This week’s New York Magazine cover story is on Woody Allen’s latest movie, Whatever Works. The screenplay, they note, calls to mind “a brand of Jewish humor that has, in recent years, been all but scrubbed out—neurotic, depressive, abrasive, excluded.” With that, the magazine proceeded to celebrate this humor with a PDF displaying the evolution of a Jewish joke, and a piece on OldJewsTellingJokes.com:

The site, for which he filmed family members and friends telling 30-second-to-three-minute stories...A quarter of the site’s visitors are under 35. “For them, it’s comfort food,” says Hoffman. “It’s a visit with Uncle Steve, who isn’t around anymore. And it channels an element of the culture that isn’t religion but still makes them feel connected.” It’s also a window to a world where certain topics never went out of style: food, sex, aging, analysis, misdiagnosis, couples who hate each other, eating while dying, eating while shtupping, shtupping while dying.

This is a humor we understand very well; just recently you could have caught Alan Zweibel at 92Y talking about putting suntan lotion on his behind, Richard Lewis making cracks about his mother, and Jerry Seinfeld with Carol Leifer talking about nothing. We continue celebrating this humor and Jewish life downtown tonight at 92YTribeca with Ronna & Beverly’s All Jew Revue: Shavuot Edition.

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