In the post-WWII era, the schlemiel played a pivotal role in a cultural revolution in America that most of us didn’t notice. Before WWII, Charlie Chaplin was seen as a schlemiel character by some of the worlds greatest thinkers (such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, etc). They could see the powerful impact he had on […]
Yesterday, Bruce Jay Friedman turned 90. He is the author of many important novels, short stories, and screenplays on the American Schlemiel such as Stern (1962), A Mother’s Kisses (1964), “Brasserville Teenager,” The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Stir Crazy (1980), and much else. One of his children, Drew (who is an amazing caricaturist), wrote this on […]
One thing I have noticed about Bruce Jay Friedman’s fictional experiments with schlemiels is the fact that a person’s parents play an important role in the schlemiel process. But in his fictional scenarios, mothers are not the sole source of this or that person becoming a schlemiel. To be sure, fathers can also play a […]
Bruce Jay Friedman has been writing fiction since the early 1960s. As a novelist, he is most well-known for Stern. But he is most famous for his plays Scuba Duba and Steambath. Both were shown Off Broadway in the early 1970s and were overnight successes. Steambath was adapted for TV in 1973. And Friedman wrote […]
Books give me ideas. I love to be between one book and another. It’s like being between one place and another. I’m always walking – it seems – from one idea to another. I like to retrace my steps because I might stumble – like a schlemiel – across something. Wandering around New York […]
Sacha Baron Cohen has, to be sure, played the schlemiel character in nearly every one of his productions. From Ali G to Borat, we see that Cohen prefers to cast and create comical characters with a schlemiel sensibility. To be sure, Cohen has in many ways taken on the legacy of Charlie Chaplin (who Hannah […]
In classic Yiddish literature, we don’t often learn much about the parents of the schlemiel character (whether in the Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third, “Bontshe Shvayg,” or I.B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”. Shalom Aliechem comes close when he tells us that his Motl character (Motl, the Cantor’s Son) was an orphan and that […]
The Jewish-American family has almost always been depicted in a comical way in novels, films, and TV shows. In the Jewish-American family, the mother plays a powerful role and is the pit of many jokes. In the 60s and 70s, many novels (such as Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint or Bruce Jay Friedman’s A Mother’s Kisses, […]
In 2009, New York Magazine published a special issue on Larry David with a cover that featured Woody Allen and Larry David, entitled “Last of the Schlemiels: Notes on the end of Jewish Humor (may it rest in peace), and the beginning of something Nu.” The irony of this article and the cover title is […]
A few weeks ago I was walking through the streets of New York with a good friend, Jessie Freedman. He’s a young Off Broadway playwright whose new wave Avant Garde theater has been written up in The New York Times and other places. When the topic of what or who I was interested in […]
Schlemiel Theory 