Jimmy's Spin
Remember when the Jets asked the the NFL commissioner to change their schedule as they had two consecutive home games on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and they thought their Jewish fans would be annoyed and unable to fill seats in the stadium? Me neither.
But Jimmy Kimmel does:
[h/t Andrew]
I love it!
meshggeneh!
You know, the joke rests on the perception that all Jews are white, right?
The thing is, you’d be hard pressed to find a black Jew spittin’ Yiddish like that!
I disagree, B.BarNavi. I don’t think any Jewschool readers think “all Jews are white.” We know the Jets don’t have Jews on the team, or they would have had different grounds for asking for the schedule change.
I’m not talking about Jewschool readers (I KNOW for a fact that you’re better than that). I’m talking about the general populace to which this segment is aimed.
I for one thought it was funny not because of a Jewish Black man (which to me is not a premise for a joke), but because of a Jewish Black man my age using Yiddish. I know lots of Yids, few of em use meshugeneh or tuchus in a sentence. Very few of the Yids of Color I know use yiddish.
No, no the thing that made it funny was the slamming of the locker door while yelling “meshuggenah!”
i mean, it’s such niche humor that while i’m laughing my tuchus off, i can hear like three people laughing in the audience. Bet none of those folks on the show even know what meshugeneh is.
I bet more people get it than you realize.
Haha… I’m not Jewish. On the contrary, an African-American (Orthodox) Muslim, and this is hilarious to me. It’s definitely niche humor, but for those even vaguely familiar with Jewish people and practices, this should be funny. And context clues would help. I like how he mixes the Yiddish in with the common A-A/Southern slang, i.e. “Ain’t no tellin’ what my bubbe will do!” (linked to this blog from Maya Escobar, btw…)