On the eve of the eve of the eve of Yom Kippur comes this stunningly asinine comment by Woody Allen at the very start of his interview with New York Times journalist Dave Itzkoff:Asked on Tuesday morning if it was appropriate to wish him a happy Jewish New Year, Woody Allen made it clear that such formalities were not necessary. “No, no, no,” he said with a chuckle, seated in an office suite at the Loews Regency hotel. “That’s for your people,” he told this reporter. “I don’t follow it. I wish I could get with it. It would be a big help on those dark nights.
The irony here is especially deep when one recalls the scene in Annie Hall where Alvy Singer renders Groucho Marx's quintessential quote of (Jewish) self-deprecation: "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member."
Since there is nothing to say beyond Allen's pathetic confession/delusion that his people are not Itzkoff's people I'll leave this alone and return throughout the day to read the reactions of my people to the once-great director who built his public persona on little more than simply being a Jew.
3 comments:
I thought he built his public persona on being funny.
True. But the humor and the Yiddishkeit are inextricable. Without his Jewish nebbish persona, he would just have been one more comedian playing the clubs.
Inextricable? You don't have to be Jewish to slip on a banana; ie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, Abbot and Costello. You don't even have to be Jewish to study Kabalah. Every Madonna-nick know that.
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