When Seth Rogen recently went on Conan to promote his latest film, Neighbors, Conan’s first comment went right to the relationship of Seth Rogen to Zac Efron’s body: “Your costar Zac Efron, in this film, I…I didn’t know this but apparently…he’s in ridiculous shape.” In response, Rogen says, shaking his head up and down, as […]
In one of the most urgent moments of Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007), we see a desperate Ben Stone, played by Seth Rogen, go to his father, played by Harold Ramis, for advice about whether to become a father and have children. Ramis tells Rogen to go for it and that he wants to have […]
Is Seth Rogen giving the schlemiel a bad name or…another name? To be sure, I’ve written several blog-entries on Rogen-as-Schlemiel. Before I saw Rogen and Franco’s parody of Kanye West’s Latest video, I was already on Rogen’s trail. And, to my understanding, he, along with Judd Apatow and others, were looking to revise the schlemiel […]
Seth Rogen is often cast as a schlemiel in many Hollywood films. We can see this in films like Knocked Up (2007), Superbad (2007), and Pineapple Express (2008). But in films like Knocked Up we start seeing the transformation of Rogen’s character. In that film, Rogen goes from a pot-smoking “lord of dreams” to a […]
Don’t you love those moments when you can’t tell if something is serious or a joke? I had one of them yesterday and it created a delicious ambiguity around how the schlemiel may get lost in translation. While walking through Manhattan yesterday, I stumbled across a poster that caught my eye. On the front of […]
I’m happy to see that yesterday’s blog post on the Rogen/Franco Parody of Kanye West’s “Bound Two” video has prompted some response. What I’d like to do in this blog entry is address the questions and concerns of some readers regarding the post. First of all, in my blog entry I acknowledged that this video […]
As a Jew raised in Upstate New York, St. Patricks Day meant a lot of drinking games, parties, and merrymaking. There is nothing Jewish about these activities. Nonetheless, writers like James Joyce made the main character of his epic novel, Ulysses, an Irish Jew. Bloom, the main character, demonstrates the flow of consciousness. In a […]
There are many different arguments about when the Schlemiel went mainstream in America. While Hannah Arendt sees that happening with Charlie Chaplin, Daniel Itzkovitz argues that it was the debut of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1978) and its winning of four Oscars that made it clear that the Schlemiel was no longer a Jewish icon; […]
There is yet to be a genealogy of the schlemiel in America. Schlemiel Theory has – over the years – been hard at work gathering the threads. An account of the schlemiel in America would be incomplete without mentioning Menashe Skulnik. He was one of the great comedic stars of Yiddish theater in the early […]
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 […]
