Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials by Jennifer Caplan

Author:Jennifer Caplan [Caplan, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HUM000000 HUMOR / General, SOC049000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Jewish Studies, PER015000 PERFORMING ARTS / Comedy
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2023-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Seinfeld

Seinfeld is, of course, one of the quintessential TV shows of the 1990s and is to TV what Woody Allen is to movies, namely, the first thing many people think of when you say “Jewish humor.” Ironically, however, Seinfeld not only rarely makes reference to religion at all, but the writers and performers purposely play fast and loose with our assumptions about Jewish characters. Based on the sheer quantity written about Seinfeld and Judaism as compared to other shows, one might assume that it was a show about Jews, at least.38 In reality, however, of the main characters only Jerry himself is actually Jewish. Despite George being written as a stereotypically Jewish character (and his parents being written and performed as very Jewish) and Elaine being often seen as a “Jewish American Princess type,” neither character is Jewish. Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who play George and Elaine, are Jewish (Alexander) or from historically Jewish families (Louis-Dreyfus).39 The inspirations for the characters, according to the writers, were Carol Leifer (a comedian and one of the writers for the show) and Jason Alexander himself, both Jews. Jeffrey Shandler describes the characters as, “crypto-Jews who were deliberately, playfully, and transparently disguised as something else,” which aligns with the ways the writers of the series have spoken of the fun they had in creating non-Jewish characters and then making them as Jewish as possible.40 There has been debate over whether, perhaps, George’s mother is Jewish, although when Estelle Harris (the actress who plays Mrs. Costanza) asked the show’s cocreator and writer Larry David, his response to her was, “What do you care?” Vincent Brook has gone on record asserting that, “diegetically speaking, George is manifestly non-Jewish,”41 although Jarrod Tanny points out that Mrs. Costanza refuses to ride in German cars, which is much more of a nod to post-Holocaust Jews than to Italians. There is some question as to whether Kramer is Jewish, but if he is, it is never mentioned.42 And he is never specified as not Jewish. So it is with their tongue firmly in their cheeks that the writers set out to make the most Jewish non-Jews on television.

Nathan Abrams, in The New Jew in Film discusses the ways that “Jews” were coded on screen, at least through Seinfeld’s era. He says representations of Jews were “racialized and anti-Semitic; invisible or nonexistent; idealized, de-Judainized and de-Semitized; often replaced by the Gentile mimicking the Jew; ethnicized, anxious, and neurotic; or victimized and humiliated. Furthermore . . . [there] were certain recurring stereotypical tics . . . including fast-talking intelligence, physical weakness, small stature, and sexual preference for the blonde shiksa.”43 The characters on Seinfeld tick almost every box, especially the “Gentile mimicking the Jew,” which is what George and Elaine could be seen as doing, though the Jewishness of Alexander and family history of Louis-Dreyfuss make them almost Jews mimicking gentiles mimicking Jews.

This is a phenomenon that Vincent Brook identifies as “perceptually Jewish” characters, which he contrasts with “conceptually Jewish” characters.44

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