I like to poke fun at Jews. I do so because I am 50% full of the blood of the chosen people. It’s like Dave Chapelle calling everyone a nigga. He’s black, so it’s all good. Ok, maybe that makes very little sense, but I think you understand the point. Stereotypes are funny because they are often true, and no one has a stranglehold on both comedy of the self deprecating variety, and on stereotypes, like the Jews.
One of my favorite Seinfeld episodes is the one where Tim Whatley (the dentist) converts to Judaism, and Jerry is suspicious that he has done so only for the jokes, more specifically the chance to tell Jew jokes without guilt. When asked by his Rabbi if this offends Jerry as a Jew, he retorts “No, it offends me as a comedian!”…great line.
ANYWAYS, I am here in a Starbucks somewhere in the Lincoln Road area in Miami Beach. Every other person that comes in is either gay, Latin, a model, Jewish, or a combination of the first three. I tend to think there aren’t many gay, Latin, Jew models here…but who knows, I could be mistaken. Miami Beach is to the Jews what the Jersey Shore is to Italians. It is their warm weather Mecca (yes, I said Mecca to describe where JEWS would go…terrible terrible irony and poor choice of analogy, but whatever…this post is hardly pc as it is). So not surprisingly, within a few blocks of me, there is a Jewish school, complete with Jewish Bus covered in all kinds of funny phrases and graphics that make it some sort of weird hybrid of a synagogue and the book mobile. There are also quite a few signs on the local streets pointing locals and tourists toward the “Jewish Museum”. I snapped a photo of one of these signs, and posted it to Flickr with a sarcastic, and what I thought was funny, comment.
When I logged on this morning to rotate and delete some photos, I noticed that someone had added it as a favorite. I thought it was cool, so I popped over to the person’s profile, happy to know that someone got my sense of humor enough to find comedy in similar places, and to see what sort of similarly funny items he or she may have within his or her Flickr account. What I saw when I clicked over, was a collection of horrific and sad photos outlining brutal war and cultural protests along with an odd collection of Jewish themed and terrorism themed photos.
The photographer is listed as being from Brooklyn, and given the evidence contained within some of the photos and set names, along with his place of residence, I am going to *assume* that he is a Jew. The real kind, not the poser kind like me.
Anyways, it got me wondering what made him select my photo as a favorite. Looking over some of the other photos within the set, I doubt it was for my comic stylings. Maybe unlike Jerry, he had the opposite reaction and this photo and caption did not offend him as a budding comedian, but as a Jew.
I guess the point here is that we live in an interesting time. With such an incredible globalization happening, and with the widening reach of the Internet and the media, offending items and stereotype laden jokes can spread with blazing speed, and as we have seen recently, can blow up into giant misunderstandings that end up creating dangerous situations. It can be so easy to misunderstand things and to take them out of context….such as that photo and comment. Anyone who has met me, knows that I joke, and would see the humor in that immediately…but pulled out of my head and into someone else’s Flickr group, and viewed within that context, it can quickly take on a different meaning.
I still think it’s funny.
