Category Archives: Comedy

When I was 11 or 12 years old, I visited a Times Square Army recruiting booth at which Audie Murphy, a celebrated war hero who won the Congressional Medal of Honor and a movie star in Grade B westerns, spoke and gave out autographs. He was an early role model and I left the recruiting station elated that I had in my hands the autograph of an American hero. Many years later, I introduced my sons to a sports celebrity. I ran a 2-week camp for a synagogue in Atlanta, and arranged for admittance to an Atlanta Hawks practice session where we could watch the great Pete Maravich in action. He was very accommodating to the campers and signed their scraps of paper with his name. It was a heady moment for many of the kids to be in the presence of a basketball legend.

Flash forward to the year 2012, and our adulation of celebrities is no longer so innocent. Just ask any parent or educator. Celebrities, actors, politicians often grab our attention due to their nefarious activities, including dishonesty of all types, illicit sex, drugs, and the list goes on. The King of Comedy, appearing in 1983, gave us a prophetic hint about the craziness surrounding celebrity that was to come.

In a brilliant opening scene, Jerry Langford, a late night TV host, is bombarded with fans as he exits the studio. One obsessed fan tries to get close to him, but Rupert Pupkin, ostensibly trying to protect him, slams the door in her face, and we are left with a freeze frame of hands pressing against the window of the limousine. It is an image representing the intense longing of an obsessed fan for access to a celebrity. Life is nothing unless there is connection with fame. It is sad and it is frightening when the entire thrust of one’s life is to live through others.

Rupert Pupkin is determined to become a TV celebrity like Jerry and the movie chronicles his fantastical and obsessive quest for fame. Rupert keeps cardboard figures of Jerry in his basement and has imaginary conversations with him and Jerry’s guests. His friend Masha, a celebrity stalker, will stop at nothing to get close to Jerry, her idol. She ultimately helps Rupert break the law in order to compel the studio to grant him a guest appearance on Jerry’s show.

Rupert receives a prison sentence of six years for his crime, but is freed after serving less than three years. He goes on to write his memoirs and becomes a celebrity in his own right, which echoes what happens so often today. The criminal is released, writes a book, and becomes a fixture of talk shows as he rehabilitates his public image.

The Torah view of celebrity is clear. The Ethics of the Fathers instructs us that fame is elusive. The more one chases it, the more it eludes him. Gaining celebrity is not a Jewish goal. Moreover, the object of Torah adulation is not the actor or the athlete. Rather it is the scholar or the doer of good deeds. In the end, we cannot live vicariously through others. Each of us is an image of the Divine, totally unique with our own respective missions. No one else can live our life for us because we are accountable for our own destinies. God only wants us to be ourselves, not an imitation of someone else. At the end of 120 years, God will not ask me if I was as great as Moses or Abraham; instead He will ask me if I was the best “me” I could possibly be.

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When I came to Israel a couple of years ago as a recent oleh (immigrant), I arrived with a rudimentary speaking knowledge of Hebrew and no Israeli cell phone. Yet I had arranged from America to meet old friends, now living in Israel, at the airport, who would take my wife and me to our home in Beit Shemesh. The challenge: how to make contact with him if I had no cell phone and no Israeli money to use a pay phone. Moreover, even if I had money for a pay phone, I was unaware that I had to dial city code prefixes before the actual phone number.

Fortunately, I found my friends and everything worked out, but I was reminded of my unsettling airport experience as I watched an early scene in The Terminal, in which Viktor Navorksi, a citizen of an Eastern European country in the midst of a violent coup, arrives in the United States and is unable to leave the airport. His passport is no longer valid and he cannot enter the USA until his situation is resolved. While stuck in the airport, airport security gives him food vouchers and a 15-minute phone card, but Viktor does not have the language skills to know how to use them. Viktor is confused and I understood his frustration.

As his temporary stay at the airport extends into weeks and months, Viktor, a building contractor, uses his skills at construction to get a job with a renovation crew at the terminal. This enables him to earn money to buy food, clothes, and other necessities. These crafting skills and his modest personality slowly ingratiate him with the airport staff, who admire his resourcefulness and his innate kindness towards others.

A turning point occurs when a foreign national wants to bring in medicine for his deathly ill father. He threatens airport personnel and Viktor, because of his language skills, is brought in to diffuse the situation. He successfully resolves the tension by calming the foreigner and creatively suggesting to him that he claim that the medicine he brought in from Canada is for goats and, therefore, needs no special clearance. Viktor, originally seen as a buffoon, now is perceived as a savvy negotiator, which brings him the admiration of many who work at the airport.

Our first impression of outsiders may be akin to seeing Viktor for the first time as simply a foreigner; but once we mentally engage another human being, we are peeling an onion, discovering new layers every time we speak with him. I have found that the more I get to know people, the more interesting they become.

When my wife and I have guests over for a Friday night Shabbat meal, I always ask the invitees to introduce themselves for a moment. I sometimes suggest that each guest tell us something we may not know about them. Surprisingly, I learned that one of our guests celebrated her 70^th birthday by parachuting out of a plane. There is clearly more to people than what meets the eye. Viktor Novarski reminds me of the innate complexity of people, and that we should give people a second chance to make a first impression.

The Bible instructs us many times to remember our sojourn in Egypt when we were strangers in a strange land. I am no longer a recent immigrant but I remember how good it felt when I was greeted with a smile, when someone asked me what my name was and where I was from, when someone clarified a confusing moment. It is a good thing to be kind to the stranger. After all, one day the stranger may be you.

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Going to grade school in Mt. Vernon, New York, I was a good student focusing on academics until my neighborhood changed almost overnight. Low income projects were built a block away and Jews fled the hood rapidly. We could not afford to move so we stayed and my education took a different turn. Surrounded by peers who wanted to be cool, I wanted to be cool too. As a result, I spent time combing my hair and listening to rock and roll instead of focusing on my studies. Over a period of several years in a junior high school of average achievers, I became average. No longer at the top of my class, I became one of the cool guys. I remember vividly going into the school restroom with Ernest, a buddy, and styling my hair just like Elvis, slicked back with a curl dangling in front. Hormones were raging and Ernest and I wanted to look good for the girls. It wasn’t until my high school years and my being “born-again” as an Orthodox Jew that I firmly realized that the most fulfilling way to lead a life is to be yourself, to think of larger issues than personal appearance, and not to construct a life determined by the expectations of peers. I finally understood that my goal in life should not only be to be liked, but to be holy, a goal of a totally different order.

I was reminded of this as I watched Zelig, the story of Leonard Zelig, a man whose only purpose in life is to be liked by others. It is an all-consuming goal, which even has physical consequences. If he is with Chinese people, he becomes Chinese and can even speak the language; if he is with people of color, the actual color of his skin changes; if he is with physicians, he becomes a doctor who can speak the medical lingo. He becomes whoever he is with. Through a protracted psychoanalysis with Dr. Eudora Fletcher, we learn that Zelig morphs into whoever he is in order to protect himself emotionally. When alone with himself, he has no identity.

The film traces Zelig’s journey towards personal self-actualization, which occurs because of the love of one person who deeply cares for him, who validates him, who thus enables him to change his life: Dr. Eudora Fletcher. This notion that a person who knows that he is loved feels valued is a Jewish sensibility. Parents understand this almost intuitively. Rabbi Akiva in the Talmud used to say that “Beloved is man, for he was created in God’s image. It shows even a greater love when God informed man that he was created in His image.” If we know God made us in His image and loves us, we feel special; and that is very good for us emotionally. Because we are all created in God’s image, all of us have infinite value. Moreover, God created the world, say our Sages, with only one man. This teaches us that one life is equivalent to the entire world. None of us is a mere number. Each one of us is an entire world.

Zelig reminds us that ultimately we achieve very little in life if all we do is imitate others. The key to emotional maturity and progress lies in our very individuality, in our ability to understand how we in our own special way can contribute to and enrich the world around us by being who we are, by celebrating our divinely-given uniqueness.

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