By Maddie Orton
Arts Correspondent
When film and TV producer Sam Hoffman got the idea for the web series-turned-play “Old Jews Telling Jokes” back in 2008, he reached out to the man he credits for his sense of humor.
“I called up my dad and I said, ‘Do you th-ink you can put together a group of old Jews to come tell jokes?'” Hoffman said.
“And I said, ‘Do I know any funny old Jews…’ remembers Sam’s father, Barnett Hoffman. “I don’t have to leave my family!”
The idea was this: Sam would create video portraits of people — all about his father’s age — telling jokes they’ve heard and shared for years. Participants would be family, friends — everyday people. It would capture and share the unique, Borscht-Belt-style humor he grew up hearing.
Hoffman, his Dad and a big group of friends and family met up in an empty storefront in their hometown of Highland Park. They filmed hours of setups and punchlines.
“I gotta tell ya. That had to be one of the most exciting, wonderful nights of my life,” Barnett said.
Footage of Barnett from the web series includes this joke:
“Old Jewish guy walks into a urologist and he says, ‘Doctor, I can’t pee.’ Doctor says, ‘How old are you?’ Man says, ‘I’m 93.’ Doctor says, ‘You peed enough!'”
“We just laughed our brains out for about four hours, and ate a lot of doughnuts,” he said.
Barnett, a professor and retired judge, conjectures as to why humor has such a prominent place in Jewish culture. He says there are lots of theories, but a long history of persecution is foremost among them in his mind and others’.
“My mother was a Holocaust survivor, and she could never tell a joke,” joke-teller Sarah Ross says in the web series. “But she went to the Catskills, and she came home with that one, and she told it perfectly. I’ve been telling it for years.”
Barnett says the jokes are universally funny, but many of them are also innately ‘Jewish’ — Jewish mother jokes, for example.
“How many times have you called your mother and your mother says: ‘Everything alright?'” Barnett asks Web series joke-teller Sylvie Drake: “What’s the difference between a Jewish mother and a rottweiler? The rottweiler eventually let’s go.”
Family friend, and fellow Highland Park resident, Alan Gordon was among the original cast of joke-tellers. He says beyond the fun of the experience, it’s also a way to preserve an art form that’s on the decline as the younger generation’s connection to the Jewish immigrant experience fades.
“I think because most of the young people today don’t have the experience that we had with our uncles and our grandparents who spoke with an accent and told these off-the-cuff jokes that we related to them with them,” says Gordon. “And they see us now as very gentrified and they see no relationship between what we’re talking about in the jokes and their lives right now. I think my grandchildren will have no idea what these jokes are about.”
The web series, correlating joke book and touring show all help to keep that tradition going.
“I love the show because it incorporates a lot of the jokes and a lot of the cultural references that we began with the website,” said Sam Hoffman. “It’s executed by professional actors and they nail it every night.”
Sam says he hopes the show leaves audiences nostalgic, but not too sentimental, for an art form that can still makes them belly laugh. Old Jews Telling Jokes runs through early January at George Street Playhouse.