I just want to make a note on my last few posts about Louis CK. I took a detour from my readings of Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse on the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem to look into Louis CK’s relation to what I called the “Jewish Thing.” Although he is cast in the Louie episode as a humiliated failure and in something of a schlemiel-type-of-role, the truth is that much of his humor is very aggressive. And, as my last blog entry pointed out, at times it traverses the fine line between Jewish jokes and anti-Semitic jokes.
In the final analysis, I don’t see him as playing the schlemiel. In the Louie clip I wrote on, Louis CK is lined up – by a Carnegie-Deli-Comic-Now-Film Mogul – with Seinfeld as a competitor. But he doesn’t ultimately fit the bill. And what we learn is that while, in that clip, he may play a down on his luck underdog type, he is not of the deeper schlemiel tradition.
What we need to think about is whether and how rude-comedians who make fun of the other are or are not a part of the schlemiel tradition. Donald Weber and Albert Goodman, for instance, think they are. Borsht Belt comedy, for instance, is rude. But how rude is rude? And what is a rude schlemiel? Is that a contradiction?
I have explored this –to some extent – in my reading of Phillip Roth’s character Portnoy of Portnoy’s Complaint. He is a very rude character, but, at the same time, he shows us a new kind of schlemiel who is in a battle with the Sabra. Sidrah DeKoven Ezrahi has written some fine chapters on this topic in Booking Passage (namely, her chapter “Grapes of Roth”).
In truth, the schlemiel tradition shows us how the majority of Sholem Aleichem’s, I.L. Petetz, or Mendel Mocher Sforim’s schlemiels are down to earth; they are not rude and do not pick fun at the other. The next generation of schlemiels, who also intrigued people like Irving Howe, that come out of Saul Bellow and I.B. Singer (like Moses Herzog of Bellow’s novel Herzog or Gimpel of his story “Gimpel the Fool”) are not rude either. Paul Celan’s Klein and Gross may be repetitive, but they are not rude. Charlie Chaplin, Hannah Arendt’s favorite schlemiel, was also not rude or vulgar. And Woody Allen’s classic schlemiel Alvy Singer is far from being mean-spirited in his humor.
But what about Lenny Bruce – a comic that Weber includes in his musings? What about Groucho Marx? Sarah Silverman? Larry David? How do they all fit? Do they fit?
(See here for another approach I have made to aggressiveness and the schlemiel – by way of Walter Benjamin.)
But there is more to the story of the schlemiel. His job is not “toilet talk” or to be as vulgar as possible. As Ruth Wisse claims, this character is closely bound to Jewishness and to the tension between skepticism and hope. It speaks from a Jewish angle. For Howe and Bellow, the schlemiel traverses laughter and tears and causes troubled laughter. But that troubled laughter pertains, as Howe well-knew, to the crises within the Jewish tradition and Jewish history.
The laughter we hear in the “Hasidic Cum Tissues,” however, is not troubled so much as troubling. It is not evoked by a schlemiel so much as someone who is outside the Jewish tradition looking in and looking with great anger and negativity. Louis CK may, strangely enough, find himself closer to Mel Gibson hence his drunken tweet about Jews that I mentioned in an earlier blog entry. Hence, his drunk rant with a difference…
I’d like to look more into this matter. And I suggest that these last few blog posts on Louis CK be seen in contrast to my posts on schlemiels, schlemiel theorists, and schlemiel theory.
Thanks for reading! And stay tuned to schlemiel-in-theory.
(And a special thanks goes out to Mark Kirschbaum for his comments and criticisms on this and on my Louis CK posts!)
A facebook friend recently cued me in to a website that collected things Louis CK has said about Jews. Included in the archived videos are a few clips: a clip where Louis CK plays on many different dialects and how speech indicates different kinds of sick lifestyles (the Jewish dialect amongst them), a video on rape where he goes so far as to say, in an aside, that Jews should be raped and follows “did I say that?”; it also includes a clip on Jewish girls (which was removed from Youtube), the “Goodbye Jews” clip that I discussed in the last blog entry on Louis CK, and a clip entitled “Hasidic Cum Tissues” (which was also removed from Youtube).
Regarding this clip, the webpage cites Louis CK as saying:
And the weird detail she told me is that [the Hasidic clients of the dominatrix] always had to take their sperm home with them in a tissue, because that was in their religion that they couldn’t leave their bodily fluids behind. So somehow God’s watching a dominatrix shit in your mouth, and he’s like “Well as long as you take your cum home, it’s fine.”
I was really curious about this video clip as its title and the claim were so bizarre. I wanted to hear it and take note not just of this but of other parts of the clip that would show me Louis CK’s ways of relating to Jewish things. (Moreover, I am familiar with Jewish customs (minhagim) and laws (halacha) and I had never heard of such a thing as “cum tissues” let alone heard of Hasidim who needed to make sure all semen was put in tissues.)
From the Louis CK page, we learn that the clip was removed by Youtube. Nonetheless, I wondered if it may have been renamed. It was. And it was simply filed under the Opie and Anthony Show. As their Wiki page points out, Opie (Greg “Opie” Hughes) and Anthony (Cumia) had a show since 1995 and that went on to 2002. They had a hiatus and went onto XM Satellite Radio in 2006. The show, over the years, has been host to many comedians including Louis CK. The energy in and around the show is anxious and highly charged – much like The Howard Stern Show. The language is heavy and very vulgar. And like Stern, they often disregard political correctness and speak what is on their minds. And sometimes that can get very risky.
This clip in particular is very vulgar and you may not want to hear or see my reading of it as the clip that I address portrays some Hasidic Jews in a very negative even anti-Semitic fashion. I found many details that were not mentioned by the person who runs the website or anyone on the web for that matter. I have noted them below. Read and listen at your own risk.
In this clip – show #19 -they had Louis CK as a guest. 29:27 in Louis CK begins telling a joke about a Dominatrix, Hasidim, and “cum tissues.” His friend’s wife was a Dominatrix and she had Hasidim as clients.
After much banter about this Dominatrix and his friend, he returns (at 31:17) to the joke and brings in the Hasidim and the tissues. He describes the relationship of the Hasidim to the Dominatrix and points out that they were rude to her before the transaction. In an attempt to explain why they are rude, Louis CK notes than anybody “outside” their community is deemed “an outsider.” Furthermore, “that’s the way the culture is….its a closed society…I’m trying to be nice about it…Fucking Jews!”(Nervous laughter.)
After saying this, Opie and Anthony come to the rescue and say that while he is right about the Hasidim being a closed society, it woukd be wrong to say that all Hasidim are the same. Yet, they say Hasidim are “mysterious.” Louis CK then comes in and talks about some “good” Hasidim he has met at B & H Photo in Manhattan. He imitates one of the Hasidim who works behind the counter and notes that some can be rude, there, while others “can be nice.”
Returning to the story, and bringing to bear on us how Louis CK and the Dominatrix share a negative attitude towards “them,” he notes that “these Jews were rude to her….Going to the dominatrix to have their dicks whipped is not in the Talmud.”
Louis CK points out, without wincing, that “when she was beating them, she said they were the only clients she ever hit with spite.” Finding her spite (and her beating of the Hasidim) to be justifiable, he notes that the Hasidim had “crossed the line.” In other words, they deserved a cruel beating.
After justifying her cruel (as opposed to “kind,” normal) whipping, Louis CK notes that she said that she “used to crucify them….and inside, when she was hitting them, she thought ‘You Fucking Jew!’”
“And then the weird detail she told me came when she told me that they had to put their sperm in a tissue…they had to take their sperm home with them.” CK, an anthropologist from Mars, explains that they cannot leave any fluids lying around. He goes on to state what he says as Jewish blindness and hypocrisy: “somehow, God’s watching a dominatrix shit in your mouth…and everything will be alright if you take your cum home.” Following Louis CK’s judgment, they all jokingly play out the reasons why God would want them to do this. And Louis CK finishes the foray by saying that all be well if the Hasid can put the “cum tissue in the cigar box under his wife’s shawl.”
Opie then gets going and talks about how he heard of a “tranny” who would make the Hasidim shower because they smelled so bad. All of the anti-Semitic stuff starts coming here and then a phone-call comes in that is directed at these Hasidim.
The caller who is apparently a cop confirms this claim. And even calls them “filthy, filthy animals.” Then he says not all of them “…a couple of them.”
What is so disturbing about all of this is not simply the negative anti-Semitic descriptions, but the fact that the topic is simply passed by. After the cop hangs up, they simply talk about other things.
They feel no need to reflect on what they said about the “dirty Hasidim.” There is no need to reflect on how odd it is that Louis CK thought of their cruel (as opposed to kind) “beating” as justified. Here we need to ask ourselves if Louis CK (and the whole crew) went too far.
And although they are laughing, are we? What would it mean if we were to laugh along with all of them about those “dirty Jews?” Is this routine about “Hasidic Cum Tissues” funny or just disturbing?
The last three letters exchanged between Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse over Sholem Aleichem’s fiction and its meaning show us the subtle differences between these two important thinkers and literary critics. As I pointed out in my last blog entry about this dialogue, Ruth Wisse suggested that Aleichem was, in contrast to the Yiddish writers Mendel Mocher Sforim and I.L. Peretz, more “balanced.” This was a part of Wisse’s epistolary strategy since she was countering Howe’s harsher view of Sholem Aleichem’s fiction. Wisse’s response to Howe shows us that while she agrees that there are “dark undercurrents” in Aleichem’s work, these words do not subsume Aleichem’s approach to Jewishness, Jewish history, and Yiddish literature.
For Wisse, as I’d like to show in this entry, Howe’s view should be balanced out with a more positive view of the Jewish writer. Like her brother, David Roskies, she sees Aleichem as an artist who acknowledges fragmentation but who, in response to it, takes on the tradition of the Magid (story-teller). She sees Aleichem as a “stand-up” comic of sorts who is looking to create bridges and create balance; unlike Howe, who sees him primarily as a modernist writer who focuses on fragmentation and ruin. The last letters between Howe and Wisse work to bring out this differing take on Aleichem and his work.
At the end of his third letter to Ruth Wisse, Howe notes that although Sholem Aleichem’s Motl Stories are “casual offhand, charming, even mischievous,” Aleichem will “suddenly…drop to a fierce irony, a harrowing sadness.” And this, for Howe, is the keynote of Aleichem as a modernist writer. He ends on the sad note: for Howe, Aleichem goes from laughter to tears.
In response, Wisse turns to Aleichem’s Yiddish so as to show that he was a Yiddish artist. In other words, she agrees with Howe that Aleichem is an artist, but she takes a different strategy with respect to explain why this is the case. She turns to his language and shows that Aleichem used Yiddish to show how repetition is used to create a closed circle of thoughts – what she calls a “circular style.” Noting this style in relation to one of Aleichem’s characters, Wisse points out that “her mind is imprisoned in its own obsessive circularity.” But the point of Aleichem’s using circular style in relation to this character is to “give truth to her particular embattled consciousness, self-protecting and self-defeating.” This speaks to the negative note that Howe is addressing.
But from here, Wisse turns to the linguistic strategies of Tevye (one of Aleichem’s most celebrated characters). Wisse sees this character as evidence of Aleichem-the-artist and not simply Aleichem the-folk-storyteller:
Like a true musician, he enjoys showing the speed and grace with which he can skip from one note or one tone to another. His best jokes and quotations are polyglot, drawing attention to their mixture of high and low.
But Aleichem differs from a writer like I.L. Peretz who “drew attention away from the specificities of Yiddish, away from its folk expressions, the interplay of its source languages, the different dialects of its various speakers.” Contrary to Peretz, “the unfixed nature of Yiddish was its greatest attraction, and its infinite range of dialects and oral styles the best literary means of capturing the dynamic changes – or the resistance to change – in the culture.” By pointing this out, Wisse is shifting the emphasis of this epistolary exchnage. For Wisse, the emphasis should be on the way Aleichem bridges high and low culture by way of his use of Yiddish. This makes him a modern artist.
Howe catches wind of this shift of emphasis and, so to speak, sticks to his guns. In his final letter to Wisse, he reiterates his points. His first words seek for the agreement between he and Wisse about the “oddity” of his stories. In other words, he acts his if they agree fundamentally but, ultimately, he is changing emphasis. Howe ends with five points which convey this “oddity” and how it relates to Aleichem being a quintessential modern writer. For the purpose of understanding his tactic, I’ll summarize each.
1) Aleichem is a literary artist and not an “oral story teller” and the evidence for this can be found in the “sudden, abrupt blockage” of closure in Aleichem’s stories.
2) His work demonstrates that he is not interested in “resolution of an external action” so much as evoking “shocked laughter.”
3) His work is more interested in the “clever Jew” (who is “complicated, quizzical, problematic”) than in the naïve simpleton who is concerned with the “old ways of piety.” The relation of the “clever Jew” to the past is secondary to his being…a “complicated, quizzical, problematic” Jew.
4) He is a sophisticated writer who is “very much aware” of his full departure from the tradition of oral storytelling.
5) Shalom Aleichem, like Saul Bellow who followed in his footsteps, “knew intuitively that the boundary between comedy and tragedy is always a thin and wavering line.”
Howe’s last point is something I have been discussing from the very beginning of my blog series on Howe. It taps into his approach to Jewishness. To be sure, he sees the fluid movement between comedy and tragedy as a defining characteristic of modern Jewishness and modern Jewish-American literature. And this reiterates what he was saying in his introduction to Jewish American Stories.
Wisse final letter to Howe – literally, her last word – provides us with a key to understanding how she differs with Howe over how we should understand Sholem Aleichem and his project.
First of all, she notes that he avoided “the romantic subject, the heroic possibility, the grand style of the novel” because he was “simply unconvincing and demonstrably uncomfortable in this mode.” More importantly, he was a modern writer because he is able to work on many levels simultaneously. She notes “On Account of a Hat,” a story Howe loved, and points out that it has a “dozen interpretations: it is the plight of the Diaspora Jew, an exposure of rootlessness, a mockery of tyranny, the comic quest for identity, a Marxist critique of capitalism, and, of course, an ironic self-referential study of literary slight of hand.”
In other words, Wisse wants to “balance” out the “oddity” – that Howe finds so fascinating – with other elements of the text that Howe’s reading overshadows. To be sure, she points out that Aleichem works by way of “indirection” with “the worm’s angle of vision, and with apparently flimsy materials.” But he uses them to present something tenacious about Jewishness, something Howe may miss.
As we saw above, Howe sees Aleichem’s Motl in terms of the final, negative note. Wisse, reading the same character, points out his tenacity: “He confronts all the things that happened to him and forces himself upon life again and again, and the sum of these trials shape the rhythm, constitute the meaning, of his existence.”
Commenting on this, Wisse notes that:
Sholem Aleichem’s admiration for the stubborn ruggedness of Jewish faith and the surprising vitality of the people comes to expression not just thematically, in story after story, but in the resilient, recuperative shape of all his major work.
Knowing full well that her reading may not be deemed “academic” enough, she notes that Aleichem had no obsessive interest in an academic, modernist reading. She asks us to contrast Aleichem’s memoir to the “mountaineering saga of Jewish writers with all the high, serious climbs of other European literati.” And what we will find from his simple memoir (consisting of only four anecdotes about the ordinary nature of other Yiddish writers and forgetting) is that he “he deflates intellectual and artistic pretentiousness, and even undercuts the grandeur of the Alps!”
In other words, Wisse, like Aleichem, thinks that Howe’s obsession with the “quizzical” and “troubling laughter” of Aleichem is something Aleichem would laugh at. Playing on the word “quizzical” (which Howe uses several times in his letters to Wisse), Wisse gives her final words on Aleichem which show us a correlation of simple faith (hope) in the story (and storytelling) and not with the world:
What confronts us, finally, is the quizzical smile of the author, compulsively skeptical about everything but the story.
This tension between hope and skepticism, for Wisse, not only informs her reading of Aleichem as an artist; it also informs her reading of the schlemiel. Howe’s reading of the schlemiel would differ significantly because, in reading Aleichem, he puts the emphasis on the quizzical-as-such and not the relation of the quizzical with the tension between fiction and reality or hope and skepticism.
Early this morning I reposted a blog entry on Louis CK. And as a part of the facebook tagline, I jokingly referred to Louis CK as an “honorary Heeb.” In response, a friend of mine pointed out that she thought that Louis CK was not Jewish and, on the contrary, that at least one of his pieces might disclose a “bit” of anti-Semitism. She asked me if I ever saw the “Airplane” clip, suggesting that this clip in particular has elements of the anti-Semitic and may alter my reading.
The possibility of anti-Semitism did in fact come across my mind before she gave me her opinion. I was, in fact, writing up a new blog entry which addresses Louis CK’s joke about Schindler’s List. When I first saw it, I wondered how he would traverse the risky topic of the Holocaust. To my mind, Louis CK’s joke about Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List hit at the limit of anti-Semitism. Louis CK brings it to the limit by way of imagining the auditions that Steven Spielberg would have to give for a key role in which a young German girl brazenly sends the Jews away to the concentration camps with the words “Goodbye Jews!” This is a serious role, but what would happen if the auditioning little girls had a miniscule amount of knowledge of the kind of voice that should be used. This irony addressed to this serious topic is the focus. Spielberg gathers many different girls for the audition and it is Louis CK’s performance of the voices that sends the audience into peals of uneasy laughter.
Here he tells the joke to Conan O’Brien.
And here he gives it over to an audience at Carnegie Hall:
He imagines there are fifty little girl actresses who are trying out. They are “going from the Hannah Montana auditions to the Schindler’s list audition.” Each of them pronounces the phrase “Goodbye Jews” and, as one can see, Louis CK has them do versions that don’t fit the context. Nonetheless, the power of the message could prompt people to think that the message is overshadowed by the comic performance of the words “Goodbye Jews.”
Although I find this point interesting, I would argue that this is not anti-Semtic; rather, it shows Louis CK’s tension with Jewishness. And this is what I am looking for. The point of the contrast, in comparing the “Goodbye Jew” piece to the Louie piece in the last blog, is to show that Jewishness is something that Louis CK, at times, addresses.
For him, if comedy is not disturbing than it is not comedy. And the fact that a film like Schindler’s List is a holy cow is quite apparent to him. As a non-Jew he’d like to inject a tension into this so as to point out, by way of the young girls auditioning, that they had no sense of the role they were to play. As young American women who want to be on TV or Film, they have no sense of history, the Holocaust, or how to properly relate to the topic. Their awkwardness is telling: it teaches us that they don’t have a cultural sense of what is the norm. That norm, so to speak, is lessened now. As Louis CK notes at the beginning of the piece; its no longer a blockbust film; its on TBS (the main Boston TV channel).
Its banal. And, when we have to relate to it with the proper gravitas, we become awkward. What happens when our children, so to speak, don’t know what’s at stake? They will, of course, be awkward. And, regardless of that, the very fact that “Goodbye Jews!” is to be performed would make one very awkward. Who, after all, would want to say those words (with conviction) in an America that deems itself, by and large, conscious of the Holocaust? The mere fact of saying it is disturbing. This comes out in the awkward approaches we hear in each of Louis CK’s voices.
Now for the contrast: On the one hand, you have pieces that put Louie CK in the position of the loser-who-can-redeem himself; he is given a choice between succeeding and failing as a comic by a Jew who was once a comic but is now a movie mogul. He is like a schlemiel but not quite. He has an odd relationship to this tradition.
Through this Louie clip, we can address his relationship to scenarios in which he acts in relation to Jews or with Jewish topics. How does he situate himself?
Moreover, from this clip we can query into what his relationship is to a Jewish comic tradition; one which, as the Jewish film mogul/executive suggests, starts in New York City in the Carnegie Deli. How does Louis CK relate to this Jewish comic tradition? How does he, literally, compete with Seinfeld? Is it a Jew vs. a non-Jew struggle? Or is this a question of “who” takes on a comic tradition? Need it be a Jew? Or is Louis CK far from this? As we see in the beginning of the clip, Louis CK doesn’t know who this Jewish-comic ancestor is. This blindness directs us to the tension and the issue: what is Louis CK’s relationship to a Jewish comic tradition? Is there any? Why should he care about Jews?
In contrast to a clip like this, anyone who watches Louis CK can tell you that Jewishness is certainly not something Louis CK regularly concerns himself with. In the clip below, we don’t see any such narrative. What we find is scatological humor. Here’s a joke justify farts – providing reasons why farts are so amazing.
He reasons that “they come out of your ass. The hang out around shit and they smell for that reason. His gestures are mired in the physical processes. There is nothing “Jewish” here. To be sure, this video segment simply doesn’t pose the question. Its caught up in the gestural. In the “Goodbye Jews,” the gesture of enunciating these words. This gestural focus, however, takes us away from the historical tension.
More important is how Louis CK’s use of gesture brings about – when he addresses the issue – a tension with Jewishness. It is a clash between repeating or not repeating a Jewish comic tradition. As I noted above, is Louis CK a competitor with Jerry Seinfeld? Does he emerge from the same tradition, in Carnegie Deli, or is he doing comedy despite that relationship?
Searching for evidence of Louis CK’s tense relationship to Jewishness and to his possible anti-Semtitism, I did a Google search correlating the airplane routine, which I heard was anti-Semitic, to Louis CK and anti-Semitism and I found only two links of interest: the first link was published in The Jewish Press. It was entitled “Louis C.K. – Not a Jew.” It was published in May 20, 2012 and was authored by the blog Not a Jew – Jew: Choosing to be Chosen A Blog of My Journey to Judaismhttp://notajew-jew.com/?p=66
The blog is authored by someone who refuses to give his name and directs us, instead, to the journey of conversion: from being a non-Jew to a Jew. In the “about” section we read:
His name is not important, but his journey to become a Jew is.
But, apparently, said person who wrote the blog has written for the New York Times, the Jerusalem Post, etc. His task, ultimately, to show his readers that he realized that Louis CK isn’t Jewish and this, in some way, prompts him to want to convert to Judaism.
In this piece, he presents his argument as to why Louis CK is “not Jewish.” He begins his argument by creating a criteria by which he distinguishes between what it means to be a Jew from what it means to be a non-Jew. To give authority to his reading, he cites his “friend” (the notorious Rabbi, TV show host, Hollywood personality, and author of Kosher Sex – amongst other books) Shmuley Boteach:
One of the main things I’ve learned about the differences between Jews and non-Jews (namely Christians) is: non-Jews place a great deal of importance on how you feel, what you believe, your intentions, your inner motivations for being good. By contrast, according my friend Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Jews “care far less about what you believe. What you do is more important.”
If it all comes down to a tension between concern with belief and conviction – on the one hand – and action – on the other -how does Louis CK fare?
He, the author of the blog, sites a comedy routine by Louis CK where he talks about how he relishes the fact that he “thought” about being ethical and giving up his seat to a soldier on an airplane but he didn’t. This, argues the blogger, isn’t Jewish. A Jew wouldn’t think about whether he or she thought about doing said deed; a Jew, says Boteach, would do it. The principle of Jewishness is, as the blogger states: Action is greater than thought. This seems to be a crude principle, but it can be understood in a more significant and sophisticated manner.
Relishing the thought that one “could” help would make Louis CK into a solipsistic, Cartesian, kind of philosopher instead of what Emmanuel Levinas. The latter thinks ethics is “first philosophy,” not thought or being. Levinas puts the other, ethics, before all philosophy and reflection. Levinas’s essay, entitled the “Temptation of Temptation,” makes it clear that Louis CK is caught up in the “temptation of temptation.” For if temptation is about relishing the fact that one is “capable” of thought (that one “can”) than the temptation of temptation is to think about what one is capable of doing and not doing anything. As Aristotle might say, this is philosophy: thought thinking thought. That, Levinas would argue, is not holy. It is not Jewish. For Levinas, being-for-the other (in action, not thought) is Jewish.
The blogger notes something like this when he notes that there may be a “Little Jew” in Louis CK because he gives a lot of his money to charity:
But perhaps there’s a little Jew inside of Louis C.K., after all. Because, when his video generated over a million dollars in downloads in just its first 12 days online, he issued a statement “to set an example of what you can do if you all of a sudden have a million dollars that people just gave to you directly because you told jokes.”
He gave $250k to the people who produced the video and built the web site to sell it. Another $250k went to his staff for “a big fat bonus.” $280k went to five different charities (including Kiva, which I discovered because of him – thank you Louis C.K.!). In total, he gave away 78% of his million dollars, which is 7.8 times more Jewish of him than a Jew who tithes 10%.
While this is very interesting, while it gives me a criteria for what’s Jewish and what’s not Jewish, it doesn’t equate Louis CK’s comedy with the anti-Semitic.
But this criteria doesn’t seem to work. Aren’t Jewish comedians always playing around with thoughts and possible scenarios? Doesn’t that happen throughout the Talmud? However, the Rabbis always think in terms of how this or that scenario relates to Jewish law while Louis CK thinks of scenarios in terms of things we find embarrassing or odd. These scenarios seem to be replayed in much Borscht Belt comedy, too. Were they also “tempted by temptation?” Or should we read Louis CK’s reflections differently – in terms of the social relations he works through? Is it a Jewish way to go against the grain and test the limits of this or that discourse (here, the discourse of Holocaust representation or in terms of the relationship of Jewish comedy in the past to Hollywood today)?
Besides this should we call Louis CK Jewish or Non-Jewish in terms of only one example and a citation from Shumley Boteach?
I think we need to look more deeply into the matter. And I’d like to say that I leave this blog post with the voices of Louis CK’s little girls as they say “Goodbye Jews.” They are out of touch with Jewish history but its really not their fault now is it? America right now seems to be forgetting more and more and Louis CK, in that piece, brings us face to face with that reality. At the same time, he’s marking off the fact that he is not Jewish in saying “Goodbye Jews.”
But his departure is not so much anti-Semitic as marking off a difference between himself and Jews. He also doesn’t know who he is inheriting the comic tradition from. It may not matter to him, as we see in the Louie clip, above.
The only other link I found on Google relating Louis CK to anti-Semitism, had nothing in fact to do with anti-Semitism. Rather, it was an article from Heeb Magazine which simply notes some Tweets Louis CK did while he was, apparently, drunk. I’ll note one of his Tweets and leave it at that:
Even though Louis CK shouts out, in the voices of many bright eyed girls, “Goodbye Jews,” this drunken Tweet says: “Don’t worry, Louis CK likes Jews!”
After I first saw him perform, I immediately wondered if Louis CK (Louis Szekely) was Jewish. At first glance, his gestures, jokes, and comedy routine seemed, for me, to be Jewish. But I was uncertain. The ambiguity over his identity prompted me to think about what I was interested in: was I interested in whether or not he was a Jew or whether or not his gestures were Jewish? I also wanted to know what he thought of such a question about his comic routines and their ethnic identifications. I couldn’t put my finger on what made his comic routine (or he himself) seem “Jewish.” This inquiring mind…wanted to know.
A simple Google search brought me to the site “Jew or Not Jew.” (This site, by the way, has nothing to do with the app that was deemed anti-Semitic.) On this web page, I discovered that Louis CK wasn’t Jewish. He was raised a Catholic. And, according to the blurb on the page, Louis CK said the following to the LA Weekly which, this site believes, indicates a happenstance kind of relationship to Jewishness:
L.A. WEEKLY: Why are so many funny comics from Boston?
LOUIS C.K.: Because Boston is a miserable place filled with drunks, losers and Jewish girls with big tits.
From this and from his lineage, the site concludes that he is not a Jew. Fine. But I was not satisfied by this superficial assessment. I wanted more. I wanted to see how he dealt with the Jewish thing.
But before I look into that, let’s take a look at the man himself. Louis CK is a provocative stand-up comic whose self-deprecating, aggressive, awkward, and vulgar brand of comedy has gained critical acclaim over the years. Many of his best skits draw on his personal life and observations as a divorced and aging father. The character he plays on stage is constantly attempting to come to terms with all of the odd situations and minute details of being a father, being single, and searching for success. In all of these departments, no matter what he does, something always seems to go wrong.
Despite what we often see in his comic routines, he has, apparently, been very successful. He has credit for writing comedy and doing many comedy performances and has written for the Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night With Conan O’Brien, and The Chris Rock Show. And between 2008 and 2010 he recorded two full-length comedy specials: Chewed Up (2008) and Hilarious (2009). In 2011 he released Live at the Beacon Theater.
In addition to these comedy specials Louis CK has starred in two different sitcoms where he was the center of the show: Lucky Louie (2006) and Louie (2010).
And recently, in 2013, he did a special for HBO entitled Oh My God.
From time to time, Louis CK is involved in comic situations or tells jokes that involve Jews. In this segment from Louie on FX, Louis CK is face-to-face with a stereotyped Jewish media executive from Hollywood. But before he goes in to meet the media executive, he and his agent, an awkward looking teenager in a tight suit with large glasses, are left to wait in a waiting room not knowing who they are there to see or what is about to happen to them. When called, they naively go into the office. The scene is reminiscent of a Kafka novel. And, as a result of their utter lack of knowledge and the lack of communicating between them and the secretary, it seems as if they are on the way to some kind of disaster. However, as in a Kafka novel, he is not greeted by a non-descript messenger of the institution. Rather, he is greeted by a New York Jew who speaks with a distinctly New York (“Jewish”) accent. In this scene, Louis, who is usually very aggressive and uptight, cowers. When asked by the executive, “Do you know who I am?” Louis CK acts as if he knows.
The executive begins by complementing Louis CK for his performance on the David Letterman Show. This butters him up. It also enter Louis CK into a cat and mouse game. The executive tells Louis CK that he has a secret to tell him. But before he tells Louis CK his secret, he says that he “started off in Carnegie Deli” (as a comedian).
To be sure, we still don’t know “who” he is, but we now know one thing he has done and may fuzzily infer his identity. This comment is oddly placed and, at the same time, it suggests that the man talking to him went through the Jewish comedy circuit (and, for some reason, this is something the executive thinks Louis CK should identify with as a root of the modern day stand-up comedy that he does). However, Louis CK mistakenly thinks that this factoid is the secret. The executive laughs at the mistake and indicates that the secret is not Jewish comedy or the origin of stand-up comedy. The secret has nothing to do with Jewish comic identity.
Before Louis CK can hear the secret, he has to, in a Kafkan sense, sign papers that he has no time to read. After he does, the Jewish media mogul reveals the “secret” to Louis CK which isn’t a statement so mush as a question: Do you want to replace David Letterman? Louis CK humbly declines and suggests a Jewish comedian for the job: Jerry Seinfeld. Strangely enough, the executive confirms that Louis CK was right: Seinfeld was also asked to be the new host.
But this doesn’t mean that he is on par with Seinfeld; the mogul basically tells Louis CK that the two are incomparable. Louis CK learns that he is an “option” while Seinfeld is a “slam dunk.” In this scenario, Louis CK is the ridiculed schlemiel. He’s not the first in line, although he dreams of being there.
In response to this offer, Louis CK suggests that the media executive may not want him because, if he knew who he was and how old he was, he would reject him.
In response to this, the media mogul describes Louis CK as a guy who comes from a working class family in Boston and notes, with a big jab, that Louis CK isn’t doing so well and that his career is in a slump. And after noting that Louis CK is at the point in his career where he is afraid that he might do something embarrassing, he asks, “Am I right?”
The camera pans to Louis CK who lightly sighs and turns his head slightly away. Then the music starts as the media executive suggests a way Louis CK can redeem his career and his sad life. But then, after giving hope, the media executive takes it away and notes how Louis CK, as he gets older, will become more and more of a failure. With poetic egress, the media executive calls him a “circling failure in a rapidly decaying orbit.” In other words, he makes Louis CK “conscious” that he is a schlemiel of the worst (negative) variety and will remain so if he doesn’t grasp hold of his proposal. In contrast to classical schlemiels in Sholem Aleichem or I.B. Singer, Louis CK is not so absent-minded that he will miss the meaning of the media executive’s description. In their stories, they don’t know they are schlemiels and they don’t care; in this clip, it’s the opposite.
In this version of the schlemiel, the schlemiel has the possibility of success or failure.
“It’s in your power to change that…and sill your chances are very slim. David Letterman is retiring…do you want his job?”
The episode ends with this question.
In truth, this question draws the fine line between being a schlemiel and not being one. This is the line the American schlemiel must cross if he/she is to be a “man.” There is an either/or at work here which underlies one aspect of American identity: One can either remain a failure or change. For instance, this Jewish media executive changed from being a comedian in New York to being a mogul in Hollywood. Can Louis CK do it? Can he be like Seinfeld, a successful Jewish comic? Or is it too late?
This segment makes for a fascinating commentary on how Jews have “made it.” And now, instead of a Jew, it is a non-Jewish comedian who is in the position of the failure and it is a Jewish media executive and Jerry Seinfeld who are in the opposite position.
After writing on Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse’s dialogue over Sholem Aleichem’s humor, it hit me that the Jewishness of this piece is close to what Irving Howe saw as the “undercurrent of darkness” in Sholem Aleichem’s humor. It is an analogue to the overlapping of laughter and tears which Howe draws from a comment by Saul Bellow about Jewishness. To be sure, there is nothing kitschy or sentimental about Louis CK’s humiliation. His aging and failure are tangible. We can, like the media executive, imagine him going on as a failure (even though we all know that the real Louis CK is a great success). And this possibility is supposed to trouble us since, as we can see from the clip, it is troubling for Louis CK. He wants to be a success but can’t help thinking of himself (or knowing himself to be) as a failure.
We all want him to make it just like we all want characters in Sholem Aleichem’s stories to make it in America but, as we all know, the characters in Aleichem’s books don’t often gain such success. As Ruth Wisse points out in her book The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, their success is in their words. When it comes to success in the world, they often fail. Language is often their saving grace. Reading Aleichem, we know that his characters may be funny but in the end they may all remain schlemiels. And nothing will change (save for their place).
But is that such a bad thing? It is if success is your only criterion and where being a schlemiel is equated with being an aging and decaying loser who doesn’t have a real job. What we see with Louis CK is that, although he is not a Jew, he still can play a Jew in the sense that he plays the everyman. His very existence is that of a schlemiel. He is an aging failure who likely has “no future.” Louis CK is, as the media executive says, “a circling failure in a rapidly decaying orbit.” In other words, like a schlemiel, he doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and the places he does occasion are dying away.
Louis CK, if he is to be considered at all, is an “option.” From the executive’s perspective, Louis CK can save the studio money (Seinfeld is too expensive). But in reality the secret is that Louis CK makes the studio money because the Jewish comic gestures that started in the Carnegie Deli (which the Media Mogul notes indirectly) have now become part and parcel of all Hollywood comedy. The irony of it all is, as the clip shows in the end, the pilot must be done in New York City (home of the Carnegie Deli) and not in Hollywood. In other words, Louis CK goes back to the place where it all started and he is given this mission by a Jew, but, and this is the point, he is not Jewish.
After watching this clip, I had a better understanding of how one could understand Louis CK’s ambiguous Jewishness and what it implies. I also understood that although we would like to see him become like Seinfeld, we would, ultimately, rather see Louis CK fail as he desperately tries to succeed. And in such failure we discover something that looks and feels Jewish but really isn’t. We also discover a comedy that is far crueler than anything we would find in Sholem Aleichem. Things have changed.
In America today, failure, it seems, has become a commonplace. As Walter Benjamin tells us, beauty, for Kafka (and himself), is the beauty of failure. And failure has, in America, lost its ethnicity and perhaps even its beauty when it found Louis CK. Echoing Irving Howe’s reading of Sholem Aleichem, I would say that my laughter at Louis CK is deeply “troubled.” And this “troubled laughter” has nothing to do with comedy in the face of the threat to Jewish existence posed by Jewish history so much as comedy in the face of the threat posed by one’s age, choices, and bad economic situation. And this threat is common to many Americans. It doesn’t come out of a tradition, as does the schlemiel, so much as out of a condition. Perhaps the take away from Jewish humor – which seems to be echoed in this episode – is that only a comedy that honestly depicts and performs failure can survive it.
Irving Howe initiated his letters to Ruth Wisse about Sholem Aleichem by staking his main claim that, based on his own experience of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, he must go against the grain and state that they, like all stories of the Schlemiel (from Chelm to Hershel Ostropolier), have “their undercurrents of darkness.” Throughout Howe’s letter, we find a repeated emphasis on how odd he now feels when he reads Aleichem: “And now, in reading Sholem Aleichem, I find myself growing nervous, anxious, even as I keep on laughing.” This troubled laughter reverberates throughout the letter.
Although she agrees in many ways, Ruth Wisse is suspicious of Howe’s way of speaking. And despite the fact that she can understand its source and agrees with it – to some extent – she puts forth a different tone and a different emphasis. As the epistolary correspondence moves on, this becomes more and more apparent.
Wisse initiates her epistolary response to Howe by noting that what he is saying was also said by the Yiddish critic and early admirer or Sholem Aleichem, Ba’al Makshoves. According to him, Wisse tells us, Aleichem “conjures up the collective anxiety and then dispels it magically, laughing the danger away.” Reflecting on this, Wisse argues that Aleichem’s contemporaries may have “taken the uncertainties for granted” and “enjoyed the relief he alone provided.” But she agrees with Howe and reflects that “nowadays his name has become such a byword for folksy good humor, innocent ‘laughter through tears,’ that we are surprised to rediscover the undertone of threat in his work.”
She concedes that it might be their shared “modernist bias” that makes them frown upon contemporary kitsch representations of Aleichem’s work; nonetheless, she does note that Aleichem was aware of the “fatal weakness of the culture.” It comes through in the “narrator’s sense of his own shared culpability in having brought it (the culture) low.”
In other words, he is a “self-conscious” modern artist and, like Howe and Wisse, he has a modernist bias. And unlike “Tevye, Sholem Aleichem encouraged his children’s Russification.” But, and here is the difference, Aleichem knew he was “confined to a Jewish fate” and was the “product of ‘tradition.’” He also left for American and made and remade himself like many other Jews fleeing a slowly dying Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
Although she acknowledges the modernist bias and the “ferocity” we see in Aleichem, Wisse wants to take some of the sting out of Howe’s reading. And she does this by lending more emphasis on Aleichem as the artist who, she believes, can do the Jewish people some good. Making reference to an Aleichem story entitled “Station Baranovitch,” Wisse notes how the narrator and the author share a similar task; the task of the story teller:
The fate of Kivke (the place in the story) and the Jewish community are ultimately in the hands of the gifted story teller whose untimely departure at Baranovitch constitutes the story’s only fatal event. The artist can transform reality at will – a potent charm in desperate times – but his magic is subject to temporal claims.
Like her brother, David Roskies (who in his book A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling, looks into the power of the Magid, “storyteller,” to bridge the past and the present), Wisse wants us to pay closer attention to the storyteller. Nonetheless history does matter for Wisse as much as it does for Howe. But history is balanced against the powers of the story teller: as we see in Wisse’s words above, the storyteller’s “magic is subject to temporal claims.”
In response to Wisse’s counter-balancing of the story-teller and his magic to the horrors of history, which he addresses, Howe takes note once again of the kitschy view he is trying to think through with his emphasis on the undercurrent of horror in Aleichem. He justifies his challenge in view of this:
To see Sholem Aleichem in this way seems a necessary corrective to the view, now prevalent in Jewish life, that softens him into a toothless entertainer, a jolly gleeman of the shtetl, a fiddler cozy on his roof.
The words “toothless entertainer,” “jolly gleeman of the shtetl,” etc are meant to cajole and insult those who fall for kitsch and masscult. He goes on to say that Aleichem is a “self-conscious” artist and not a “folk writer.” The problem with this claim, however, is that Wisse (like her brother Roskies) believes that Aleichem, although a self-conscious writer, was still drawing deeply on the folk tradition of the Magid (story-teller). In response, Howe notes that he came out of this culture -where the storyteller and the audience were intimate – but that he was not bound by it. Nonetheless, Howe himself is perplexed as his thesis – influenced by Saul Bellow – about comedy and horror being interchangeable is being challenged by Wisse who is looking for more balance between the powers of the story teller and the challenge of history.
The word Howe uses to distinguish his reading of Aleichem from the older type of Magid – and to “balance” the Jewish tradition with the modern artist – is “quizzical” (a word which, as we shall see, Wisse plays on):
Sholem Aleichem stands as both firm guardian of the Jewish past and a quizzical skeptical Jew prepared (as the story of the Tevye stories makes clear) to encounter and maybe accept the novelty and surprise of modern Jewish life. It’s just this balance, so delicate and precarious, that I find so enchanting in his work.
In “the end,” says Howe, what we also hear in Aleichem’s folkloristic tales is a “quizzical voice.” Howe goes on to say of this voice that it “tells of madness…but so long as we can hear that voice, we know the world is not yet entirely mad.” Indeed, Howe sees quizzical voice as offering a kind of salvation for modern readers such as himself who see the world as mad.
But this mad, quizzical voice is not funny. And its salvational aspect is, because it is mad, still troubling. Nonetheless, Howe agrees that the traditional and the modern should be balanced by way of balancing the folk voice (the voice of the Jewish tradition) with the “quizzical” voice.
In response, Wisse next letter pushes Howe to think more about the meaning of balance so as to take the edge off of his modernist obsession with the “quizzical” and the uncanny. She notes that of the three greatest Yiddish writers – Mendele, I.L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem – all tried to find a “balance” between tradition and modernist writing but each of them tilted too much in the direction of towards the skeptical: “The strain of this divided existence, and the resentment, shows in their work.” However, Aleichem is “different”; he achieves balance:
Sholem Aleichem is different. Though he too felt the impending break in the ‘golden chain’ of Jewish tradition, and felt the cracks within his own life, he makes it his artistic business to close the gap.
Wisse goes so far as to say that “wherever there is a danger of dissolution,” the stories “work their magic in simulating or creating a terra firma.” In other words, we need to pay attention to the crisis but, more importantly, we need to see how Aleichem addresses it and “balances” out tradition. As Roskies, Wisse’s brother might say, Aleichem provides a “bridge” and that, for Wisse, is more important that the “quizzical” voice that Howe hears in Aleichem’s work.
To be sure, by Terra Firma Wisse even goes so far as to agree with the Yiddish critic Borukh Rivkin that Aleichem gave the Jews of Eastern Europe a “fictional territory to compensate for their lack of a national soil.” Wisse’s reading, here, is echoed by Sidrah DeKoven Ezrahi in Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination. In her book Ezrahi sees this move, for her embodied in the post-Holocaust American translation project of Howe, Bellow, and Feidler, as the creation of a “virtual shtetl” – and, after the founding of Israel, this substitute land (think of George Steiner’s “text as homeland”) comes into question.
In addition to finding the necessary “balance” in terms of rescuing tradition from dissolution, Wisse claims, in response to Howe, that even though Tevye is not the Vilna Gaon, he is “the original stand-up comic, playing to an appreciative audience of one: his impresario, Sholem Aleichem, who then passes on this discovered talent to his readers.”
In other words, Wisse looks to underscore the ameliorative aspects of Jewish humor which are a response to history. She does this by pointing out that Aleichem not only balances out tradition but he does so in the spirit of the “original stand up comic,” which he created.
And this speaks to Wisse’s recent book No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, since Wisse looks for a humor that balances tradition instead of destroying it by way of extreme/excessive sarcasm.
As I have tried to show in this blog entry, Wisse also thinks that extreme skepticism (the “quizzical” tone that Howe speaks of with Aleichem) can also pose a threat. That’s why she introduces the notion of “balance” into the epistolary exchange with Howe.
(In the next blog entries that address this epistolary exchange, I’d like to bring out this subtle contrast between Howe and Wisse so as to show how the schlemiel can be read in terms of the tension between tradition and modernity. If an author looks at the schlemiel in too skeptical or quizzical a light, the Jewish tradition may be compromised. Nonetheless, Wisse does agree that skepticism must be there. As I noted above, for Wisse it seems to be a matter of emphasis. She would agree that there is a strange, dark “undercurrent” with the schlemiel, but how much of an undercurrent? How does it relate to – or balance out with – the comic element? Is that what makes for Jewishness? Or does radical skepticism and irrevernace, as we see in writers like Sholom Auslander or even Phillip Roth, mark Jewishness as “quizzical?”)
In their epistolary introduction on Sholem Aleichem, Irving Howe sets the tone for his declaration of Jewishness by noting that he has an “uneasy feeling” that he has discovered a Sholem Aleichem that has “seldom been encountered.” Howe says what no-one wants to hear; namely, that Sholem Aleichem “turns out to be imagining, beneath the scrim of his playfulness and at the center of his humor, a world of uncertainty, shifting perception, anxiety, even terror”(vii).
Howe uncovers and shares something shocking about Aleichem. He then akes the newly perplexed reader by the hand. After disclosing what has been repressed about Aleichem, he compassionately notes: “Let no innocent reader be alarmed: the stories are just as funny as everyone has said. But they now seem to me funny in a way that almost no one has said.”
Reading this sentence, I could not help but think of how Martin Heidegger, the celebrated German philosopher, speaks in his talk “What is metaphysics?” Here Howe acts like Heidegger when he performs, like and unlike Heidegger, what Heidegger would call the “nihilation of the Nothing.” What happens for Howe, as a reader of Aleichem, is that the world he, the reader, lives in – the world of Sholem Aleichem – is “now” different. It has been nihilated by suffering and unspeakable horror (which Howe assocaites with the scars of Pogroms, violence, anti-Semitism, and an existential experience of everything become strange, unfamiliar…all of a sudden). In this moment of nihilation, the fictional world of Aleichem’s schlemiels is funny, but it is no longer the same.
Aleichem’s “Kasrilevke” – his Chelm full of Schlemiels – is nihilated by the nothing. Howe tells us, however, that the world of Sholem Aleichem’s stories is still funny. In other words, Kasrilevke (Aleichem’s Chelm) remains funny, but it is other: the world of Sholem Aleichem’s stories is “funny” but “in a way that almost no one has said.”
If we listen closely to this line, we can see that Howe’s line sounds stupefied at its uniqueness. But, in truth, it is so only because, in his reading experience of Aleichem, he has lost his belief in Aleichem’s laughter through tears (his “folksy” Chelm) and is fascinated with witnessing a terror that, he argues, permeates Aleichem’s fictional world.
But though it is “other,” Aleichem’s world remains comic; in other words, one has not totally lost one’s kitschy relation to the world of Sholem Aleichem by this shocking realization. One is still, so to speak, Jewish if one identifies with folksy humor and schlemiels. But this identification is of the masses while Irving Howe’s identification is with those who scrutinized themselves. These special readers find that Aleichem shows us what we don’t want too see: the suffering that ruptures our history. As Howe wants to remind us, Jewish history, like Aleichem’s stories, is full of rupture. In other words, Chelm and Kasrikevke, the fictional worlds of schlemiels, are still funny and familiar yet they are also…. “now” unfamiliar.
Howe reiterates this existential astonishment after noting that the Yiddish Critic S. Niger, which he and Eliezer Greenberg “anthologized in our Voices from the Yiddish, thought that Aleichem was a “writer of tenderness and cleverness, with a profound grasp of Jewish life.” Howe says that, at this moment something has changed. This is not “the Sholem Aleichem I now see.”
Howe’s movements from this to the next sentence are astonishing. After reading this, Howe asks Wisse: “Is my view a distortion, the kind induced by modernist bias and training?” Following this he acknowledges that he may be overreaching in his claims for Aleichem’s Jewish humor: “I am aware of that danger and try to check my self, but still…”
Strangely enough, Howe incriminates himself and his obsession with crying through laughter. He must report what he sees in Aleichem despite the fact that it goes against the grain of the community and despite the fact that he fears Wisse will accuse him of a “modernist bias.”
Howe goes on to insist that what we find in Aleichem is not “merely a folk voice” but a “self-conscious disciplined artist.” Aleichem is not a “folksy tickler.” And in addtion to him being a “self-conscious disciplined artist,” Aleichem, like “all great humorists, he attaches himself to the disorder which lies beneath the apparent order of the universe, to the madness beneath the apparent sanity. In many of the stories one hears the timbre of the problematic.”
Speaking directly to Wisse’s work on the schlemiel, Howe claims that, based on his experience of the nihilation of the kitschy, folikish aspect of Sholem Aleichem’s stories/world, he can now state the generalization that the “Chelm stories, Herschel Ostropolier stories, the Hasidic tales, even sometimes the folk songs, all have their undercurrents of darkness.”
Questions:
Will Wisse agree with this crying through laughter which challenges the schlemiel’s laughter through tears? Will she agree with Howe’s reading of the schlemiel? In the next blog, we will address this question and look into how she addresses it. This will help us to better understand the similarities and differences between them regarding the schlemiel and Jewishness itself.
Do we laugh through tears or do we cry through laughter? The answer to this question or perhaps the question itself are, for Irving Howe, the crux of Jewish identity. For Howe, the few Jews who really “scrutinize” themselves, the Jews who “dare to know” (so to speak), will come to this very question. Howe has taken this risk and his experience of this question concerning Jewish humor serves as an example of his Jewishness. This performance of Jewish identity – which comes out through his question concerning Jewish humor – is what Howe is showing us. Howe is demonstrating a Jewishness that is based on pondering the question of what Jewish humor and with it Jewish identity is.
Either one laughs in order to dispel one’s sadness or one laughs and inevitably runs into sadness. For Howe, laughter cannot dispel tears. This declaration is, to be sure, Howe’s conversion experience. And he didn’t learn it from Saul Bellow, as he stated in his introduction to Jewish American Stories; rather, he learned it from an artist who is Saul Bellow’s Moses: Sholem Aleichem.
The relation of Bellow to Sholem Aleichem is a missing link for understanding not just Howe’s approach to Judaism, which ponders the question as to whether one laughs through tears or cries through laughter, but Howe’s Judaism, which he inherits.
As I pointed out in the last blog-entry, Irving Howe, in his introduction to Jewish American Stories, and in this epistolary exchange, identifies with Saul Bellow’s reading of Jewishness. And, as I pointed out, Bellow’s reading of Jewish identity is made in terms of Jewish humor.
Let us recall that Bellow finds that the uniqueness of Jewish humor is found in the fact that “laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not so easy to determine the relation between the two.” Howe so deeply identifies with Bellow’s claim about the intermingling of laughter and trembling in the Jewish humor that he repeats it in his shared introduction to another book published. This new book, a collection of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, was published three years after Jewish American Stories. The 1979 collection of Shalom Aleichem stories is entitled The Best of Sholem Aleichem Stories.
In that introduction, Howe once again nods to Bellow and notes that Jewish humor “laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relation between the two.” The fact that Howe repeats this definition – not simply of Jewish humor, but, for Howe, Jewishness- is significant: he shares this “declaration” of his Jewishness with Ruth Wisse, a scholar of the schlemiel.
Given that he is testing his view of the schlemiel against hers, what Wisse says in response to Howe is even more telling. Her similarities with Howe are important, but her differences are more interesting. Her schlemiel and his differ.
The difference between their views of Jewish humor is instructive for those of us, today, who are concerned with the meaning of Jewish identity. Their shared introduction to The Best Stories of Sholem Aleichem teaches us – by way ofprompting us in a Talmudic manner – to interpret their relationship. To prompt their readers to make a more literary reading of their introduction to Aleichem, they structured it as an epistolary exchange.
Let’s take note of this and read their dialogue closely.
I’d like to carefully go through this exchange of letters so as to show where Wisse agrees with Howe. After doing this, we can she where and how she tactfully disagrees. The subtle differences between them are important and foreshadow Wisse’s recent book and much talkedaboutbook on Jewish Humor: No Joke. ( I will address this book in a separate blog entry, but for now I’d like to draw out the precursor to that work which, I think, can be found in her dialogue with Howe.)
Ruth Wisse’s 1979 reading of Aleichem is of especial interest to a “schlemiel theorist” like me since Wisse is one of the foremost authorities on the schlemiel. Her reading of Aleichem and Howe’s reading are not simply founded on their similar yet different readings of Jewish humor but also their readings of Jeiwshness. For both, the famed Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem is an important starting point. As a historian of Jewish literature, Howe believes that without Sholem Aleichem their could be no be Saul Bellow. Bellow inherits crying through laughter not laughter through tears from Sholoem Aleichem.
First of all, although the introduction begins with (and is initiated by) Howe’s reflections on Aleichem’s perplexing humor, it ends with Wisse’s resolution. Her resoluation balances between Howe’s “quizzical” view of Aleichem’s humor and Wisse’s own “quizzical” yet joyful view of his humor. In the end, it is not just a matter of emphasis; in fact, their views of humor also articulate two kinds of Jewishness. And the differences between these articulations are instructive and far reaching.
What concerns Howe most about Aleichem is the darker side of his work. To be sure, one of the reasons he put Sholem Aleichem’s Best Stories together with Ruth Wisse was to show this neglected aspect of Aleichem’s humor. Until then, many Americans who romanticized Aleichem (and, for Howe, Fiddler on the Roof didn’t help) associated Jewishness with joy and “laughter through tears.”
For Howe, this view, which I will call the “kitschy” view, is wrong.
The view of Aleichem (and the schlemiel) as simply a popular fun loving artist is, for Howe, too kitschy; and, as a result, it forgets history and rupture. To be sure, Howe doesn’t desire a kitschy kind of laughter through tears. He’s not interested in a Broadway or a Hollywood Production of Fiddler on the Roof (1964).
He seeks to be true to who he, by virtue of history, is: a Jew. And his commitment to this kind of troubled laughter demonstrates his commitment to Judaism. This commitment puts his kitschy identification with Jewishness into question. But the kitschy view of humor is not annihilated. Alechem’s humorous world is, so to speak, “nihilated.”
Howe wants to show us (demonstrate for us) that his commitment to troubled laughter, in the face of such nihilation, is based on the approach to Judaism of his progenitor, Sholem Aleichem. In other words, Howe’s Jewishness can be found in the troubled laughter we hear in Aleichem’s books. He wants to share this insight and demonstrate how a commitment to Jewishness must challenge the popular, kischy view, that laughs through tears.
Howe seeks to set the record straight. In the introduction he shares with Ruth Wisse, Howe tells us that Aleichem, like Bellow after him insist that to be Jewish we must admit that we cry through laughter. This is tantamount to, as Howe says, “declaring” one’s Jewishness.
Wisse responds to Howe’s declaration with her own.
Irving Howe’s search for the meaning of Jewishness differs from these. His search was inseparable from his interest in the relationship of Jewish history to modernity and to Yiddish and Jewish American Literature. It is also inseparable from his understanding of Jewish humor. As I pointed out in the last blog entry on Howe, he went through many different readings of Jewishness and concluded that Jewishness is a “vague thing.” Nonetheless, this doesn’t keep him from closely researching it and finding resonance in Jewish American literature. What concerned him most was the future of Jewish American literature and Jewishness. Relating to this, he thought that with the loss of the Jewish immigrant experience, which he believed were inseparable from places like New York and Chicago, Jewishness would also be lost. As I pointed out in the blog entry, Howe believed that Jewish-American literature had no future because people no longer had a “felt” relationship to Jewish tradition or Yiddish.
Howe’s sense of Jewishness is, to be sure, found in his relationship with this loss of tradition and the transition from having a tradition to draw on to having no tradition. But there is more to the story. Of all the thinkers and writers that Howe mentions in relation to Jewishness (which include Osip Mandelstam, Saul Bellow, Harold Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Phillip Rahv), he finds his greatest affinity with the Nobel Prize winning author, Saul Bellow’s tragic-comic reading of Jewishness. His own sense of Jewishness, which amounts to a big, sad, question mark, draws on what he says about Bellow in his introduction to Jewish American Stories and on what he says in a shared introduction to The Best of Sholom Aleichem (an introduction he shares, by way of letters (!), with Ruth Wisse). Moreover, what he says about Jewishness vis-à-vis Bellow is nothing more nor less than his reading of the schlemiel.
Regarding Bellow’s understanding of Jewishness, Howe cites Bellow, in his introduction to Jewish American Stories, as saying:
In Jewish stories laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relation of the two. At times laughter seems to restore the equilibrium of sanity; at times the figures of the story or parable, appear to invite or encourage trembling with the secret aim of overcoming it by means of laughter.
Immediately following this, Howe does something unusual. He cites himself and gives his reading of Jewishness in terms of the perplexity of post-assimilation:
They (Jews) had achieved ‘a normal life’ in America, and for those with any taste for self-scrutiny, it was a life permanently beset by the question: who am I and why do I so declare myself? To live with this problem in a state of useful discontent was perhaps what it now meant to be a Jew.
Howe identifies himself with “those (Jews) who have any taste for self-scrutiny.” And he also identifies with Bellow. To be sure, later in the introduction, he confirms his identification with Bellow when he writes: “For what I want to assert is that the dominant American Jewish style is the one brought to a pitch by Saul Bellow and imitated and modified by a good many others.” And, I would add, by himself.
Taken together, Howe is telling us that his “self-scrutiny” about what it means to be a Jew can be found in Bellow’s reflection on Jewish humor and its relationship to suffering and “trembling.” Indeed, the exchange between the comic and the horrific is of great interest to Howe. And this has a lot to do with what he thinks is Jewish, today.
His reading of Sholom Aleichem – as espoused in his introduction to The Best Sholom Aleichem Stories – is permeated by such a comic-horrific “feeling.” With respect to the schlemiel, this reading is brought to its breaking point by way of his dialogue (in the shared introduction to that book) with the noted scholar of the Schlemiel, Ruth Wisse.
In the next blog entry, I will turn to this dialogue so as to tease out what is at stake when one reads the schlemiel in terms of an exchange between laughter and horror. The stakes involve the relationship of literature and reflection to history. As I have pointed out above, for Howe, this is his way of relating to Jewishness and it differs from those who seek to understand what it means to be Jewish by way of religion, Zionism, post-Zionism, etc. And, unlike these other ways of seeking Jewishness, it underscores the importance of the schlemiel for understanding what it means to be Jewish.
Last night the screening of Shlemiel at the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center went very well. What I love most about sharing the film are the Q & A sessions that follow the screening. This time I was fortunate to be showing the film to a group of artists and art critics whose insights into the film were insightful and novel. These emerged out of questions pertaining to where I am now and where I am going.
Every time I see the film, I see myself going through a process and I can’t help but smirk to see how my dreams, like a schlemiel, didn’t match up with reality. I dreamed big and the film maker did a fine job of showing how my father also did. From the very start, I could see that I was casting my net out and believed that my band, Men With Babies, would be successful. What the film shows is how it failed to make it to the NXNE (North by North East Music) Festival. Nonetheless, after the film was made, it screened at NXNE and my band was invited to play. (And the band’s future – albeit in a new incarnation – is still yet to be determined.) The film also shows how I dreamed big about religious experience and how that also faltered. This had to do with the fact that I came to Judaism through a Hasidic group that had major Messianic aspirations. Moreover, my father also had the Messianic on his mind (as a part of his psychosis). And, as I pointed out in my last post, I opened myself up to his insights and they bled into my own search for what it meant to be an American Jew.
To be sure, I thought of the Messianic in terms of my own music. But I didn’t cast all my chips down with the Hasidic vision of the Messianic. The film shows that part; but it doesn’t show how I was influenced by the Messianic aspirations of avant-garde art and poetry. I was interested in breaking boundaries like Antonin Artaud, the Living Theater, or Jerzy Growtowski.
To my mind, these movements, words, and gestures looked to break open boundaries and expose us to something we have never seen, something to come, something Messianic.
I also saw this in the mad writing that came out of Thomas Pynchon and other experimental writers. I heard this madness in much of Paul Celan’s later poetry. And as a person who has studied philosophy and teaches philosophy, I found a philosophical root for this in the Messianic as understood by the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. All of this amounted to an avant-garde type of secular messianism (or as John Caputo might say – in the name of Derrida – a “messianism without messianism”) and a revolutionary kind of practice.
When I was a teenager, I foolishly looked to art as Nietzsche, in the preface of The Gay Science), did: I thought I could – by my own efforts – transform my bodily and psychological pain and trauma into joy. But, unlike Nietzsche, I learned when I was an undergraduate that if this were to possibly happen, I could not do this alone. I truly believed, like Emmanuel Levinas, that it depended on the other.
The “schlemiel-problem” in all of this doesn’t lie with this insight; it inheres in the word “believe.” To be sure, I believed too much in the interaction of myself and the audience and this led to a crash course. But, at the very least, I learned that if I were to crash it would be before the other and not by myself.
The questions from the audience prompted me to think about how much my dreams didn’t fit with reality. I now realize that I couldn’t, like the avant-garde artists I loved, go at it alone. I still believe that a secular messianic happens and can happen between the actor, writer, artist and the audience – it happens between people. And that I, of course, must initiate an encounter or respond to an encounter. I know that, because the actor, writer, and artists must take risks that they are, and have to be, to some extent hopeful and, yes, foolish. Artists, like schlemiels, must dream. And those dreams – if they are to be affective – must be shared. And this, one must admit, is foolish because it is uncertain. Nonetheless, one must take one’s (foolish) chances.
The schlemiel fails best because he or she still goes on and is, in many ways, blind to failure and to the scope of his or her dreams or perceptions.
I can testify to that as can many a schlemiel-artist. I am a schlemiel who is aware of his propensity to dream big; but that won’t stop me from being a schlemiel. Unlike others, I don’t think the schlemiel is something that can or even should be eliminated through a conscious rejection of ‘dreams’ in favor of ‘reality’ or the ‘world’ or the feminine for the masculine, or humor for seriousness. No. One can and must dream and take risks and this is a part of the human condition. No matter how hard a Jew tries not to be comic and to shoot far over their mark and avoid the blind spots, one will always miss something. And this makes sense.
This doesn’t simply mean that we should, as Beckett said, “fail better.” It means that we should always try to make for a fit between ourselves and the world but with a comic awareness that that fit will always, comically, be off.
And this speaks to my own Jewishness. I may have tried to reject one part of it, but I have at the same time embraced another part. I am not afraid to say that me relationship to the world, as a Jew, is still mediated by the schlemiel. My relationship to Jewishness also bears its mark.
I thank the artists and art critics at the Isabella Freedman Artists Retreat for helping me to rethink where I have, as Paul Celan might say, come from and where I am going to. In the end, this schlemiel has come out of a mess and is now going (awkwardly) towards you, the other, but with different eyes. And yet, I know, that even with these new eyes there will always be a blind spot which may keep me from seeing what or who is in front of me.
Who is that in the mirror? It’s me and its not me….
Schlemiel Theory 