A few days ago, Girls creator and lightning rod for both endless praise and endless controversy Lena Dunham wrote what I assume was intended to be a “humor” piece in the New Yorker entitled “Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz.” In it, she cracks one-off jokes about ostensible similarities between a stereotypical pampered pooch and a stereotypical pampered Jewish man, silently chuckling at things like “hair all over hisbody, like most males who share his background.” The piece has blown up since its publication, as a piece like this tends to. Some critics have been bandying about its purported “disgusting antisemitic garbage.” Some supporters (most of whom are Jewish themselves), on the other hand, praise the piece’s place in the“time-honored part of the Jewish comic tradition”of making fun of one’s own people. (Dunham’s mother is Jewish.)
Like many of the piece’s critics, I don’t take issue with tasteful Jewish humor. As a Jew, I find the norm of “self-deprecating” Jewish humorand the “wry self-knowledge” a Salon article ascribes to Dunham’s piece to be quite funny when done right. Hence, like many of the piece’s critics, my first issue with Dunham’s piece is that at no point is it actually humorous. It feels like it’s trying to make me smirk at lines like “I have more Instagram followers than he does” (given that Dunham has over one and a half million Instagram followers, I’d be more surprised if that weren’t the case). New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick praised Dunham’s piece as “a comic voice working in [the Jewish-comic] vein.” However, I’m not so certain support of the Jewish comedic tradition can be extended to something just for being written by a (part) Jew when I haven’t found anyone (supporters included) who has laughed at it.
Here’s the rub, though: part of the reason Greenburg and Silvermansucceed is because their humor is sincerely self-deprecating, able to walk the line between stifling political correctness and outright anti-Semitism thanks to an involvement of self. Dunham’s piece, on the other hand, isn’t self-deprecating in the slightest. Despite Dunham’s Jewishness, she paints herself as an almost external actor here, poking fun at her boyfriend while simultaneously removing herself from the clutches of the Jewish identity she skewers.
This stance is particularly clear when Dunham states that “he comes from a culture in which mothers focus every ounce of their attention on their offspring and don’t acknowledge their own need for independence as women.” If this piece were self-knowing, as supporters claim, Dunham might have used the word “we.” By instead using the word “he,” Dunham moves herself out of the spotlight, accusing her figurative boyfriend of being coddled by a culture of which she wants us to know she has no part. A piece like this, in order to participate in the tradition of so many legendary Jewish comedians, must be written from a Jewish perspective first and foremost. Dunham can absolutely write this as a Jewish woman, but in order for it to fit into the “self-knowledge” already enumerated here, the Jewishness must take precedence. In putting the word “Jewish” in the title, Dunham needs to tackle this piece as a Jew before letting any of her other identities approach.
By refusing to implicate herself as a member of the culture she criticizes, Dunham loses the credibility she needs in order to play a legitimate part in the rich history of Jewish comedy. Remnick likened the piece to “Richard Pryor and Chris Rock doing the same about black stereotypes.” Personally, I would compare it less to those honestly self-aware comedians and more to Bill Cosby’s Pound Cake Speech at the 2004 NAACP awards, in which Cosby severely criticized modern Black culture: “The lower economic and lower middle economic people are [not*] holding their end in this deal.” The most insightful criticism I’ve seen, which largely applies to Dunham’s piece as well, comes from a review of a Michael Eric Dyson book about the speech from the Harvard Education Review: “Cosby has built up years of cultural capital and credibility while ignoring race to establish a platform for himself that he is using to lambast and criticize poor Blacks rather than defend them.” Much like Dunham, in removing himself from the group of people he’s denouncing, Cosby also removes his perspective from the place it needs to be to tackle this subject.
In the end, “Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz” fails because it doesn’t say anything particularly worthwhile. It’s not funny, it’s not insightful, it’s not even particularly well-conceived or well-written. Most of the critics calling out the piece’s anti-Semitism (especially those who are likely not Jewish themselves) are, as Remnick puts it, “howling in the wrong direction.” However, those who would place Dunham’s piece in the pantheon of great Jewish comedy (for reasons that don’t actually relate to the piece’s comedy, I assume) are also mistaken. The “Jewish comedic tradition” many Jews (myself included) love so much succeeds largely due to an inclusion of self in the culture at which good comedians so nostalgically jab. By removing herself from this culture — whether via a choice pronoun or a more overt criticism of his failure to tip — Dunham changes her role from humorous critic to problematic accuser.
Will Rivitz is a freshman from Brookline, Mass. He can be reached at wrivitz@princeton.edu.
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