Whither the shlemiel?
According to a smart and much-discussed New York Magazine article last May, American Jewish prosperity has all but killed off the “neurotic, depressive, abrasive, excluded” antiheroes that once animated a comedic tradition running from Groucho Marx to Woody Allen.
Larry David, entertainment critic Mark Harris argued in his essay, is keeping their brand of humor on a ventilator, introducing the shlemiel and his sidekicks to “a generation to whom it’s now almost completely foreign.”
What Harris did not take into account was that young Jews born to privilege, like other Americans their age, are facing the very real prospect that they will never be as affluent as their parents. Praise God for the tanking economy: At least in the hands of novelist Sam Lipsyte, old-school Jewish humor has come back.
Lipsyte’s satirical novel “The Ask,” released this month, concerns the transformation of Milo Burke, an overeducated, underemployed wannabe art star, into a truly down-at-the-heels shmo.
We first meet Milo as a man in socioeconomic limbo: In early middle age, with a wife and a young son, he works in the development office of a so-so university but still dreams of becoming a great painter; he is poorer than he was growing up but of a higher social class than his neighbors in Astoria, Queens. As a result, he has contracted an au courant malady: a case of white liberal guilt exacerbated by the dread that the privilege he loathes in himself is about to be taken away.
Milo’s condition deteriorates significantly after he is fired, only to be rehired on the condition that he can coax a major donation from Purdy Stuart, a former college friend and now a sleazy millionaire who needs him for a job just slightly less compromising than that of a Mafia bagman.
All this is quite grim, though hilarious in Lipsyte’s telling, but there’s also a redemptive aspect to the novel that’s easy to overlook. When Milo slips down the class ladder, something is waiting for him at the bottom: an ethnic identity that had eluded him when he was a just-average hipster. By the end of the book, he is a grade-A shlemiel.
What’s funny about professional shlemiels from Groucho to Woody is their insistent and absurd contrariness in the face of the obvious bounds imposed on them (“I would never join a club that would accept me as a member”).
Milo is half-Jewish — on the side that halachically counts — but he primarily identifies, at the outset of his unfortunate journey, as a wannabe art star. Newly fired, he spends his days wandering the streets of Astoria worrying that people just like himself will move in and ruin its heartening mixed-income multiculturalism.
“They were infiltrating, the freaking me’s,” he thinks on one of his walks. “The me’s were going to wreck everything, hike rents, demand better salads. The me’s were going to drive me away.”
Milo’s shame-faced identification as the aggressor keeps his own ethnic affinities at arm’s length. But once he has been knocked from the creative class into a milieu that includes laborers, Iraq veterans and underworld types, other people start, in effect, calling him a yid and, through having to contend with the slur, he becomes one.
Left by his wife, the anchor of his shaky existence, Milo finally comes to take a certain pride in his Jewishness, if for no reason other than to mock those real and imagined enemies who see him simply as a yid.
“Come kill me as a Jew, flog me to death in a desert quarry, bayonet me in the Pale, gas me in your Polish camp, behead me on your camcorder, I still would not believe,” he says. “To me that was the true test of courage: to not submit to the faith they assume you possess and will kill you for.”
With “The Ask,” Lipsyte surely wins this month’s if not this year’s award for deftest reworking of this tragicomic, supposedly superannuated comic material, but he’s not the only one who still finds it funny.
It appears in a different form in the film “Greenberg” — the latest from director Noah Baumbach, who at 40 is just a year younger than Lipsyte.
Like “The Ask,” “Greenberg” is a sharply attuned comedy of social class, though in this case, the shlemiel at its center is Roger Greenberg, a middle-aged, emotionally disturbed scion of a wealthy Los Angeles family (played by Ben Stiller) who has an affair with his brother’s personal assistant (Greta Gerwig).
Woody Allen fans will notice nods to “Annie Hall” in a moment when Stiller becomes momentarily indistinguishable from a crowd of Chassids, and in Gerwig’s charming but genuinely awkward character who, like Annie, shyly sings at a local nightclub. But beyond these references, there is little overt Jewishness in “Greenberg,” save for an early scene when Roger’s Semitic looks are mentioned in jest by a fellow guest at a pool party.
“I’m not even … I’m only half,” Roger protests.
“You look full,” the guest says.
“That’s not what I usually get,” Roger says. “People think I look Italian. And since my mom is Protestant, I’m actually not Jewish at all.”
The joke’s on Roger, because Baumbach has given his film such an unavoidably Jewish title. It’s a brilliant deconstruction of the Jewish joke par excellence: Greenberg, one assumes, wouldn’t want to be in a movie that would accept his name as its title.
The shlemiel is alive and not too well, which is just the way he should be.
“Greenberg” opens Friday, March 26 in Bay Area theaters.
Reprinted from www.tabletmag.com, a new read on Jewish life. JTA distributed this article.