Comedy is full of surprises. But that’s not always the case. More often than not, we get the same types of stock characters who do what…they always do. However, sometimes a stock comic character may surprise us. And since Hollywood is full of actors who play the same types of comic roles, the same can […]
Today is Schlemiel-in-Theory’s Birthday!!! It turns two years old today. The blog has, in the time of a year, gone from one thousand to nearly four thousand followers! And, as with any birthday, I would like to make a resolution that this year I will redouble my efforts to find and write on new and […]
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 […]
Big Bang Theory is one of the most popular sitcoms today. Each show draws between 15 and 20 million viewers. The show has its share of “geeks” and “nerds.” But unlike the past, where nerds were looked down on, the show represents them as the norm. What makes the characters most interesting, however, is not […]
Sheila Heti – the author, narrator, and main character of the comic novel How Should a Person Be? – has fears that if she trusts someone, she may hurt someone and hurt herself. But, as we learn from the prologue, she has to if she is to learn how a person should be. She doesn’t […]
The “Yale School,” which included such academic personalities as Paul deMan and Harold Bloom, gave America its first taste of deconstruction. What deMan and Bloom popularized, in particular, was the rhetorical reading of texts. The point was to find, as deMan once said, their keystone (or it’s “center”). By locating it and taking it out, […]
Woody Allen’s Zelig traces the path of a character (of the same name) that, Irving Howe suggests (in one segment of Allen’s film), is based on the passionate drive of American Jews in the early 20th century to assimilate into American society. Zelig, to be sure, is a schlemiel. But he is what I would […]
I recently stumbled across a trailer for Gary Shteyngart’s new book – Little Failure – which will hit the streets on January 2014. I came across the trailer by way of an article in Slate. The title of the piece, “Gary Shteyngart’s Homophobic Little Failure of a Book Trailer,” suggests that the trailer, because it […]
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 […]
Judith Butler has, on many different occasions, pointed out that she is taking on the legacy of Hannah Arendt. And by this she means Arendt’s legacy vis-à-vis her work on the political. One of the terms Butler uses in her political vocabulary – which also pops up in her work on sexuality – is “normalization.” […]
Schlemiel Theory 