Our Divine Comedies

Recovering a Vital Spirit in a Tragic Age

I delivered the following speech on June 9, 2024, at the Old Glory Club Conference near Memphis, Tennessee:

I always approach this yearly talk with some trepidation. I arrive with an idea for the conference that I am looking to explore at length. But then there is a need for an icebreaker. Usually, it helps if these icebreakers are humorous, but humor itself has gotten harder as of late.

We might forget that most of us, as serious as we are all trying to be right now, began with the pursuit of humor. And back in the glory days of YouTube, getting laughs was easy enough. The enemy was the progressives, and that was the group that everyone wanted to mock. But then things changed, the bottom fell out of the online discourse space, and it became very apparent that very little could be accomplished by talking to these people, much less cracking jokes about them — not simply because they were revealed to be the puppets of power, but because they were revealed to be batshit lunatics.

I guess the absolute collapse of the online left was as funny just as it was predictable. But not in any wholesome sense. Speaking as someone who interacts with these individuals quite a bit online (perhaps too much), I can say that it really is hard to look at someone in the position of ContraPoints, Thought Slime, or even Vaush without being filled with a sense of pity. It’s like encountering those people you knew in high school who never did grow out of a certain stage of their lives, or never could. Laughing is the last emotion you want to express, even if their situation is objectively ridiculous.

But from whence can be found a humorous topic? Is it just about finding some out-group to complain about?

Of course, when I brought this problem up to an old friend, right around the beginning of the anti-Israel protests near where I live, I was told point-blank, and with more seriousness than I was expecting, that probably the group everyone wanted to hear me complain about, especially in a humorous capacity, was well, uh… the Jews.

Um, no. That’s not going to work.

Do you mean to tell me, that after seven years of studiously avoiding speaking about this group, I was now just going to get up in front of an audience of two hundred people and talk about the Hebrew Menace? I mean, come on. I have a German last name, and half of my family tree fought on the wrong side of World War II. This is a non-starter.

So instead, I went in search of a good joke to tell. But it’s very hard to come across a good joke, the kind that makes you take a step back in a totally unexpected way, that draws you into a moment of self-reflection. I’ve heard only a few of these jokes in my lifetime. And only one changed the course of my life. And the more I thought back to that joke, the more I wanted to make it part of this year’s talk.

But unfortunately, that joke is about Jewish people.

I mean to be clear: this joke is a Jewish Joke. I call it the “Yiddish Chicken Joke.” But I can’t explain it, or really deliver it properly in any meaningful sense, without first discussing my own relationship with Judaism at the broadest level.

So here I am, in the exact place I didn’t want to be: talking about my own personal “Jewish Question” in front of hundreds of people.

I guess the beginning of my problems may be genetic. As everyone online, and sometimes in my personal life, reminds me, I look Jewish. There might be some basis for this suspicion. I learned a decade ago that I indeed have a great-great-great-grandmother who was Jewish, leaving myself somewhere in between 3 and 4% Ashkenazim, but also in that very enviable position of being Jewish by the matriarchal Talmudic law and Aryan by the standards of Hitler’s Nuremburg Laws, something I feel very proud of.

Hey, laugh now, but I have the 23andMe to prove it, along with a paper signed by Heinrich Himmler.

That’s a joke, but, well, not really.

Nevertheless, for my own part, I have always been fascinated with Jewish culture, not least because when I grew up, most of my friends were either half or entirely Jewish. More than a few times I found myself sitting at tables during parties, realizing that I was the only gentile present and that everyone else just assumed that I was one of the people. Very often I was that lone goyim, and so I feel like I have a unique insight into this other world that I was never a part of myself.

I am probably going to disappoint a lot of people when I say that I don’t really have anything very negative to say about Jewish culture generally. It has its known eccentricities, to be sure, and also its mysteries. It is radically traditional yet also radically deconstructive. Critical yet somehow supremely oblivious to even the most basic realities. As a culture, Jews have a certain style of genius, a certain ability to invert perspectives by saying the thing that couldn’t be said and expressing the truths that couldn’t quite be expressed publicly. Perhaps that’s subversive, but it’s also a core part of the Jewish culture that I deeply admire.

But it is not without paradox. There is always that sense in which Jews, the shrewd noticers of the wrong things about other people, could never really seem to notice anything about themselves as a group. Of course, at an individual level, Jews were hyper-aware and even had a penchant for a certain neurotic guilt complex. But when the question moved to the collective level, there was instead this blithe obliviousness, a feeling that even the concept of Jewish guilt, at any point in history, was inconceivable at an ontological level.

There is also that other paradox wherein Jews, known widely to be great explainers and debaters, can never convincingly argue their own side. Every time a Jewish person has tried to explain or defend his own actions to me, it has had the inevitable consequence of convincing me of the exact opposite. I always think that Jews themselves must be aware of this at some level, since these types of catastrophically bad apologetics are a staple of Jewish comedy (Larry David built his entire career on this). Still, I don’t think many realize how extensive the problem really is.

As some of you will probably know this year, from personal experience, there is no better way to talk someone out of Zionism than to put him in a conversation with an Israeli Zionist. That is certainly what happened to me. I began the conversation as a then-follower of Ben Shapiro and a complete supporter of America’s “greatest ally.” Then, after 20 minutes of hearing my interlocutor’s justifications for Israel’s actions, actions which I had theretofore thought I supported, I wanted to ask the guy if he knew how I could join the PLO.

Or alternatively, I might hear from an older relative that Jewish Talmudic law was an attempt to trick God to get around the spirit of His law. As a young man, I dismissed this easily (all the more easily because there was a nonzero chance that said older relative might have learned this fact from the Hitler Youth). Certainly, Jewish religious strictures have a beauty about them. But then, at a later stage of life, I sat down and watched a five-minute TikTok video of a rabbi explaining why they followed Talmudic law, and I immediately found myself mumbling, “Good grief, this guy is trying to trick God!”

I guess this phenomenon brings me right in line, to that one point in life where I almost converted to Judaism, the backdrop for the Yiddish Chicken Joke.

Suffice it to say that, as a young man, I was deeply impressed with Jewish culture. Not least in the way that it seemed to wed tradition and skepticism, and connect the Old World to the New. Of course, I had my own Old-World tradition, but it felt dead, it seemed only able to exist in a pre-modern state, and furthermore, it wasn’t an identity. It seemed that Jews were the only people who really understood the modern condition. They had criticism, yet also a certain concept of spirituality and permanence.

As such, around my early teens, I had managed to convince myself that I should convert to Judaism. Now, mind you, this was not a sincere religious ambition in any way. I was still very much a proto-skeptic — my main stint in atheism was very much ahead of me. My desire to convert was just about tapping into that feeling of identity that I so deeply coveted.

After all, what was a religion? Just a name, right? There wasn’t anything permanent about it.

Well. Maybe there was one thing permanent about it, considering how conversion to Judaism for men involved an uncomfortable genital surgery, but that was immaterial to me back then. And, as a former Hipster Millennial, I like to think now that I was just contemplating genital mutilation to obtain a fake identity before it was cool.

But as luck would have it, my ambition to convert to Judaism was stopped cold in its tracks, by (wouldn’t you guess it) a conversation with one of my Jewish friends. We were on a hiking trip at the time, and I broached the topic of conversion generally, only to try to get an idea of what the process would entail. Now in hindsight, I realize that he thought I was trying to convert him to Christianity, but that did not occur to me at the time, and instead of addressing the topic directly, my friend just told me a joke, the infamous “Yiddish Chicken Joke.”

It goes like this.