpreter of dreams, Sigmund Freud was also an avid interpreter of jokes, and a collector to boot—Jewish jokes in particular.

He was not the only significant historical figure who had a thing for a good yuk; for centuries, people of all backgrounds—philosophers, linguists, statesmen, and, of course, comedians—have collected jokes, and have also endeavored to explain what it is about them, exactly, that makes people laugh.

Jim Holt, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, is among these enthusiasts. His new book, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, traces the evolution of the bit from the Ancient Hellenic world all the way to the present day. Holt tells Nextbook about the curiously named joke collector G. Legman, shares his own favorite punchlines, and explains why the word “Kalamazoo” ought to make you chuckle.

In Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America, Richard Zoglin, a reporter for Time magazine, argues that a generation of comics should also be considered essential to that cultural revolution. His story begins with Lenny Bruce, ends with Jerry Seinfeld, and includes yeshiva dropout David Steinberg and pioneer comedienne Elayne Boosler.

Zoglin speaks with Nextbook about how Bruce and others made the leap from Borscht Belt shtick to a new, raw, and convention-flouting form of stand-up.

Lenny Bruce, Robert Klein, and Elayne Boosler

Lenny Bruce and Robert Klein: Photofest. Elayne Boosler courtesy of Elayne Boosler.

In 1964 Melville Shavelson set out to make a Hollywood epic about an American military man who helped establish the state of Israel. Though Cast a Giant Shadow had a generous budget, the full cooperation of the Israeli government, and a star-studded cast including Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Angie Dickinson, and Senta Berger, it flopped. But something great came out of it: Shavelson’s hilarious, groundbreaking 1971 book about the experience, How to Make a Jewish Movie. That his friends suggested a better title would have been “How Not to Make a Jewish Movie” gives a hint of what to expect.

By the 1960s Shavelson was well-known in Hollywood as a maker of comedies. He’d received Oscar nominations for co-writing two films he also directed: the Cary Grant-Sophia Loren romance Houseboat and the Bob Hope vehicle The Seven Little Foys. His association with Hope was his entry into the entertainment biz: Shavelson began writing for him in 1938, and didn’t quit for 20 years. How to Make a Jewish Movie reads like the work of an expert comedy writer. Practically every paragraph ends with a punch line; nearly every sentence has an ironic kick. Shavelson is talented enough to make the story of creating a flop irresistible, and humble enough to accept at least some of the blame. And while the pleasure of How to Make a Jewish Movie comes from the funny stories of difficult actors and shattered $40,000 camera lenses, the book is also a milestone: quite possibly the first book by a Hollywood director devoted entirely to the making of his own movie. Lillian Ross’s Picture and John Gregory Dunne’s The Studio had already given readers vivid behind-the-scenes accounts of Hollywood filmmaking, but Shavelson pulled the curtain back firsthand and revealed, humorously and memorably, the industry’s machinations, long before the public became well-versed in box office figures and books like You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again shot up the best-seller list.

How to Make a Jewish Movie is primarily a chronicle of everything that can go wrong in the creation of a big-budget film, from rights acquisition to the ad campaign. But Shavelson, who was born in Brooklyn, opens with a confession: “I have never entered a synagogue of my own free will, except for the ceremonies attendant on birth, death, or marriage.”

So how does a comedy writer—especially one who says he was “ashamed” of being Jewish—wind up making an earnest biopic about the founding of Israel? At the suggestion of a friend at MGM, he reads Ted Berkman’s book Cast a Giant Shadow: The Story of Mickey Marcus, Who Died to Save Jerusalem (MGM had just dropped its option on the book, so his friend called to say it was up for grabs), and something is awakened in him:

After reading Ted Berkman’s book I knew I had to make that movie if it killed me. . . . I literally ran to Paramount’s front office and pantingly laid this hot project on the desk of the head man. Would Paramount buy it for me? 

He was kindly, intelligent, shrewd, and went to Temple regularly every Rosh Hashonah. Who, he asked me, would want to see a picture about a Jewish general?

Since, at the moment—and ever since—I couldn’t think of an answer, I decided to buy the rights to the book myself.

The story of David “Mickey” Marcus is indeed awe-inspiring. He was a Brooklyn-born West Point graduate who served as an infantry lieutenant in the ’20s, then returned to New York City to become a gangbusting U.S. attorney and Commissioner of Correction. At the outbreak of World War II he rejoined the army. According to Shavelson’s screen treatment (which he prints in full in the book) Marcus wrote Army training manuals, made his first parachute jump into Normandy on D-Day, drafted the terms of surrender for Italy and Germany, and “was at Roosevelt’s side at Cairo, Teheran, Quebec, and Yalta.” In Germany, General Patton appointed him liaison officer with liberated concentration camp survivors. He was made second-in-command in occupied Berlin, and organized the Nuremberg trials and Japanese war crimes trials. In 1947, having returned to New York to work as a lawyer, Marcus was quietly asked to guide the untrained and ill-equipped Jewish troops of Palestine in their fight for independence. He did it under an assumed name, with the secret blessing of the Pentagon. Against all odds he led Israel’s army to victory upon the nation’s birth—and was mistakenly killed by an Israeli sentry just a few hours before a truce was declared.

Shavelson’s own story of putting together Cast a Giant Shadow is heroic, too, in its way: he’s a mensch in the face of disaster. He makes the film sound like the most troubled shoot since Cleopatra, but does it in an avuncular, anecdotal way that anticipates Sidney Lumet’s 1995 book, Making Movies. Needing the involvement of a star—preferably a non-Jewish one—to make his project viable, whom does Shavelson go to first? The least Jewish man in Hollywood, John Wayne. Shavelson had co-written a movie for Wayne in the past, but they had squabbled on the set. Undeterred, he pitches Marcus’s story, ending by reading a eulogistic telegram to Marcus’s widow from David Ben Gurion. Wayne (known to all as Duke) lights a cigarette and says:

“That’s the most American story I ever heard.” 

I wasn’t sure I understood him correctly. Ben Gurion had signed that telegram—not Ben Franklin.

“Everybody’s knockin’ the United States today,” Duke said, pacing the floor and covering half an acre of carpet with each stride. “Claiming we’re sendin’ in troops all over the world to knock over some little country where we’ve got no right to be. They’ve forgotten who were are and what we’ve done. At a time like this, we need to remind them of how we helped the littlest country of all get its independence. How an American army officer gave his life to do it.”

“Mickey was Jewish,” I insisted on reminding him.

“Don’t gimme that crap,” said Duke, “Jesus Christ was Jewish, too, and he didn’t even go to West Point.”

So, in a gesture of grand patriotism, Wayne agreed to appear in the picture. Not as Marcus—that role would go to Douglas, an actual Jew—but as a Patton-like general whom Shavelson would insert into his as-yet-unwritten script. Shavelson then took his pitch to the Mirisch brothers, Harold, Walter, and Marvin, “collectively the world’s largest independent producer of films,” and a deal was made. Soon after, in a location scouting trip to Israel, Shavelson got an early warning of the difficulties to come: The army’s commander-in-chief—none other than Yitzhak Rabin—demanded script approval. And, “in the event that the script should be approved, he went on to say, all film shot in Israel would have to be reviewed by the military authorities before being shipped out of the country.”

Luther Adler and Kirk Douglas in Cast a Giant Shadow

In 1965 filming got under way in Tel Aviv with 125 crew members, 800 Israeli soldiers, and a thousand extras. The problems began immediately: During a shot, Israeli tanks left abruptly when the army learned that Syria had invaded; nearly all the trucks in another shot stalled when the desert temperature hit 126 degrees; the two technical advisors provided by the army clashed over key details; Israel’s Communist Party dropped leaflets from a roof into the middle of a crowd scene. Along the way, Brynner went unrecognized by Ben Gurion (“The King and I. . . which one were you?”), and Shavelson and Douglas bickered repeatedly over the script. On the last day of filming in Israel, 200 extras shot half of a scene, disappeared while the next shot was set up, and sent in a representative to proclaim that they had united as the Israel Screen Extras Guild and would not return until their salaries were tripled. After examining the footage, the Israeli Defense Forces sent a detailed critique, which included: “In Scene 327, the girl with a flowery skirt doing the Hora is completely out of step. Change this.”

When Cast a Giant Shadow was released in 1966 the question “Who would want to see a picture about a Jewish general?” loomed over the national advertising campaign, which lacked, Shavelson writes, “all mention of the nation of Israel, the War of Liberation, the Jews, or Colonel Mickey Marcus.” Relating this fact, he seems understandably peeved. What he doesn’t say (perhaps it was a sore point) is that Otto Preminger’s Exodus, which also concerned the founding of Israel, was the fourth-biggest box-office draw of 1960. Cast a Giant Shadow didn’t earn back the cost of its negative.

So, how’s the movie? Kitschy. Its dialogue sounds, not coincidentally, like the work of a comedy writer. When Marcus tells Ben Gurion (played by Luther Adler, in a ridiculous white wig that makes him look more like Martin Van Buren) that Jerusalem has no strategic value, and that trying to save it doesn’t make sense, Ben Gurion says, “Did it make sense for a fellow with a nice, steady job building pyramids to march his friends into the Red Sea?” When it’s serious, it’s worse. A didactic argument between Marcus and Wayne’s American general about Israel’s future ends with Wayne—John Wayne!—raising his glass and declaring, “L’chaim.” (He pronounces it “la kime.”) Sinatra is amusing as a New Jersey pilot who drops seltzer bottles on the Arabs when the Israelis run out of bombs. Douglas is suitably rugged, and Brynner pontificates impressively. But Shavelson himself calls it “a not-very-good movie.” Pauline Kael’s assessment was more blunt: “Even those willing to accept the hours of incoherence and banality may recoil at the obscenity of being asked to experience the horrors of Dachau as reflected in John Wayne’s bleary eyes.”

In his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, Kirk Douglas still sounds disappointed when he writes of Shavelson: “Though Mel was Jewish, he was not Jewish enough. The movie needed to be done by someone with deep conviction.” If he didn’t have conviction when he started the picture, Shavelson says he did by the end. Like his film’s protagonist, he comes to find Israel’s stubborn citizens exasperating but admirable, and his months among them turn him into something of a Zionist. Halfway through the book, at a seder, he has an epiphany: “The escape had taken place, not in some mythical land with an impossible alphabet no one could ever learn, but only a few miles from here, across the desert where tanks had recently rumbled out of that same land of Egypt, only to be turned back in defeat by the descendants of those who had written the very songs the children were singing.” He’s finally proud to be Jewish, proud to have made a movie about Jewish pride. The fun of the best making-of movie books, such as Final Cut (about Heaven’s Gate) and The Devil’s Candy (about The Bonfire of the Vanities), often comes from schadenfreude—the pleasure of witnessing the payback for megalomania and excess. But you feel for Shavelson, because his intentions are so pure, and because he seems like such a nice guy. He also seems to have learned, as an entertainer, that the story of a nice Jewish filmmaker who finds himself while shooting a $5 million flop has more potential in the hands of a comedy writer than the story of a Jewish general who gets killed.

Shavelson continued making movies into the 1970s—comedies, mostly. In 1990, more than 50 years after he began writing for Bob Hope, they wrote a bestselling book together, Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me. Now 90, Shavelson is finishing up a memoir, which he’s calling How to Succeed in Hollywood Without Really Trying—P.S., You Can’t. Asked over email about How to Make a Jewish Movie, he pooh-poohed the idea of it being a literary milestone: “I wrote it in part to counter all the negative reviews the film inspired, and to show how a bad film can be explained by circumstances, as well as lack of talent….My old friend Julius Epstein, co-writer of Casablanca, always said the Academy should stop restoring old negatives and start destroying a few. Cast A Giant Shadow might be a candidate.”

Cast a Giant Shadow is available on DVD. How to Make a Jewish Movie is long out of print.

I tried that Airborne stuff, but it’s not helping. Pot makes it worse, and booze just adds self-loathing and a headache to the equation. One evening, over dinner, I told my wife.

“I…” I said.

She looked at me, worried.

“What is it?” she asked.

I took a deep breath. It would have been easier for me to admit I’m a pedophile. “I’m giving a shit,” I mumbled.

“You’re what?”

“I’m giving a shit.”

She gave me a look and went back to her menu.

“About what?” she asked.

I tore a slice of bread from the loaf, put it in my mouth and bit its head off.

“Everything,” I said.

“Oooh,” she said as she leaned forward with a smile. “Lobster bisque!”

I am in that dark pit of narcissistic writer’s despair known as “between books.” The memoir is mostly done—all over now but the fighting and finger-pointing and squabbling and accusations of self-hatred and lawsuits and denials and recriminations and guilt and self-doubt—and I am trying to get started on something else. But I’m giving a shit, and that’s deadly. Every idea, every thought is subjected to a thousand comments, a thousand voices, none of them my own and all of them critical. It’s as if a literary Goldilocks has found her way into my head: this idea’s too short, this one’s too long, this one’s too serious, this one’s too funny. Or too shallow, or too self-important, or too Jewish, or too obvious, or too boring, or too desperate, or too clever, or too ordinary, or too traditional, or too experimental. Too everything and not enough everything else. I picture the bears coming home and tearing her little head off.

Too Palahniuk, says Goldilocks.

What if they feel guilty about it?

Too Dostoyevsky.

What if I tell it from the point of view of the bed?

Too Tibor Fisher.

What if they arrest her and because of her criminal record she can never find work and has to spend her days roaming the streets, homeless and starving and delusional, tortured by her own conflicting desires, mania, and existential dread?

Too Hamsun, say Goldilocks. Hang it up, Bro.

“Well?” I ask my wife.

“Well what?

“Well what about the giving a shit? What about the voices? What about the comments?”

She waves me off.

“Fuck them,” she says.

Best writing advice ever.

* * * 

“I’m giving a shit lately,” I said to my friend Jack. “I’m not sure why.”

Jack is an accomplished illustrator whose work regularly appears in national magazines.

“Tell me about it,” he replied. Jack takes a sip from his gin and tonic, drops his voice and admits to me that he still stops by the art technique section at the local bookstore and flips through How To Draw books.

“Really?” I asked.

“Swear to God,” he said.

Just that afternoon, I was in the reference section of the same bookstore. I was looking for How to Not Give a Shit, but it wasn’t there. I considered checking with the bookseller.

Can you order it for me?

It’s not coming up in our computer.

Try it with “Damn.”

I almost bought How to Write a Novel in 21 Days, but didn’t, knowing that it would eventually—like No Plot, No Problem and every issue of The Believer I have ever bought—find its way, once I was feeling better, into the blazing wood stove in my living room (nothing against The Believer, but when you’re feeling insecure about your own writing, the last thing you want is a magazine full of positive reviews and glowing reports about the brilliance of every writer but yourself; give me The Unbeliever, where everyone gets crapped on and every book’s a failure—at least then I’ll feel as if I’ve got a fighting chance).

“That is so pathetic,” I say to Jack.

Jack nods.

“See?” he says. “You’re not so bad after all.”

The bartender stops by.

“Another,” says Jack.

“Two,” I add.

Three years ago, as I was finishing up the final edit on a book of short stories, I emailed my editor with some last-minute concerns. Did we need more stories? Were they too Jewish? Should I change the names of some of the characters? He was surprised.

“Now,” he replied, “is a bad time to start caring.”

Best writing advice ever.

* * * 

“I’m giving a shit lately,” I said to my shrink. “I’m not sure why.”

“But maybe I should give a shit,” I suggested. Maybe giving a shit is the fabric that holds society together, maybe everyone giving a shit about what everybody else thinks is vital to our survival as a species.

“Maybe,” said my shrink. “Or maybe the problem is that you don’t give enough of a shit.”

I silently wondered if all that psychiatrists do is take what you said, mix up the order of the words, add a few modifiers and throw it back:

I’m afraid I’m fucking my dog, Doc.

Or maybe you’re afraid your dog is fucking you?

I think I’m going to kill again, Doc.

Or maybe you think you’re going to be killed again?

Maybe, he continued, I was feeling—having finished the memoir—understandably drained. Emptied. That maybe my problem wasn’t that I was giving too much of a shit about what Goldilocks said, it was that I wasn’t, at the moment—having unloaded so much with my memoir—giving much of a shit about anything else. Soon, though, the well would refill, and there would be something I needed to write about. And then, he assured me, I would not give a shit what anybody said, I would just write.

“After all,” he said, “every hammer needs a nail.”

“What?”

“I mean some people need something to react to.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, “but I don’t think I like the way you said it.”

“So now I’m the nail.”

“So now I’m a hammer?”

“What’s wrong with being a hammer?”

“WHAT’S WRONG WITH BEING A HAMMER? I just need to bash things in, I just need to smash everything, there’s nothing wrong with that?”

We sat quietly for a while, hammer on one couch, nail on the other.

“Like it’s so great being a nail,” I said. “Like a nail never hurt anyone.”

He stood and went to his desk.

“Ever step on a nail?” I asked him. “Hurts. Hurts a lot. Yes, you’re the nail, okay? You’re the nail. AND I’M THE WOOD!”

I stood, pulled my jacket on, and headed for the door. I grabbed the knob, pulled it open and turned to face him.

“Next Monday at 1?” I asked.

He nodded.

I slammed the door behind me.

* * * 

Two weeks later, I traveled with my wife and two-year-old son to a warm, quiet island in the British West Indies. I was looking forward to spending the week with them, and hoping that the time away would help with my now-chronic case of shit-giving.

The first day, my son refused to go in the sand. My wife scooped some up in her hand and showed it to him.

“It’s just sand,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

The second day he went in the sand, but he wouldn’t go near the water. My wife stepped into the ocean and waved to him.

“It’s just water,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

The third day I was trying to sleep on a lounge chair when my son, still terrified of the ocean, decided he wanted to go for a run on the beach. He grabbed my hand and we raced across the hot sand to the water’s edge, where the sand was cooler. Hand in hand we ran down the beach, screaming “Yahoo!” as loudly as we could and disturbing the other guests. We reached the end of the beach, turned and started running back, and as we did, the water came up high under our feet.

“It’s splashing!” I shouted happily, trying to keep him from panicking.

But something came over him. Something switched on, or maybe switched off, and instead of panicking, caring, or worrying, he just held my hand tighter, ran even faster and raised his other fist in the air as we splashed through the surf.

“It doesn’t matter!” he shouted. “It doesn’t matter!”

“It doesn’t matter!” I shouted along with him, raising my own fist in the air.

“It! Doesn’t! Matter!” he replied, stamping and splashing and laughing through the surf. “It! Doesn’t! Matter!”

Best writing advice ever.

When Daily Show writer Rob Kutner moved to New York City five years ago, he corralled a group of performers and comedians to join him in a “Purimspiel”—a live (and generally raucous) parody of the biblical tale of Queen Esther, who saved the Jews of Persia from Haman’s murderous plot. A year later, word had spread that this was not your ordinary song and dance act. Kutner was turning away people at the door.

In their fifth annual presentation, called the Shushan Channel, which took place this past weekend, on Purim, Stephen Colbert wielded a grogger and Queen Esther snagged the top prize on America’s Next Top Model.

Rob and two of his actors—Seth Herzog and Raquel Hecker—speak with Nextbook about the origins of their spiel and perform a sketch from it.

Falafel restaurant owners face off in West Bank Story

The short, which has played at more than 100 festivals including Sundance, reimagines Tony and Maria as David and Fatima, star-crossed lovers whose dueling families own neighboring falafel restaurants. The cast sing, dance, and snap their way through an allegory of the current political situation: After a Kosher Kitchen employee installs a falafel machine that crosses the property line, a Hummas Hut worker throws a rock into the gears. In response, the Kitchen owner decides to erect a wall between the two establishments. Threats and angry words are exchanged. Can David and Fatima’s love overcome their families’ mutual animosity? Does Maria feel pretty?

Sandel, a California native and USC film school graduate who has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, says that he made a comedy about what many consider to be a categorically unfunny subject to “counteract the multitudes of negative documentaries and news reports that, while very informative, usually seem to be skewed to one side and always leave the viewer feeling like this conflict will go on forever.” He wanted his film to be a hopeful one. “I truly believe that peace between Israelis and Arabs will be achieved and don’t believe it is a hopeless endeavor,” he says. “We wanted to make a film that would convey that feeling.”

Over the years the Academy has honored many movies dealing with Jewish themes: Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and five of the last 11 best documentary winners, including One Day in September, about the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The Academy also regularly rewards performances in such movies—as perennial nominee Kate Winslet, playing a fictional version of herself on Ricky Gervais’ show Extras, put it, “if you do a film about the Holocaust, guaranteed an Oscar.”

Dance scene in the Hummus Hut

Needless to say, none of these pictures have been musical comedies. Did the Academy think they were nominating your straightforward drama about the West Bank? How did a movie about a group of Israelis and Palestinians sporting hats shaped like kebabs and pitas score a shot at an Oscar?

Nominated shorts tend to be on the idiosyncratic side—this year’s crop, for example, includes films about a Mormon, a young African girl, an abandoned husband, and an old man who locks himself in an armoire—but increasingly the Academy has favored politically relevant subjects, just as it has for features: Best picture nominees in the last two years have included Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, and, of course, Munich. Compare that to the 1997 nominees: As Good As it Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting, L.A. Confidential, and Titanic—five perfectly good movies that don’t have anything more political between them than an iceberg.

Like many of the Jewish-themed films that have been nominated before, West Bank Story has a positive “message.” Schindler’s List and The Pianist, though devastating, ultimately gave viewers something to take heart in, a lesson about humanity’s capacity for good even in the most brutal, debased circumstances (a moral embodied most fully in Holocaust “comedy” Life is Beautiful, which, of course, snagged Roberto Benigni an Oscar in 2000). West Bank Story has a similarly upbeat message, advising us, it seems, “take heart, peace might be as easy as making falafel.”

But is making peace (or falafel, for that matter) so simple? At the end of West Bank Story, both the Hummus Hut and Kosher Kitchen have been destroyed, and the Israelis and Palestinians realize they must work together to stay in business and keep their customers fed. After screaming at each other for most of the film, each family dancing as the other’s storefront burns to the ground, the two sides reconcile in about a minute.

This warp-speed resolution has struck many viewers as overly simplistic, a criticism Sandel acknowledges is accurate. He says the film has to be simple—it’s a comedy, after all—and besides, it’s “not meant to be a learning tool for the situation in the Middle East. It is not an historical explanation, or a political solution on screen. It is a movie about hope and peace and that is it.”

For critics who find the film to be in poor taste, Sandel points out television shows such as Israel’s Wonderful Country, a kind of Daily Show-Saturday Night Live hybrid. “Palestinians and Israelis joke about this all the time. [They] are a little more comfortable with it because they’re in it and they’re close to it, whereas sometimes American Jews and Arabs feel an obligation to speak on behalf of.”

Still, it’s difficult to take heart in the film’s “hope,” when the situation it presents so faintly resembles the one unfolding in that “multitude of negative documentaries” we’ve all seen. By forgoing the complexities of the conflict, we’re being given hope about a problem we don’t have. It’s like having a mechanic fix your tire, when what you need is a whole new engine—it’s nice, but really not the point.

Despite this, and the fact that only a fraction of the jokes in West Bank Story actually land, the movie has an ineffable goofiness that makes it easy to dismiss but hard not to enjoy. As Sandel says, “In a world of hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of news reports, articles, and documentaries that are all very serious, surely there’s room for a comedy here and there.”

With this knowledge I see the whole experience with new eyes. Things seem fresher. Why, there are even some new selections on the pre-show tape: Take The A Train and The White Cliffs of Dover. I watch Maxi-Length Down Jacket’s back intently while the latter song plays. Its history seems so distant for me as to be medieval (even though I was born less than 20 after the end of World War II, the last year of the Baby Boom according to some demographers), but for her it must take her back. She was, at the very youngest, in her late teens when this wishful picture of peace and bluebirds was in rotation on the radio. People needed such rosy visions back then, I suppose, what with everyone aware of the war that was consuming the attention and resources of the public at large, with everyone worried sick about sons and brothers and husbands and friends fighting overseas. Good thing those days are past and we have NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO WORRY ABOUT!

I’ve been trying to parse the recondite logic behind pairing these two films today. It’s quite bizarre because they contradict. One is a direct refutation of the other. Good news out of the way first: Bullets Over Broadway is fabulous! Exponentially better and funnier and more beautiful to look at and terrifically well-acted than I remember. Dianne Wiest’s grande dame Helen Sinclair and Jennifer Tilly’s lollapalooza gun moll Olive are sublime. And the script (co-written with Doug McGrath) is tight and funny and has none of the runny, maddening, improvisatory quality of other films. If this is what having a collaborator does for Woody Allen (Manhattan and Annie Hall were written with Marshall Brickman), then he should never be without one.

Chazz Palminteri, playing mob henchman Cheech, assigned to guard Olive while she mangles her way through a Broadway part, is soon helping playwright John Cusack rework his script, turning it from serviceable into a work of art. But Olive is ruining everything with her proactive lack of talent. So he whacks her with the final words, “You’re a horrible actress.”

This central contention of the movie—that he has killed her with neither qualm nor remorse because art and the making of same is not subject to the morals of man (a deadly serious belief albeit played for comedy here)—seems noteworthy in light of Everyone Says I Love You, which is a lousy, shitty movie in precisely the way that would involve a thug’s slug. Everyone Says I Love You is a sloppy insult whose cracks and flaws are spackled over with fistfuls of money and sundry diversions in the form of real estate porn (it’s a love letter to the Upper East Side, right down to the immigrant nannies and Jamaican nurses of Mt. Sinai), some calling-in-favors flashy cameos (Itzhak Perlman on violin!), and Drew Barrymore’s astonishing (even to this fag) breasts. As my friend, Nextbook regular Jesse Green, when we saw the film together when it was first released, said about an ice-pink, boat-neck satin number Drew wears, “Who was the nipple wrangler for that dress?” They are truly amazing. Why are all the straight boys not still talking about them? I cannnot get them out of my mind!

But I digress. The movie is a musical wherein otherwise non-musical characters break into song. It’s like a pageant of the Post-Skill era. This is one time Woody Allen’s characteristic elitism fails him, and in completely the wrong way. One can almost see him responding to the unctuous wheedling of casting directors, persuading him to employ this hot young thing or that one. So there are dewy and delightful Natalie Portman and Edward Norton! Almost to a person—with the exception of kittenish Goldie Hawn—these actors can’t sing. Warhol was at least being ironic when he dubbed his rag-tag troupe of semi-talents Superstars.

Put aside, if you can (you won’t be able to, trust me) the aneurysm-inducing faux-roistering You Can’t Take It With You cacophony of the spoken scenes with their halting and muddled improvised dialogue. Forget the afterthought that is the camera work. The film’s cardinal sin isn’t even Allen’s brazen plagiarism of creator Dennis Potter’s unique twist on musical theater of having characters break into song, (although that’s pretty chutzpahdik). No, what so rankles is that Allen misses the point of the entire art form. What Potter was trying to achieve—and what every musical director and producer from Vincente Minelli to the Freed unit, even up to the massively annoying Lars von Trier, knew and executed by employing stars anointed with actual talent—is that the impulse to sing, that almost unendurable groundswell of emotion that would lead one to break the Fourth Wall of space-time and open one’s throat also by definition, according to the physics of the musical theater universe, possesses a transformative power. One becomes a perfect instrument of the emotion moving through one’s body. You are made beautiful, at least in voice. So that in those moments that you realize that if you were a bell you’d go ding-dong-ding or you can’t help lovin’ dat man of yours, what pours out of you are the perfect phrasing and honeyed tones of Howard Keel and Dinah Shore (or if you’re Natalie Wood, Deborah Kerr, of Audrey Hepburn, of Marni Nixon) Not, emphatically NOT the croaky documentary stylings of Edward Norton (who further appalls during a number set to My baby Just Cares for Me set in Harry Winston, where he dances self-consciously and like a goofball, as if to say “This is stupid and aren’t dancers just a stupid bunch of homos?”). Otherwise, you’re just in the shower.

Play It Again, Sam was actually directed by Herbert Ross, who went on to make the approximately perfect Pennies From Heaven. What? Were they not speaking by this point? Why didn’t Allen consult him. The generally very talented Kenneth Branagh made a similar travesty of the movie musical with the mediocre numbers with which he peppered his lousy Love’s Labour’s Lost. It’s a mystifying infraction for both these men, since no one’s sensibilities would be more mortally offended if you said to either Allen or Branagh, who clearly revere the respective realms to which they have devoted their lives, “I’m just gonna turn on the camera and shoot some shit,” or “I dunno, it’s just Shakespeare…how hard it be?”

The answer of course is Very Hard! It takes effort and rigor. That’s why we don’t generally spend more than five seconds watching children who have put thumbtacks on their shoes to “tap dance,” unless it is our own eight-year-old. Otherwise, it’s Cheech’s bullet for you, my friend, and there’s not a jury in the land that would convict you. (In truth, I’ve always had a bit of trouble with that pronouncement about art and artists being immune to the petty concerns of morality, or the need to be kind or fair or anything other than obliteratingly self-involved. It has always struck me as the rationalization that goatish, flesh-pressing painters, writers, and musicians trot out in order to cheat on or sock their long-suffering wives and girlfriends.) But the rigors of creativity—the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude—do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn’t for everyone. At the end of Bullets, John Cusack’s character realizes it’s not a price he’s willing to pay. “I’m not an artist. There, I’ve said it and I feel free.”

In the pilot’s opening minutes, Studio 60‘s executive producer Wes Mendel (played by Judd Hirsch), has an on-screen breakdown in which he decries the atrocious state of television. In his outburst—immediately precipitated by the network’s decision to ax an apparently hilarious sketch titled “Crazy Christians” for fear of offending religious groups— Wes rants that the only things the “candyass” networks are truly scared of are the FCC and “every psycho religious cult getting positively horny at the thought of a boycott.” (We never get to see this sketch. Judging from the ones that we do, it’s probably for the best.)

Mendel is fired, and the network brings in a new writer-producer team to rescue Studio 60, composed of the Jewish Matt Albie (an aged Matthew Perry, with significantly more gravitas than his epic stint as Chandler Bing might lead you to expect), and Danny Tripp (Bradley Whitford, who played Josh Lyman on The West Wing, in very familiar form). The duo are actually veterans of Studio 60; in fact, they wrote the “Crazy Christians” sketch four years earlier. This time around, they have a new boss, Jordan McDeere, a fantasy of a network executive (which for Sorkin means she’s a liberal who keeps her word, and for men more generally, that she looks damn good doing it). Played by Amanda Peet, who has a way with the one-liner, she promises they can air the sketch in their first episode. When this news gets out to the Christian community, they call for a boycott of the show. Affiliates try to pressure Jordan into cutting the scene, but she refuses. (Four stations ultimately decide not to carry the episode.)

Sorkin has nothing but disdain for this sort of maneuver. “Living where there’s free speech, sometimes you get offended,” he has Mendel say. And if they don’t want to be offended, can’t we “teach them how to change the channel?” Jordan asks. In The West Wing, Sorkin had a penchant for introducing a devil’s advocate who spun lingual gold, challenging our heroes’ perceptions, if not ultimately changing them. Here, his contempt for the Christian right is such that, thus far, he has refused to put persuasive words in their mouths. (Even Studio 60‘s other distasteful element, the studio execs, get a chance to defend themselves.)

The character charged, or rather, who has charged himself, with writing all of the material for the fictional Studio 60 is Matt Albie. Matt is, in certain respects, a thinly veiled stand-in for Sorkin (another writer who insists upon penning his show almost single-handedly). Like Sorkin, Matt is a Jew operating in the secular, but distinctly Jewish province of Hollywood, where everyone apparently has a working knowledge of Yiddish. (The world tsurris is bandied about in the pilot’s first 5 minutes.) Like so many Jewish TV characters, Matt is neurotic. Upon completing the first week’s episode of the show he can barely enjoy the accomplishment, griping to his partner that he only has to start all over again. “Could you be a little more Jewish?!” Danny responds. Matt’s also an intellectual, insisting that they stick with a sketch about commedia dell’arte, even though no one other than the writers and performers seem to find it amusing. When a blond, Teutonic baseball player makes a pass at his ex-girlfriend, Matt retorts, “Let’s see this guy make the Dean’s list eight semesters in a row as a contemporary dramatic lit major.” His friend lovingly replies, “fairy.” And it goes without saying (or at least it should) that he’s funny.

Matt’s ex, played by the lovely Sarah Paulson, is Harriet Hayes, the deeply devout female comedy lead of Studio 60. As the show opens, Harriet has released a recording of inspirational music and appeared on The 700 Club to promote it—the deal-breaker in her relationship with Matt, who equates that show with a Klan rally. (This is another quality Matt and Sorkin share. Harriet is based on Sorkin’s ex-girlfriend, the actress Kristin Chenoweth, who promoted her own album of inspirational music on the Christian television circuit.) Harriet takes her faith seriously, leading prayer circles (funny ones, of course) before each show. She’s a liberal’s fantasy shiksa, if one were to fantasize about a devout shiksa: a smart, attractive blonde who loves her Jesus, but remains open-minded. Though, she’s not above screaming at Matt, “You’re a Northeast, Jewish, liberal atheist!” In a nice way.

She remains on Matt’s side, defending his right to air the “Crazy Christians” sketch, even expressing a desire to be in it. Matt and Harriet might have broken up, but in this case, they’re in it together—allies against a common enemy. If on Studio 60 the Christian right embodies religious fanaticism, then Jews, liberals, gays, atheists, and even tolerant practitioners like Harriet Hayes, represent its antibody, secularism.

Judaism and secularism jibe so well here because on Studio 60 Judaism can hardly be called a religion. (In the one depiction of a religious Jew, in a skit called “Science Shmience,” Rob Reiner plays a Hasid named Shlomo Levi, who insists that men, judging from the likes of Abraham and Noah, can live for hundreds of years.) There’s no evidence anyone is observant, or even believes in God. For Sorkin, being Jewish seems to mean opposing censorship and being able to laugh at oneself.

The ability to recognize the ridiculous and cackle at it is what distinguishes all the heroes on Studio 60—from Matt to Harriet to the WASPishly named Jordan McDeere. Such snickering is the right of every American, and the desire to do so in this day and age, Sorkin is saying, is the mark of a smart one. And if conservative Christians could learn to chuckle as easily as the wider humanist community, not only would TV be of higher quality, but America would be a better place.

Over breakfast at the Café Gottlob (“thank God” in German) in West Berlin’s formerly Jewish Schöneberg district, Levy explains that he’s exhausted. Go For Zucker: An Unorthodox Comedy—a huge hit in Germany—is about to open in the United States (it premieres in New York on January 20), and a new film, a comedy about Hitler with the working title Mein Führer, is about to go into production. Yesterday, he worked 11 hours straight on the new project’s script, then “to air out his head” walked around the snow-bedecked city for three hours, staying out well past midnight. But fatigue doesn’t seem to have affected the Swiss-born director’s knack for chatter or tendency to philosophize. “Jewish humor, or good humor in general, lives from the fact that nobody’s perfect, and that our whole existence is pretty ridiculous in itself,” Levy proposes with a smirk. “We are all walking disasters.”

Scene from Zucker

The first comedy about Jews from Germany since the 1930s, Zucker surprisingly swept six categories at the German Film Prize last year. Set in Berlin, the film tells the story of two estranged brothers: the secular and downtrodden Jaeckie Zucker (nee Jakob Zuckermann), a former East German sports reporter turned small-time pool hustler; and Samuel Zuckermann, Orthodox and priggish. Jaeckie and Samuel reunite at the bidding of their mother’s will, which stipulates an Orthodox funeral in the huge Weissensee Jewish cemetery, a strict week of shiva, and, most importantly, no inheritance for either brother if things don’t get friendly.

With its unblinking (and sometimes outrageous) look at contemporary German-Jewish life—a cashier at a kosher supermarket cheerfully insisting, “It’s never too late to become Jewish!”; Jaeckie’s family unsuccessfully pretending to obey the dietary laws—the film takes an irreverent look at a topic that’s weighed heavy on the German soul for six long decades. Despite mass societal guilt about the Holocaust and the endless succession of museums and memorials, most contemporary Germans are at best unfamiliar and at worst highly uncomfortable with Judaism, Jewishness, and Jews. Which is, perhaps, one reason Zucker fared so extraordinarily well here. But the film also brilliantly satirizes the still-healing rifts between East and West Germany. “When I wrote the screenplay I put together all kinds of elements without knowing whether this existed or not, whether there was a Jewish family that was divided,” says Levy. “I started doing research, and I realized that I was actually pretty close to what really happened.”

Not that Zucker should be taken as realism. Growing up “relatively wild” within the confines of Basel’s Jewish community (his Polish-Jewish mother fled Berlin in 1939), Levy received a crash course in irony. “You make fun of yourself and others,” he says. “This person is more Orthodox than you, but he cheats on this and this. I grew up in that kind of culture.”

Levy worried about finding a cast who would share his sensibility. “I was doubtful I would find actors in Germany who would understand human beings with this ironic eye,” he explains. His fears were soon allayed. Henry Hübchen, an East German theater star who plays Jaeckie to dissolute perfection, and Udo Samel, a West German television star and theater actor, as the more uptight Samuel not only immediately understood Levy’s vision, but added an unanticipated dimension to the film. “When I had them on set as brothers, I realized that 15 years after unification, it was West meets East,” says Levy, explaining that “in East Germany acting was a job like any other. Samel came out of a very sophisticated acting approach.”

For all its success, Zucker barely made it to the screen. “The movie was an unloved child,” laments Levy. “No one wanted to take care of it at the beginning.” Initially intended for television, the film was turned down by every station in Germany before finding backers. Test screenings convinced Levy and his producers that Zucker was more suited to the big screen. “It had a small release in Germany. It was a sleeper, running for weeks with mostly word-of-mouth. And then we cleaned the evening [at the German Film Prize]. Which gave the movie another push.”

Before moving to Berlin in 1980, Levy, 48, worked his way through the fringes of Switzerland’s arts circles: He was a circus acrobat and clown, then played in a rock band, before “accidentally” landing an acting job at the Basel State Theater. In 1985, his first film Du Mich Auch (Same to You) became a surprise hit on the European festival circuit, jump-starting what has become a remarkably successful career, defined by edgy features like the sexual thriller Stille Nacht (1995), starring his former longtime girlfriend and collaborator Maria Schrader. In 1994, he founded a production and distribution company, X-Filme Creative Pool, with Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), Wolfgang Becker (Goodbye Lenin), and producer Stefan Arndt. With Zucker, he’s given up rehearsing to allow actors to more fully interpret the story. “I’d be the wrong person to shoot Mission Impossible 3,” he says.

As a director, Levy views his work, reluctantly, as slightly subversive. “It’s not a self-decided thing that I have to be the angry Jew who confuses the country, but there seems to be an energy in my work here that creates this,” he says, taking a drag off a borrowed cigarette. “I accept it. It’s a mixture between love and fear. I have to do it. It’s like a devil in me. I’m a Scorpio. You know what I mean?”

Levy is optimistic about the film’s American release. “You watch one black-and-white movie after another in which you have a Jewish victim and a German perpetrator. People stop being interested in it and they need a new approach,” he says, his mood slightly dampening. “Europeans did a lot of research. The main energy was to understand exactly what happened. But we didn’t think too much about why it happened. That’s something nobody really understands. Not that you can resolve this, but I think that comedy can be more enlightening.”

From Hairspray to Garden State, Jackie Hoffman is often cast in character roles. But starting tonight, she is the star of the show. In Chanukah at Joe’s Pub, she’ll indulge in the same brassy humor she brought to bear in an earlier podcast and offers here three segments from her holiday extravaganza.

Introduced by Blake Eskin.

Jackie Hoffman appeared in the movie Kissing Jessica Stein, and on Broadway in Hairspray. But when she isn’t on stage or the silver screen, the charmingly hyperactive comedienne tells anecdotes from her own life, at comedy clubs and benefit banquets—and to anyone else who will listen. “All my stories are true, because I have no imagination.”

Introduced by Laurel Snyder.