Sunday Night Documentary

"When Jews Were Funny"—With Pros and Cons Of Posting This

Today: I wrote one piece, worked on it about 3 hours, moved on to another, worked on it for 7 hours. How then, do they fail?

The first one was a travel piece, of a sort, about La Alpujarra. (Just back from a voyage.) That one will survive.

The second one was dark and dismal, all about my frustrated relationship with electronic communications, and my sense of what exactly is happening to us by way of all this non-grounded communication.

I started writing it after receiving a lashing from somebody who had written to me to offer help (with Zoom calls, which we’re not doing right now) and I had not replied.

I apologized but my apology was rejected. “Too late,” she wrote. The moment had passed, she informed me. She added that she had reached out also by phone but I don’t even have my American phone connected here, so it’s doubly frustrating.

Infected now, with a dose of demoralization, I started to knit a hopeless sweater, about technology, not being able to keep up, even remotely, my loathing of electronic communications, the assault of all things digital, the collapse of real friendships, information sand storms, inchoate forms of “communication,” guilt, debt, how deaf we are becoming to one another—and so on.

At 4 am, I felt I should kill it—not publish it, since it was whiny, pointless and dis-spiriting.

So I bailed out, and started to watch a documentary about Jewish humor.

Halfway through the documentary, thinking I wanted to post it, I read some of the comments. Many loved it, but some were angered by it, along these lines:

@davidhinkley

“This is just a pile of supremacist nonsense. Gross! “

Suddenly I thought about not posting this documentary, since people on the internet got indignant.

But then I thought about it, and realized I was self-censoring.

It’s a good little documentary with a choral of voices addressing a golden age of Yiddish rooted Jewish comedy in the Catskills, and yeah, some of them brag, but so what?

I always like to hear people talking about a subject they really understand.

In the comments, somebody else wrote: “Jews aren’t funny. Yiddish is funny.”

Ok, fine.

I only cared that anything was funny.

I can walk and chew gum. I can abhor Israel’s brutality and post a documentary about Catskills Jewish stand up comedy.

And Yiddish is funny.

But I wonder if I am, in fact, expected not to praise Jewish humor? Let me know.

The documentary is about rhythm. (The rhythm of Yiddish.) It’s about voices, now “gone,” and about what makes something funny, or not—which we will never agree on, thankfully.

There’s so much dark news, so much nihilism, and contempt for people—it feels like an existential threat some days, steering between the rocks in the archipelago, trying to anticipate and reflect everybody’s animosities.

All ethnicities have their humor, and it is (yes) supremacist nonsense to say, as one person does in this documentary, that Jews “own comedy.”

But so what?

This is for anybody who misses their old Jewish relatives who spoke Yiddish.