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It’s getting more dangerous to be a comedian — but was it ever safe?
Can We Laugh at That?: Comedy in a Conflicted Age
Jacques Berlinerblau
University of California Press, 256 pages, $24.95
Even in these polarized, politically turbulent times, Jacques Berlinerblau argues that the United States still agrees — mostly — on the importance of free speech, in all its complexity and messiness. He calls this the Pre-Digital Free Speech Consensus, and it’s the organizing principle of his attempt at sketching a sociology of comedy in Can We Laugh at That?: Comedy in a Conflicted Age.
Berlinerblau, a chaired professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, describes this agreement as normative rather than legal, overlapping but not strictly identical with legal and constitutional imperatives. He short-hands the concept this way: “The suppression of human political, intellectual, and artistic expression, either by the government or by citizens, should be avoided to the greatest extent possible.”
But this view, never universally held, may be eroding — including in the United States, traditionally its greatest bastion. Berlinerblau, perhaps because of his deadlines, doesn’t cover the Trump administration’s recent assault on late-night comedy. Even so, he worries that the so-called consensus, “noble and highly imperfect, is coming undone.”
Written in clear prose, without much academic pretentiousness, Berlinerblau’s slim volume falls short of a definitive global account of comedic controversies and their aftermath. It offers instead a rudimentary framework for assessing changing norms in an era of ideological contention and internet virality.
It is not easy being a comedian, and now less so than ever. “The disturbing truth,” Berlinerblau writes, “is that humorists the world over are being assailed in all sorts of ways. They are called out and harassed online. They are boycotted and subjected to ‘cancellation.’ They are hounded in the courts through civil suits and federal investigations. They are menaced by vigilantes, religious fundamentalists, paramilitaries, and terrorist cells.” And in extreme cases, he says, they are “forced into exile, kidnapped, imprisoned, or even murdered.”
The danger varies by location and regime. Berlinerblau divides the book into three main sections. The first, on the United States, suggests that while “cancellation” is an ongoing threat (if often less total or permanent than it initially appears), the free expression consensus is holding. Part II, on other liberal democracies, finds that consensus “under siege.” The final section, on “non-democratic spaces,” depicts humorists operating with few, if any, safeguards and subject to persecution, prison or worse. Why they still risk challenging authority is a question for another, more psychologically focused book.
Berlinerblau begins with the slap heard round the world: the 2022 Oscars assault of Chris Rock by the actor Will Smith after the comedian insulted Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. He also mentions the shaming and (attempted) cancellation of Louis C.K., consequences not of C.K.’s transgressive comedy, but of his self-confessed sexual misconduct. “C.K.’s reputation took a hit,” Berlinerblau writes, but he “remains a profitable artist” — an example of the limits of cancel culture.
In the U.S. section, Berlinerblau focuses on four stand-up comics who have faced what he calls “the coalition of the outraged:” Dave Chappelle, who has mocked gay and trans people; Sarah Silverman, who has offended targets across the political spectrum and apologized repeatedly; Kathy Griffin, who was criticized for tweeting a fake image of President Trump’s severed head; and Shane Gillis, whose career revived after fallout from his anti-Asian American slurs.
Berlinerblau distinguishes between “punching up” and “punching down,” based on the power position of comedic targets, while admitting that those distinctions can blur. He also discusses comic personae (whose views may not align with the actual comedian’s) and meta-comedy. Lenny Bruce famously talked about his arrests; nowadays comedians riff on their social media travails. The results can be comedic gold, or a dead-end, with comedy devolving into complaint.
Another issue is just how gender plays into audience reactions. Did Griffin suffer more career damage than Gillis because she is a woman? Berlinerblau’s sample size, as he admits, hardly warrants firm conclusions, but his supposition seems reasonable. Self-deprecation traditionally has been more familiar territory for female stand-ups than insult comedy.
In other democracies, Berlinerblau shows, comedians face more difficult terrain. He seems to admire the satirist Vir Das, who implicates his audiences in attacks on the (arguably illiberal Hindu nationalist) Indian government and Indian society more broadly. The comedian was “frequently threatened with, but never tried on, charges of sedition,” Berlinerblau writes.
Berlinerblau also explores the incitements of the French right-wing shock comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, whose antisemitic jibes are a particularly tough test for free speech purists. From France, too, comes the most devastating fallout from untrammeled comedic license. In 2015, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad triggered an Islamist attack on its Paris headquarters that left 12 dead. Soon afterwards a gunman killed a police officer and four shoppers at a Jewish supermarket. More violence followed, including French intervention in the Middle East and deadly terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice. For Berlinerblau, the tragedies raise the question of whether comedy should ever be silenced for the sake of public safety.
Outside of democracies, he notes, comedians are often endangered. Bassem Youssef, Egypt’s answer to The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, was ultimately exiled from his native country. Samantha Kureya (known as Gonyeti), whose “subversive comedy was virtually guaranteed to infuriate Zimbabwe’s leaders,” was kidnapped and beaten. The brazen attack, Berlinerblau speculates, was an attempt to chill other critical voices.
He concludes closer to home, with the controversial 2014 film, The Interview, about the fictional assassination of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Before its release, the Seth Rogen-Evan Goldberg project precipitated a massive hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment by alleged North Korean operatives. Here the free speech imperatives of the United States collided with North Korea’s paranoid authoritarianism — and the security vulnerabilities of the internet.
Berlinerblau wonders what would have happened if North Korea had issued a credible nuclear threat. More broadly, he frets that the provocations of comedians “imperil the free speech protections they claim to revere.” That’s a paradox that Berlinerblau admits he can’t resolve.
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New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America
The new documentary Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience, produced by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, is fast, entertaining and a good introduction to the topic.
Focusing mainly on the musical side of the story, but covering ‘straight plays’ as well, the film opens with a superb ‘warm-up act’: “Hu Tsa Tsa,” a stock Yiddish vaudeville number performed by the widely mourned Bruce Adler, who died in 2008 at age 63. Bursting with charm and talent, Adler, scion of a top Yiddish vaudeville family, demonstrates that Yiddish theater used to be pretty damned lively.
What follows is the oft-told story of the rise and decline of the American Yiddish theater, beginning with its prehistory in the Purimshpiels — the annual performances that for centuries served as the only secular entertainment in the Ashkenazic world. From there the film takes us to Yiddish theater’s 1876 birth in Romania, courtesy of Avrom Goldfadn, a.k.a. “The Father of Yiddish Theater.”
The film also describes Yiddish theater’s arrival in America, which, thanks to massive Jewish immigration, quickly became its capital. We learn of its influence on American theater’s styles of acting and set design. And the film describes the decline of its audience, due to assimilation and the immigration quotas of the 1920s.
There’s an excellent section on “The Big Four” Yiddish theater composers — Joseph Rumshinsky, Alexander Olshanetsky, Abe Ellstein, and Sholom Secunda. All in all, the documentary does a fine job of teaching the aleph-beyz, the ABCs, of the history of Yiddish theater to the uninitiated.
The most impressive aspect of Immigrant Songs is its well-crafted pace. Though there are a few snippets of vintage Yiddish cinema (Yiddish theater’s “kid brother”), most of the film consists of recent concert footage, some well-selected photographs and ephemera, and a lot of talking heads. Almost every prominent Yiddish theater historian was interviewed for it, along with several musicologists, an archivist, Yiddish actors, directors, producers, etc. (Full disclosure: I am one of them.) Director Jeff Janeczko cuts between the interviewees so smoothly — sometimes in mid-sentence — that it feels like they’re in the same room and feeding off each other’s energy. The movie just flies by.
There are a few errors. Marc Chagall is described as an important designer of Yiddish theater; actually he designed one minor production in Russia in 1921, and never did another. In a bizarre, and biblically illiterate, statement, one interviewee claims that Jews hadn’t developed a theater culture earlier because the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” forbade the construction of sets. (Actually it’s about idol worship.)
Another interviewee claims that the Yiddish play Der Yeshiva Bokher; oder, Der Yudisher Hamlet — The Yeshiva Student; or, The Jewish Hamlet (Yiddish plays then often had subtitles), is closely patterned on Shakespeare’s tragedy. In truth, the play — written by Isidore Zolotarevski, the prolific writer of shund (“trash”) melodramas — is not only awful, but is as close to Shakespeare as baked ham is to your grandmother’s kreplach.
The film’s biggest fault, however, is its short running time (45 minutes). This is a rich topic, and too much is left by the wayside in the interest of brevity. There’s nothing about what shund melodramas felt like, why they appealed to their audiences, and why they became the only thing a lot of people know about Yiddish theater.
There’s also nothing about the World War I-era wave of shtetl plays, which reflected immigrants’ homesickness without indulging in nostalgia, and provided some of Yiddish theater’s shining moments with plays like Green Fields, The Empty Inn and Tevye. And the most important play in the Yiddish canon, The Dybbuk, is never mentioned.
Perhaps most surprisingly, considering the film’s emphasis on music, there is no examination of Yiddish theater’s influence on Broadway’s music. (Cole Porter — ironically, the only gentile among the major composers of Broadway’s Golden Age — had a pronounced Jewish lilt in a number of his songs, and he actually attended Yiddish theater regularly.)
The film’s last section is about the renewed interest in Yiddish that began in the 1970s and ’80s with the klezmer revival. Much of it focuses on the 2018 Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, whose success was predetermined the moment the production was announced.
For the overwhelming majority of American Jews, from the Orthodox to the unaffiliated, Fiddler is all they know about the lives of their ancestors. And though it’s a world-class piece of musical theater, as a work of social history Fiddler is as phony as a glass eye. Nevertheless, for American Jews it’s a sacred text.
Fiddler was a huge hit, but it was a gimmick, a one-off, whose success does very little for the future of Yiddish theater. Worse, the Yiddish — not the text, but the lines spoken by most of the actors — was often mispronounced and had the wrong intonation. (One elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a native Yiddish speaker from Czechoslovakia, told me he didn’t understand a word the actors said, and spent the whole evening reading the English supertitles.)
What follows the Fiddler section in Immigrant Songs is mostly bromides. But the best current Yiddish theater reflects the kind of fresh thinking that keeps the form alive.
An occasional well-presented museum piece, like the Folksbiene’s 2016 revival of Rumshinsky’s operetta The Golden Bride, is a very worthwhile project (though it, too, suffered from poorly spoken Yiddish). But the most dynamic contemporary Yiddish theater is, in Jeffrey Shandler’s apt phrase, “post vernacular” — i .e., the use of Yiddish is self-conscious, a deliberate choice rather than something that’s done automatically, as it would have been a century ago when there were a lot more Yiddish speakers in the world.
An example of this is the 2017 neo-realist film Menashe, which could far more easily and conventionally have been made in English. Or a well-known piece done in Yiddish translation, like Shane Baker’s stunning Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot, can become something much more valuable than a mere stunt. The Yiddish version, under Moshe Yassur’s straightforward direction, humanized the play, stripping it of the encrusted pretentiousness that had hidden its soul. (When it was presented in the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Ireland, multiple audience members approached the cast afterwards with the same reaction: “I don’t speak a word of Yiddish. But I’ve seen Godot five or six times, and this is the first time I understood it.”)
There’s a lot to be learned from Immigrant Songs. If you find yourself hungry for more, you couldn’t do better than to seek out YIVO’s online Yiddish theater course “Oh, Mama, I’m in Love!” But by all means, start with Immigrant Songs. It’s a very entertaining and informative appetizer.
The post New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America appeared first on The Forward.
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UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
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War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”