German film theorists and thinkers had widely divergent reactions to comedy and film. Theodor Adorno had a problem with all comic films since he saw laughter as sadistic and reactionary. To be sure, he saw it as a negation of thinking. Walter Benjamin, in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” had a much more positive view of film than his friend. He saw the medium as progressive and revolutionary. In part twelve of the essay, Benjamin points out that while the public may have a “backward” reaction to an artist like Picasso, they have a “progressive” reaction to the comedy films of Charlie Chaplin:

The technical reproducibility of the artwork changes the relation of the masses to art. The extremely backward attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a highly progressive reaction to a Chaplin film.

The “progressive reaction” is “characterized by an immediate, intimate fusion of pleasure – pleasure of seeing and experiencing – with an attitude of expert appraisal.” This differs from the criticism of a Picasso painting because the “progressive reaction” has a “social index” while the Picasso painting has a “reduced social impact.” The less something has a social impact the more “widely criticism and enjoyment of it diverge in public.” But “with regard to cinema, the critical and uncritical attitudes of the public coincide.” And it happens with great immediacy.   Since film involves the “imminent concentrations of reactions into a mass,” it takes on a “progressive” affect.

What many people might overlook is the fact that Benjamin chose comedic film and Charlie Chaplin as the counter examples to Picasso: Chaplin, a comedic American film character, is put in contrast to a serious European artist and his paintings.   They not only work in different mediums; they also speak to entirely different cultures and ideologies.  Siegfried Kracauer, whose work had a lot in common with Benjamin’s, suggests that the German reception of American comedic film, in particular, is mixed because the German public was unfamiliar with the “naïve desire for happiness,” a life of chance, and the “interrelationship between intellectual habits and bodily movements” that we see in early American comedic film performances.

Kracauer found that Germans of the early 20^th century may have liked American comedy, but they didn’t get it and they couldn’t reproduce it. And if they don’t get it, how, one wonders could comedy film, like Chaplin’s, have a “progressive affect” in a country like Germany?

We find insights into these questions in Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film.   Kracauer begins by noting how American westerns and comedies became popular in Germany.

Besides Westerns, short comedies featuring Max Linden, Fatty and Tontolini were the vogue of those years (before and after World War I). All the strata of German moviegoers participated in the gay laughter they aroused. The Germans liked that sort of visual fun. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that they themselves were incapable of producing a popular film comedian. As early as 1921, a German writer stated plainly that the Germans were short of comical film ideas – a domain which, he admitted, the French and after them the Americans had learned to explore with mastery. (21)

Kracauer thinks that this had to do with the world and the comic sensibility of the main characters of these films, which “the Germans,” he felt, simply couldn’t comprehend. These characters were innocent, sweet, and helpless; they were “pulled through in a world governed by chance.”

Whether or not they indulged in slapstick, they invariably exposed their hero to all kinds of pitfalls and dangers, so that he depended upon one lucky accident after another to escape.   When he crossed the railroad, a train would approach, threatening to crush him, and only in the last very moment would his life be spared as the train switched over to a track hitherto invisible. The hero – a sweet, rather helpless individual who would never harm anyone – pulled through in a world governed by chance. (21)

Unlike any other medium, Kracauer tells us that “film is able to point to the contingencies of life.”  He also notes that these films “sided with the little pigs against the big bad wolf by making luck the natural ally of its heroes.” Comedy, in other words, suggested that chance could help the “little man.” The idea that, out of nowhere, one could be saved from danger was “comforting to the poor.” The poor, notes Kracauer, had no power and had to rely on chance for any hope of survival. But the “naïve desire for happiness” that these plots suggest was something the Germans could simply not understand:

That such comedy founded on chance and a naïve desire for happiness should prove inaccessible to the Germans arises form their traditional ideology, which tends to discredit the notion of luck in favor of that of fate. (21)

Moreover, the Germans have “developed a native humor” that “holds wit and irony in contempt and has no place for happy-go-lucky figures.” In other words, the Germans have no patience for humor because of their obsession with fate as opposed to chance. This obsession with fate and myth comes out in their humor which tries “to reconcile mankind to its tragic plight”(21). The purpose of their native laughter, at bottom, is to see how “fateful” life really is. And “such dispositions were of course incompatible with the underlying performances of a Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd.”   But what makes their comic performances most alien to German audiences is the “close interrelationship between intellectual habits and bodily movements.”

Taken together, Kracauer believed that American comedy may have been entertaining for Germans but it simply couldn’t be replicated in Germany because it went so contrary to what he called German ideology, with its emphasis on fate rather than chance, and its failure to understand the possibility that there could be a relationship between “bodily movements” and “intellectual habits.” This is something that was articulated in American film and American culture.

But it is ultimately the relationship of comedy to chance and a life of contingency that not only Kracauer but Walter Benjamin also saw as the greatest threat to myth and fate (see his “Fate and Character” essay).   But in contrast to Benjamin, this is what, for Kracauer, seems to make American comic film progressive and the German inability to reproduce it “backward.” Perhaps Benjamin is right about his conjecture that Chaplin films had a progressive affect on Germans who were entertained by it; but, in truth, Kracauer is insightful in his claim that such comedy couldn’t be replicated in Germany because it was foreign to them and their ideology which, both Benjamin and Kracauer would agree, was drawn toward fate and myth.

Chaplin, according to Arendt and Benjamin, was a schlemiel. And although schlemiels may have been popular in Germany and all over Europe for that matter, Kracauer teaches us that a schlemiel, at that time, could only be made in America. And this had to do with the fact that schlemiels and comedic characters played by Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd live in a world of chance where the only thing that can save you is good luck and a naïve belief in the promise of happiness. And this, as Kracauer and Benjamin would concede, is connected, in some way, to the relationship of “intellectual habits to bodily movements” that the film camera amplified and exaggerated for comic affect.

When one thinks about philosophers, one doesn’t think about humor. Thinkers are usually represented as morose, austere,introspective, and serious. We also see the same thing in Western theology and religion. To be sure, folly is thought to be the opposite of wisdom and the laughter of folly is thought to be irreligious. Nonetheless, in the modern period, thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson found something urgent and modern in laughter. Nietzsche embraces laughter and uses sarcasm throughout his work to invert concepts and treasured practices; Bergson suggests that humor is intrinsically connected to “élan vital” and what he calls “creative evolution.” Laughter, for Bergson, allows society to become better and to live better. But Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their famous chapter in The Dialectics of Enlightenment, “The Culture Industry,” see laughter (at films or cartoons, specifically) in a very negative light. If anything, for them, thinking seems to begin when one stops laughing.

Using a phrase coined by Walter Benjamin, they tell us that the “mechanical reproduction” of beauty by film and photography “leaves no room for what was once essential to beauty.” And this “triumph over beauty” is “celebrated by humor”(140). Every joke, though it may not have beauty as its target, is sadistic and dark. Every joke is a “deprivation” that “calls forth” “Schadenfreud.”

They go on to tell us that, really, there is no reason why anyone in the western world should laugh: “there is laughter” because “there is nothing to laugh at.” In fact, laughter only happens when “some fear passes.” For them, laughter will always be in the wake of what is most. It is an “escape” or “liberation” from “either physical danger or from the grip of logic.” Laughter, in other words, also indicates an inability to face the world and to think in a serious manner. It is a vacation from the world and its problems.

But, most importantly, Horkheimer and Adorno make the claim that humor is “the echo of power as something inescapable” and it destroys what Adorno, elsewhere, calls the “promise of happiness.” If one laughs, one is basically accepting the fact that nothing can change and is at its core, for them, cynical:

Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practiced on happiness.

A person who laughs is not truly happy. For them, “moments of happiness are without laughter.” To illustrate, they argue that the poetry of the greatest (in their view) poets of the modern, Charles Baudelaire and Friedrich Holderlin, there is no humor (141). They understood true happiness, modern culture (“false society”) does not. Moreover, although Henri Bergson’s essay on laughter affirmed laughter in a way that many thinkers thought plausible, Horkheimer and Adorno think its argument has got it all wrong. Instead of elevating humanity, humor opens the gate for barbarism. The laughing audience is, on the contrary, a “parody of humanity.”

In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at something is always to deride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, self-assertion prepared to parade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. (141)

And the “harmony” that Bergson extols between audience members who laugh is not the harmony of humanity is a “caricature of solidarity.” Perhaps drawing on Baudelaire’s notion of “satanic laughter,” Horkheimer and Adorno argue that what is most “fiendish” about “this false laughter” is that it is “conciliatory” when it is, in fact, based on “everyone else’s expense.” The only kind of delight, says Horkheimer and Adorno, is “austere.”

In other words, if one is to be truly happy, he or she must stop laughing.

If this is the case, Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of early cartoons suggests that when the critical reader/viewer watches them s/he doesn’t laugh because s/he finds an idea in them; namely, the idea that even though a cartoon character can be “electrified” it gets a “second life” and gives the viewer hope that “justice was done” and will be done. These cartoons, in particular, give the audience what Adorno calls the “promise of happiness.” Today, however (the late 1930s and early 1940s when they wrote the book), they don’t.

Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism. They ensured that justice was done to the creatures and objects they electrified, by giving the maimed specimens a second life. All they do today is confirm the victory of technological reason over truth. (138)

In Donald Duck and many other cartoons there is only one lesson that all of the violence against characters expresses: “the breaking down of individual resistance,” which is the “condition of life in this society.” By seeing this and laughing at this the audience learns, according to them, how to “take their own punishment.” And this is nothing to laugh at.

Built into their reading of the “culture industry” and their “critique” of laughter is the imperative to stop laughing. Horkheimer and Adorno find nothing funny about cartoons and will only affirm cartoons (and perhaps comedy) that promise a better world than the one we live in now. They, as Adorno says elsewhere by way of Samuel Beckett, are more interested in the laugh that laughs at the laugh. Horkheimer and Adorno scoff at laughter and believe that, in doing so, they are on the path to true happiness. And this suggests that, in this world of media and endless humor, they were always unhappy and found nothing to laugh at. One wonders what Horkheimer and Adorno would say about facebook or social networking which is constantly sharing humor.

One wonders if they would like the schlemiel and if, at the very least, they would smile. For Adonro and Horkheimer it all depends on whether or not the schlemiel’s humor advances the “promise of happiness” and hopes for a world much different from this one. Regardless, Yiddish audiences and thousands of readers did like to laugh but, unlike Horkheimer and Adorno, they saw no contradiction between laughter and the promise of a new world. For Sholem Aleichem, the commandment is not to stop laughing but to laugh more (but in such a way that hope could break through all the darkness of the world). The medium of such laughter is the schlemiel.

Dear friends,

I hope all of you are off to a great New Year.

We’re happy to announce that Shlemiel, our humble 25 minute doc, is now available for free viewing online.

After three years of grassroots and festival screenings – and a much longer process of filming, fundraising and editing – we’re thrilled to send it out (at last) into cyberspace.

Shlemiel charts a chapter in the spiritual journey of Menachem Feuer – Chassidic front-man for a Toronto rock band – who is driven by musical ambition and challenged by a crisis of faith.

For those of you who have inquired for years about seeing Shlemiel – have seen it already – or have never heard about it – we invite you to watch and share. It’s been quite a ride and an honour for us to share our work with you.

Of course, your feedback is welcome.

Go see Shlemiel

on Vimeo, Youtube or through our website.

Also, feel free to visit or like us on Facebook

or follow us on Twitter @shlemiel.

All the best,

Chad and Menachem

There’s something uncanny about learning that a comic actor you identified with as a child has, all of a sudden, died. It’s even more troubling, however, when you realize that you had, over time, forgotten about this actor and cannot recall why or how you ever identified with him or her (or how much). After brief reflection, you recall that this actor was not (and did not become) famous. He or she was just…there.   You didn’t fully identify with him, however, because there was something close to you in his or her acting; yet there was also something else, something that pushed you away, something oblique.   There is the spark of identification and….something else. On the one hand, it is comical; on the other, it is very troubling. The closer you get to it, the more you are able to, as Walter Benjamin said of his experience reading Kafka, “reread yourself.” But this rereading, though comical, is also shocking and troubling.

I more or less went through this process when I heard that Taylor Negron had died.  I tried to figure out what my troubling experience of his work was (and perhaps still is) and what it means.

As I went through videos on youtube, it came back to me, almost immediately, why I had such a troubled identification his comedy.  I realized that he was unique because he was a troubled comic. Coming to terms with why he is troubling has given me some insight as to what makes his comedy so important to me and possibly for others.

I first saw Negron in Fast Times in Ridgemont High (1982).

I remember the scene very well because, in it, Sean Penn, who plays a constantly-high-on-pot-Jeff-Spicoli, goes from being the cool dude to an angry man who seeks vengeance. Negron is not the object of Spicoli’s anger, the teacher is. But Negron, the pizza boy, is the missing link. Without him, this rivalry wouldn’t exist. Looking back at this I realize why I had a mixed reaction of identification and repulsion with Negron.

The first glimpse we have of Negron he has his head down. He waits, as it were, for the teachers sarcastic question: “Who is it?” And then the routine begins. Negron tells him, in a clipped, awkward tone: “It’s Mr. Pizza Guy.” The teacher, “again?” “It’s Mr. Pizza Guy, Sir.” Upon saying this the second time, we see images of several girls smiling and giggling. For an awkward boy going through puberty, one can imagine how these words, the way they are said, and the response to them, would make one feel. Being awkward is actually attractive?

Then Negron asks, in a tone and with a look that is a little angry and humiliated, “who ordered the double cheese and sausage?” He realizes that he has broken rules and isn’t happy about it. In this moment, the identification shifts.   And the viewer is confused.

Negron collects the money, turns abruptly, and leaves. That’s it. That’s the end of his performance. But in that moment he plays one identification against another in a troubling way.   I do and don’t identify with him. He leaves, turns his back to me, and never returns. And all we are left with his a horrible tension between Spicoli and the teacher.  To be sure, many of us would rather see more of Negron than Penn.

But Negron comes back. I remember seeing him pop up in other movies like Rodney Dangerfield’s Easy Money (1983).   In that film, he plays the new Latino son-in-law named Julio. Dangerfield doesn’t like him, but has to accept Negron if he is to receive an inheritance.   The character is deliberately made into someone who is difficult and irritating.   We don’t identify with him. However, there are moments when Julio is awkward and endearing. In this scene, like a schlemiel, he has to prove to her that he’s a “man” but he doesn’t even know what to say to do this (or even that he has to do this). His friend in the bushes next to him instructs him on what to say to Dangerfield’s daughter in order to win her

over.

He comically says, “I’m bad! I’m so bad!” He is told to “be mean” and “angry” but he can’t. It seems to go against his innocent, comical nature.  This comedic inability to be a “man” or angry speaks to what is most endearing about the schlemiel. Yet, with all of this, Julio is also put forth as a character who is confused and unable to do anything right. He is a comedic “problem.”

While going through his films, I also found a comic routine he did on stage and in a film called Punchline (1988) with Tom Hanks. It parodies an Iranian carpet salesman’s mispronounciations,  Negron exaggerates them by way of his tone and facial expressions. Looking at it now, I can understand why I was troubled by Negron. He seemed troubled, himself. In this routine, he says he likes to “piss off Iranians” and do “punk terrorism.” The light, the camera angle, and the audience all coalesce into a troubling joke told by an angry man.

At this point, I realized that his comedy spans the innocent and the not-so-innocent. There was something there in this character that wanted to be famous – as we see in this very clip to Punchline (notice his words to Tom Hanks) – but was frustrated. The possibility of failure is the darkness that looms over Negron.

Looking into this, I stumbled across a stand up routine Negron did after this film. In the routine, called the “Model Cult,” Negron describes a drug experience in the Californian desert that brought him face to face with models who wanted to bring him into a Model Cult. He starts off by saying that his friends were on Cocaine and “he didn’t like that” because he liked pot and mushrooms (the more “natural drugs”). He wanted, it seems, a more spiritual expeience. As he notes, a model comes up to him, when he is high, and says “you look like you are going through a lot.” It’s the “Fabrege woman,” says Negron. “She’s famous.” And then he changes tone as he describes the “fucking cut, buff guy” that comes up to them. He’s “blond, the Aramus man.” After making this description, Negron sends the first punch line: “And I’m so flattered they’re talking…I’ll fuck them both.”

In the second part of the joke, he portrays his confused conversation with these models. He doesn’t know what he wants. He wants to be artist but he can’t. He doesn’t know what to do. And then he looks with utmost seriousness at the audience and delivers the final punch line: “Ok, we have a cult.”

But this is not by any means the end of his troubled routines. I spent several hours watching them – especially his Taypod series – and found that he was a man who conveyed his troubled life by way of comedy and art. He can’t seem to be famous. He is a slowly dissolving star.  Negron talks about his desire to be on Reality TV and to provide a window on to the “perverse American mind.” His excitement, though naïve, is troubling.

We see this in the brief role he plays in a film he did in 1994, in the film The Stoned Age, where the stoner is the nerd who can’t get with the girls (this is a precursor to all of the Judd Apatow films which also cast stoner nerds).

The scene Negron appears in mixes the American nerd stoner. He plays the perverse, retro-oversexed-disco lover who works at the liquor store selling alcohol to youth . This was well in advance of what we would see in a film like Boogie Nights.

Needless to say, Negron’s comic roles show that he gave himself over to whatever was happening in Hollywood. He wanted to stay relevant. But his roles are all secondary and his video channel shows a person who is comically out of touch with the times he is living in (times that efface fame in the name of Reality TV, stoners, and slackers).

The last clip I came across, was an interview with the actor, comedian, and writer Richard Belzer.

This interview shows how complex a comic character Negron was. He was a child of Hollywood who lived amongst famous people and always wanted to be famous. He was gay and he was Jewish and of Cuban descent. His parents came over from New York. One of his parents was radical the other was conservative.

Negron was someone who, as he notes in the interview, experienced a brief moment of fame (when it existed). Now, however, it is gone. One can no longer be famous as they could. He laments this, yet, he continues to do his art (literally – he was also a visual artist).

Negron didn’t give up, despite the fact that he could no longer even briefly appear in films. He was a hidden star, a funny person who, although he has a darker side that comes with real failure (despite moments of fame), still shed light.

His comedy is attractive to me because it shows something awkward, troubled, and existential which, at the same time, keeps on going and survives, despite social networking and reality TV. But now he’s gone.

Going back through my mixed identifications with you I was able, today, to reread myself.   And though I identified deeply with you what I fear most, like you (and so many Americans), is the death that comes being…almost famous. But as your interview shows me there is a consolation that comes with keeping the conversation alive and recalling who you were, what you did, and what you are doing until the day you die. And if someone out there is listening, anyone, that’s what counts most.

I heard what you were saying.

Rest in peace Taylor, you will be missed.

Anyone who reads Walter Benjamin can sense, from the very first sentences of any of his essays or books, that his writing is influenced by mysticism. But Benjamin was torn between mysticism and the political. While his friend Gershom Scholem encouraged him to pursue the mystical and the theological, other friends, like Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno, suggested that Benjamin move more toward the political. With this tension in mind, it’s fascinating to see how Adorno describes Benjamin’s mystical tendencies in his essay “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin.” In Adorno’s descriptions we can see that he was grappling with Walter Benjamin’s mystical influences and the mystical aspects of his work. To be sure, one can sense Adorno’s anxiety around this subject.

Adorno begins his attempt with a simple statement about the main, singular theme of “Benjamin’s philosophy”:

The reconciliation of myth is the theme of Benjamin’s philosophy. (234, Prisms)

After he points this out, Adorno notes that this theme, “as in good musical variations,” “rarely states itself openly.” Rather, it hides and has to be read by way of hermeneutics that is acutely aware of the things we find in esoteric texts. Adorno associates this kind of hermeneutics with Kabbalah and, strangely enough, blames Kabbalah (and Gershom Scholem, indirectly) for the theme’s failure to be stated in a clear manner and “legitimated”:

Instead it remains hidden and shifts the burden of its legitimation to Jewish mysticism, to which Benjamin was introduced in his youth by his friend, Gershom Scholem, the distinguished student of cabbala. (234)

Because of this influence, Adorno is confused. He knows Benjamin was influenced by Kabbalah but he doesn’t know to “what extent” Benjamin was “influenced by the neo-platonic and antinomian-messianic tradition.”   Apparently, Benjamin never told him and kept the extent of his influence to himself.   Benjamin didn’t shoot from the hip; he kept his cards to himself. But there is much evidence that he did make use of the mystical-textual ruse.

There is much to indicate that Benjamin – who hardly ever showed his cards and who was motivated by a deeply seated opposition to thought of the shoot-from-the-hip variety…- made use of the popular mystic technique of pseudo-epigraphy.

Adorno suspects he did this because Benjamin no longer believed that one could access truth through “autonomous reflection.” The text is “sacred.” And like a Torah exegete, one needs to be surprised by the truth, to come across it by way of textual commentary and criticism. Instead of language being the “bearer of meaning or even expression,” Benjamin thought of language as the “crystallization of the ‘name.’”(234).

Why would Benjamin do this?

Adorno surmises, after grappling with Benjamin’s mystical tendencies, that Benjamin appealed to the notion of the sacred text because he was looking to save something of the “theological heritage” from oblivion:

He transposed the idea of the sacred text into the sphere of enlightenment, into which, according to Scholem, Jewish mysticism itself tends to culminate dialectically. His ‘essayism’ consists in treating profane texts as though they were sacred. This does not mean that he clung to theological relics or, as religious socialists, endowed the profane with transcendent significance. Rather, he looked to radical, defenseless profanation as the only chance for the theological heritage which squandered itself in profanity. (234)

The “key to the picture puzzles is lost,” but, says Adorno, they “must, as a baroque poem about melancholy says, ‘speak themselves.’”(235). Adorno mocks this when he suggests that this “procedure resembles Thorstein Veblen’s quip, that he studied foreign languages by staring at each word until he know what it meant”(235).   In other words, simply looking at words – just looking at them – would in some way save something of a theological heritage.  This suggests form, but not content.  Adrono says that, given this approach to language, “the analogy” between Benjamin and “Kafka is unmistakable.” However, while Kafka retained, in his most “negative” moments, an “element of the rural, epic tradition,” Benjamin retains the more “urban.”   Although Adorno’s rural/urban contrast is interesting, he doesn’t develop it. Apparently, it’s just a side note.

The next line shows us that Adorno just gives up: Adorno skips to Benjamin’s “mature period” because grappling with Benjamin’s mystical character makes him too anxious and, quite frankly, frustrated.   This Benjamin, the mystical one, is “immature.” Adorno wants to deal with the more mature Benjamin who apparently leaves mysticism behind.

Adorno tells us that Benjamin exchanged the mystical exegetical hermeneutic for a more political one:

During his mature period, Benjamin was able to give himself over to socially critical insights without there being the slightest mental residue, and still without having to ban even one of his impulses.   Exegetical power became the ability to see through the manifestations and utterances of bourgeois culture as hieroglyphs of its darkest secret – as ideologies. (235)

What many people might miss is that this kind of Benjamin, the more political one, is in Adorno’s comfort zone. He doesn’t have to grapple with this side of Benjamin’s work. To be sure, while Brecht wanted Benjamin to drop Kafka and the mystical, Adorno prompted Benjamin to create an “image of the bow” as the model for his Kafka essay: it would retain the tension between the political and the mystical.

But, as we can see from the above passage, Adorno had little patience for this. He had no interest in Benjamin’s mystical influences because, as we saw above, Benjamin could not “legitimate” his main theme. The “reconciliation of myth,” for Adorno, had to be legitimated through an exegesis directed at “bourgeois culture” and its “darkest secret…ideologies.” Anything short of that made Adorno anxious. We also see that what Adorno was anxious about is the fact that he had no idea how influenced Benjamin was by neo-Platonism and the antinomian-messianic tradition.   One wonders why. Perhaps Adorno was worried that if Benjamin was very influenced by these mystical traditions and beliefs, his interest in political exegesis would ultimately be of secondary importance to him.   And that worry is legitimate since that would suggest that Benjamin was more interested in the possibility of religion and faith than in politics.

America has a love/hate relationship with the schlemiel or (as many critics and actors who play schlemiels – such as Seth Rogen and Adam Sandler – call him) the “man-child.”   But, in truth, this America is not one; it is two. When it comes to the schlemiel or “man child,” there are two Americas: the America that watches and demands more films with the man-child and the other America (a much smaller one that consists of film critics, journalists, and occasional scholars who lament the popularity of the “man child”).   For instance, most recently, A.O. Scott, in an article entitled “The End of Adulthood,” lamented about the popularity of films where the man-child (what he calls the “perpetual adolescent”) is the main attraction.   Scott yearns for a time when America will return to adulthood but laments that, because of the feminist movement, the protest movement, cultural upheaval, etc, norms have been effaced and American men don’t know how to relate to women or be adults.   And, the same week Scott wrote his article, another essay called “The Awkward Age,” popped up in The New Yorker. Like Scott’s essay, it suggests that America doesn’t know how to (or want to) grow up.   Both suggest different historical precedents for this failure and suggest a new trend that casts the awkward man-child as a cultural icon.

Just this week Rolling Stone put out a feature article that is also pestered by the existence of the ultimate man, child: Seth Rogen. (The cover image of Rogen with a fly on his nose clearly suggests the man-child itch.) However, the piece, which addresses his latest film, The Interview, doesn’t lament the “end of adulthood.”   Rather, it suggests, in its title and in the article itself, that Rogen is “at a crossroads” between the man-child and the man. Unlike A.O. Scott it suggests that Rogen, “the Stoner King of Hollywood”(see the front of the magazine), may be becoming more mature.   This possibility alone is the fuel that fires this article and it suggests that the author, Josh Eells and the editor saw it as a powerful enough possibility to sell magazines. They are tapping into one of the biggest questions today for Americans who are moving into the workforce or who, like the main characters of just about every Judd Apatow film, would rather smoke bongs with the bros than work. Will we remain schlemiels or become adults? The public doesn’t seem to be pressed by this question, but the Rolling Stone journalist is.

Before we read the first words of the article, we read the author’s question which is framed in terms of becoming a “responsible adult”:

Can a man be a responsible adult and still make a living telling dick jokes?

The first paragraph frames the paradox that plagues the journalist’s mind. He doesn’t know who he is dealing with: responsible adults or stoner man-childs.

It’s not every day you get to sit down with the guys who might be responsible for starting World War III. And it’s definitely not every day that they’re getting backed when you do.

During the interview, we learn that Rogen “absent-mindedly” rolls a tight joint while his partner-in-film making Evan Goldberg smokes bongs. The author, throughout the piece, notes their ages (both 32) to suggest that it is about time for them to put the bongs down and start becoming responsible.

Rogen is, right off the bat, thought of as the man-child who really doesn’t know how to deal with reality:

The loveable man-child who makes dopey movies with his friends…the one who’s probably too stoned to play a video game about a nuclear war, much less incite a real one.

Eells notes how, during a screening of the “special effects,” they played with laser pointers and told jokes while looking at effects. They are what Scott would call “perpetual adolescents.”

“This is where we get to play with lasers,” Rogen says excitedly. “It’s fun to put them in people’s eyes,” says Goldberg, aiming his at the face of Franco on the big screen. He moves southward. “And on their dicks.” “Sometimes me and Evan team up, adds Rogen, their twin lasers dancing around Franco’s balls.”

The antics go on, and Eells records it all. He points how, in real life, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen are bros and merge into each other. They have, since high school, been bros:

Hang around with Rogen and Goldberg long enough and they almost start to blur – one exceedingly funny dude named Sethandevan. They laugh at the same obscure references, their wives are friends, and they literally finish each other’s sentences. Apatow describes that as soul mates.

In other words, the man-child needs company; just like a schlemiel needs a schlimazel and vice versa.   At this point, it doesn’t seem like Rogen is at the crossroads and moving from “man-child to man.”

It isn’t until the end of the article that Eells suggests that Rogen is thinking about or becoming “responsible.” Even though Rogen introduced himself as a “man-child” at the senate hearings, he shows that he is motivated by a moral cause: raising awareness of Alzheimer’s:

“The situation is so dire that it caused me – a lazy, self-involved, generally self-medicated man-child – to start an entire charity.”

Eells also suggests that his parents and sister, who are hard-working and responsible, are, to some extent, getting fed up with his stoner persona. This pressure, apparently, came out in his interview with Eells when he proudly noted that he didn’t smoke pot once in The Interview. But, more importantly, he confesses to the Rolling Stone reporter that in this film he is actually playing a character with a “real job”:

“I think in some ways I relate to this character (in The Interview) more than any other character I have ever played…Because he has a real job! It’s not until you get your shit together that you can step back and say, “I have a career; what am I going to do with it?”

Eells finishes the article by describing Rogen’s life after marriage.  He now seems to be settling down in his home in LA:

At home in L.A. he likes to garden and trim bonsai trees. He smokes brisket in the backyard every now and then, he drives a $24,000 Toyota Highlander Hybrid. As his character in Neighbors puts it: “I think I like old-people shit better than young-people shit now.”

These last lines suggest that, for the author, Rogen is becoming a man, an adult. His adulthood, in contrast to what A.O. Scott might suggest, has just begun. However, as I noted above, there are two Americas. The critic may see Rogen as becoming an adult but it may be the case that his public wants him to remain a “perpetual adolescent.”   The film, Neighbors, suggests that he doesn’t cross over actually so much as remain “in the crossroads.” In addition, Eells neglects to mention that in the film he and Franco remain, to the very end, schlemiels. The problem perhaps is with the terminology. The man vs. man-child contrast is not fitting for Rogen. Framing his work in terms of the schlemiel would be a lot more fruitful.

In a world that is cynical and filled with malice, schlemiels are naïve in their pursuit of the good. (Because of their existential blindness, they cannot see the corrupt world the way most of us “realists” do.)  But they are not naïve because they fail to be adults.  This is the diagnostic mistake.  Something else, something more important to humanity is at stake than maturity. Rogen, hopefully, is figuring this out for himself. (One thing he could do, to this end, is to stop calling himself a man-child.)  If he is going to revise the man-child, he needs to turn to the schlemiel.  The comic character we see in Aleichem’s Motl or I.B. Singer’s Gimpel must be read in terms of what Gimpel or Motl gives the world.  The same goes for his reading of another actor whose schlemiel had a major impact on American society: Charlie Chaplin.  Without these precursors Rogen will be stuck with the man-child option.

The schlemiel’s gift to the world – given by way of comedy – is not “perpetual adolescence.” It is the gift of goodness. And one need not give up the schlemiel to give it; after all, that’s the point.  Once we move away from the old man-child frame of reference used by many cultural critics, including Scott and Eells, perhaps we can better understand why someone like Rogen is so popular in America.   We don’t simply (or only) identify with “the stoner king of Hollywood” or the guy without a “real job.” We identify with something else, something more fundamental to humanity which, ultimately, can pose the greatest threat to war.

The nebbish and the schlemiel, unfortunately, often get confused.   For instance, although Gary Shteyngart clearly plays a schlemiel in many of his novels (including the last one), Random House, his publisher, has decided to run a nebbish campaign. They have made a “trailer” that casts Shtyengart – the “little failure” – as a nebbish; and in a recent interview they call him a “hot nebbish.” What saddens me about this move is that Shteyngart’s concession to Random House suggests that he is selling the schlemiel out in the name of advertising his book, more profits, and gaining popularity.   This obviously does a disservice to the comic character that this blog is dedicated to. That said, the nebbish can not only be used for capital gains, as Random House, with Shtyengart’s blessing, has done; it can also be used for political reasons as a recent video promoting the Israeli politician Naftali Bennett demonstrates.

What’s most interesting about the video is that it begins by turning the schlimazel into a nebbish. Instead of the schlemiel spilling the soup on the schlimazel, which is the crux of the popular schlemiel joke, a waitress – who is clearly not a schlemiel – spills coffee on what appears to be an Israeli who looks like a transplanted New York Hipster.   A schlimazel would get upset about the spillage, but the Hipster-nebbish apologizes. One of the most interesting scenes, which echoes a key scene from Woody Allen’s film Anything Else, involves apologizing for getting hit by another car.

In Allen’s film, the apology is not the last word; it leads to Allen, in an uncharacteristic move in his films, taking revenge. In this moment in film history, Allen goes from being a nebbish to a “man.”

In contrast, the Israeli-hipster in Bennett’s caricature never stops apologizing; it is the crux of the joke. The punch line, which comes at the end, is to that the hipster-nebbish is really Bennet. He takes off the mask of the nebbish Hipster (the alien character of the diaspora) and “stops apologizing.”   In effect, he becomes, like Allen in Anything Else, a man (that is, an Israeli).   The message is old and new; it’s built into a Zionist ideology that contrasts diaspora (powerlessness, apologetics, impotence) with homeland (power, responsibility, autonomy).

Following the analogy, Bennett is suggesting that Israelis, who want to take their “country back,” need to stay away from New York hipsterdom and Ha’aretz which is, in this video, associated with appeasement and powerlessness . The connotation is obvious: those who side with left-leaning Jewishness belong in the New York (the Diaspora) and, for all their apologetics, are nebbishes.   In a world where power exerts itself on a daily basis, they are the impotent losers.

To better understand what is at stake in this political use of the nebbish, we need to clearly define the nebbish character.

I recently organized a panel entitled “New Perspectives on the Schnorrer, the Nebbish, and the Schlemiel” for the 2014 Association of Jewish Studies Annual Conference.   The paper on the nebbish, by the scholar Jenny Caplan, made a careful distinction between the schlemiel and the nebbish. I will recount some of what Caplan said so as to show that the hipster-nebbish fits very well into a Zionist framework of Diaspora (powerlessness) and Homecoming (power).

Caplan began her talk by drawing on Leo Rosten’s definition of the nebbish – from his book The Joys of Yiddish – as “an innocuous, ineffectual, weak, helpless or hapless unfortunate. A sad sack. A loser.” Caplan notes that the nebbish, in contrast to the schlemiel, has to “constantly pick up what the schlemiel knocks over.”   While the schlemiel is existential and spills this or that by virtue of his own miscalculations, the nebbish is left walking after the schlemiel picking up the mess.   As Caplan points out, the schlemiel knocks things over while the nebbish picks them up. The “nebbish is subservient to the relationship.”

But there is more to the story and that has to do with the nebbish’s masculinity. As Caplan notes, the nebbish may have emerged out of the “overall stereotyping of European Jewish masculinity.”   But how did it end up re-emerging in America? To better understand the historical origins, Caplan cites Rachel Shukert who, in an article for Tablet, makes a claim for the nebbish’s historical precedent and creates a typology of the nebbish, which includes the hipster and even some schlemiels as nebbishes.

According to Shukert, the origins of powerlessness in America have to do with the feeling of helplessness that came out of a “single minded focus on Aushwitz.” This, claims Shukert crated a new generation of Jews who thought of themselves as hopeless victims.   Caplan disagrees with Shukert and argues for what she calls the “nebbish-as-alter-ego-effect” or the “Clark Kent Effect.”

For Caplan, it is the contrast between powerful and powerlessness that is at the heart of the nebbish stereotype. As Caplan notes with respect to Superman, there can only be something pitiable about Clark Kent (who is a Nebbish) because of Superman.   In other words, without the presentation of power (Superman), his (Clark Kent’s) powerlessness would have no meaning.   We can see what she calls the “Clark Kent Effect” in Bennett’s clip. It works well with contrasts between Israelis (as Supermen) and New York Hipster-Nebbishes (as Clark Kents). Moreover, Bennett does a Clark Kent move by taking off his hipster mask at the end of the clip. The Israeli, in this sense, is Superman and this hipster is the poor loser.

We may pity the hipster nebbish in this short clip, but this pity is ineffectual, politically.   As one variant of Zionist ideology would suggest, Jews need to leave the “impotence” of the nebbish behind and take responsibility for ourselves.   Constant apology, in this ideological sense, is a sign of powerlessness and weakness.   And while Random House can sell more books by way of making Shteyngart into a nebbish (“a little failure”), Bennett can make himself more politically viable by using the hipster-nebbish as a foil to the Israeli superman.   The nebbish sells books and can be used to win votes.

To be sure, this promotional video is a revival of age-old stereotypes that were once used by early Zionists. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the German Zionists (as opposed to the Eastern European ones) conflated the schlemiel with the nebbish. And they did this because they wanted to leave the schlemiel behind. Bennett does this because he wants to leave the nebbish behind. Like the schlemiel for German-Jews, the Nebbish doesn’t belong in Israel.   The nebbish is not the “new Jew.” It is the old Jew, the ghetto bound, diasporic Jew who must always appease the powerful. But the nebbish lives on after the establishment of a Jewish State. And, as this video suggests, it has taken the form of the hipster who lives, as this caricature suggests, by virtue of apology. The nebbish, like a man-child, can’t stand up for himself; and, in Israel, this is the foil for a political ideology that is based on the idea that one cannot appease the bully: one must stand up to them and this is something that hipster-nebbish is incapable of doing.   This is, as Jenny Caplan might say, the “Clark Kent Effect.”   And, as we can see from this video, it can work well in Israel since it appeals to a group of possible voters who see appeasement and apology as a legacy of the diaspora (emblematized and caricatured as the New York Styled hipster) or else the “wrong way” to deal with internal and external foes.  In other words, the nebbish-hipster belongs in New York, not Tel Aviv.  It is this idea that fueled a lot of early Zionism and it looks like its back but this time it has changed its clothes and reads Ha’aretz.