Given 3,000 years of slavery, exile, Crusades, ghettos, blood libel and the Holocaust, few chroniclers of history would consider the story of the Jews a laugh riot. Meet Rob Kutner, who does.
Kutner, an award-winning comedy writer for late-night TV, is the author of “The Jews: 5,000 Years and Counting,” a joke-a-minute romp through Jewish history. Kutner manages to find humor in every chapter of that history, even the parts that clearly aren’t funny.
The book came out in March, published by the Jewish imprint Wicked Son. As part of a national book tour, Kutner will appear Dec. 1 at Congregation Beth Israel in Berkeley and Dec. 2 at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto, on stage in conversation with the JCC’s CEO, Zack Bodner. During those events, he will no doubt recount how and why he wrote his latest book.
“For me it was a way to unload the Jewish history I’ve been learning all my life, to use my comic voice and skills,” Kutner, 53, said in an interview from his home in L.A. “It feels even more important now to present a factual and relatively balanced Jewish history.”
Like any proper history, Kutner begins in the beginning, recounting the Torah’s account of the origins of the Jewish people. Chief in his bag of rhetorical tricks, Kutner gives voice to the main characters, writing in the first person as the snake in the Garden of Eden, Noah’s wife Naamah (who dubs the ark “The Wooden Box of Stank”) and the dysfunctional clan of Abraham and Sarah, whom he imagines enduring a family therapy session.
“Putting them in the first person was to break up the format and keep it readable and engaging,” Kutner said. “Also, I had to figure out how to deal with the Bible. People know it pretty well.”
He goes on to portray King David as a “rock star,” the Maccabees struggling to market their new holiday of Hanukkah (“Our voices will also rise in glorious song — well, one or two songs that no one quite remembers every verse to”) and the sages of the Talmud, pictured in a series of trading cards.
“I find that appeals to young people,” Kutner said of his irreverent approach. “With kids you have to be a little dangerous. The other side of the argument is, I wanted a welcoming and warm tone, hoping this would be of interest to potential allies.”
As Kutner moves into more modern history, he wrestles with some darker episodes. His chapter about the pogroms of Russia is subtitled “It Takes a Village.” He includes a sequel to “Fiddler on the Roof,” in which the iconic song “Tradition” becomes “Expulsion.” He calls the Jews who steadily returned to the Holy Land starting in the 1800s “the worst colonizers ever.”
That last joke sprang from Kutner’s unapologetic Zionism, and an upbringing steeped in Jewish tradition.
He grew up in Atlanta in a Reform household. However, he attended a K-12 Christian school, an experience he said deepened his Jewish identity (he jokes that when the school published a list of the universities seniors were headed to, it said “Hell” next to his name). He was active with Hillel in college and later spent a year in Israel attending a yeshiva and the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies. Today, he describes himself as “Conservadox.”
As for his comedy education, Kutner said it started with his grandfather, “a nonstop jokester.”
“Both of my parents were very funny,” he said. “My dad was an ophthalmologist, often cracking inappropriate jokes. I grew up immersing myself in Monty Python, ‘Kids in the Hall,’ and after [Princeton University] I dabbled in stand-up.”
In time, he joined the writing staff of “The Daily Show” and “Conan,” scripted animated shows such as “Teen Titans Go!” “Ben 10” and “Angry Birds: Summer Madness,” and authored a series of humorous books, including “Apocalypse How” and “The Future According to Me.”
He also contributed material for the Oscars, the Emmys and two White House Correspondents’ Dinners. He himself is a winner of Emmy and Peabody awards.
In his latest book, Kutner brings Jewish history right up to the present moment, including the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel and the subsequent tsunami of anti-Jewish hate around the world. When he surmises which way that may go in the United States, Kutner is uncharacteristically uneasy, writing, “Who knows?”
“It’s a bit of a Rorschach test,” he said of that cryptic comment, “a way of saying I don’t know what’s coming, but it doesn’t seem great right now. It was an economical way of saying to American Jews, ‘Don’t get too comfortable.’”