About a month ago, I was contacted by Louie Lazar, a journalist who told me that he was given an assignment by Tablet: to determine whether or not Seth Rogen was the future of Jewish comedy. Pondering this question, Lazar came across several article/blog posts I had written on Seth Rogen for this blog. After […]
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 […]
I arrived in Budapest last Thursday and on Friday I started my Graduate Seminar on “The Schlemiel in European Literature and Culture” at the Ashkenazium Program (which includes several notable Jewish Studies, Philosophy, and Literature scholars on its faculty such as Elliot Wolfson, Paul Franks, Shaul Magid, Peter Trawny, Susan Handelman, etc.) To give an […]
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 […]
Most of Woody Allen’s schlemiels are anxious, intellectual, and highly self conscious. But not all schlemiel’s are intellectual or hyper-self-conscious. Take, for instance, schlemiels in Shalom Aleichem, IB Singer, or Bernard Malamud’s stories and novels, or schlemiels played by Seth Rogen or Adam Sandler. While they may miss a beat or a social cue, their […]
Schlemiel Theory 