A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

WELTANSCHAUUNG: EW's Mark Harris (rapidly approaching fave status, though no vote has been taken yet) moonlights for New York Magazine to talk to Woody Allen and Larry David about their new collaboration, Whatever Works (a script Allen originally wrote with Zero Mostel in mind), and muses on the state of Jewish comedy:

By the time Seinfeld became a hit, the idea of otherness, or even of depression, as central to Jewish comedy already seemed quaint. And today, in the age of Jon Stewart, it feels downright ancient. Stewart can be smart, impassioned, engaged, shticky, earnest—but neurosis, into which he playfully dips, isn’t the most deeply felt aspect of what he does. When he assumes the stance of a wimp or a weakling, it’s lightly ironic, a costume from the Jewish past he can don for a laugh, then shrug off.

At the movies, Allen’s most natural heir and the most successful representative of the new Jewish humor is Judd Apatow, who has pointedly put Jewish characters in many of his mainstream comedies (a genre that tends to omit potentially discomforting details like religion). To those of us raised on Allen’s films, Apatow’s schlumpy, relaxed good guys may hardly seem Jewish at all — they’re more defined by their status as slackers, stoners, horndogs, and underachievers. They might have grown up asking the Four Questions at the Seder table, but they wear their religious heritage with a casualness — neither obsessive nor dismissive — that is light-years from the scratchy suit in which Allen seemed trapped. “F*ck you guys, I’m glad I’m not Jewish,” grumbles the excluded-feeling non-Semite in Seth Rogen’s Knocked Up posse. “So are we,” Rogen shoots back with a smirk. “You weren’t ‘chosen’ for a reason."

Even fifteen years ago, some comedy elders might have derided the, let’s call it, Reform Jewish humor of Stewart and Apatow (and Rogen, Sarah Silverman, Adam Sandler, and countless others) as “assimilationist.” Today, the charge is irrelevant. The new comics haven’t assimilated; rather, they were born into a comedy culture that has Jewish humor so deep in its DNA that they’re naturally at home in it.