Standing up for Safran
JULIE SZEGO
IS Dvir Abramovich kidding? The question popped into my head while reading his thunderous attack on John Safran (“No Laughing Matter” AJN 29/11). For a moment, I wondered if Abramovich’s case against the Melbourne comic was, in fact, a satire of an outraged columnist.
Abramovich accuses Safran’s TV series, Race Relations, of using “the murder of millions for cheap gags”. He gives as examples Safran’s prank against Holocaust denier David Irving and his making out with a “blonde-haired Aryan girl” in Anne Frank’s attic so as to purge himself of guilt.
Yes, Safran’s Irving stunt -— luring the man to a radio studio, then converting it into a pseudo-gas chamber and threatening to deny it all later -— was juvenile. But Abramovich fails to mention the startling first minutes of the interview, during which Safran gives Irving more than enough rope to reveal his deep-seated racism.
Irving opines that white women who couple with black men only do so because they’re too ugly to score a white fella. This was one moment when my jaw nearly touched the floor in admiration of Safran’s sheer audacity.
I missed the Anne Frank episode, but on Abramovich’s description I accept that some people may find it offensive. But bad taste is a far lesser crime than trivialising the Holocaust. To make an obvious point, this isn’t about the Holocaust but about Safran, grandson of a Holocaust survivor, who just can’t let love (or even lust!) conquer all in this post-racial world.
This is not playing the Holocaust for cheap laughs, because as with much of Safran’s material, the laughs, springing from the dark attic of our collective unconscious, don’t come cheap.
Abramovich is right to describe the series as Safran’s quest to “erase” his Jewishness. “It’s as if being a Jew has ruined his life and left him emotionally and psychologically scarred,” he writes.
And physically too, I’d add. At one point, Safran ponders whether he comes from a long line of self-hating Jews, as his own father had had a nose job. (Under interrogation by his son, Safran senior admitted he underwent the operation primarily for aesthetic, as opposed to health, reasons.)
And given Jewishness is written on the body through circumcision and in the body through genetic inheritance, Safran tries to erase his identity through extreme physical measures. And so we witness his attempted circumcision reversal, the voodoo ritual, the crucifixion.
We also see his various experiments in self-obliteration via “merging” with non-Jews: donating sperm to the Palestinian sperm bank, painting his face black, pashing an Asian man while dressed as an Asian woman and even sobbing in the arms of a Japanese rent-a-mum.
Well, duh. The desire to escape what many regard as the curse of Jewishness practically defines Jewish comedy, from the benign “next time God, please choose someone else” variety to the hardcore. In fact, the struggle to “erase” Jewish identity is every bit as central to our people’s narrative -— from Abraham to Enlightenment and beyond -— as is the struggle to preserve it.
This is what makes the Jewish story one of such epic drama, triumph and tragedy — in other words, so downright fascinating. Where would Zionism be without a healthy dose of Jewish self-loathing?
And Abramovich appears to make no allowances for irony or for the complex themes underpinning many of Safran’s stunts. In ostensibly trying to erase his Jewishness, Safran succeeds only in re-affirming its almost mystical power. He literally plumbs new depths of pathos in digging up his late mother’s grave to ask how she would feel about his marrying a shiksa. Cheap laughs?
Again, they were anything but. The emotional toll could be counted on Safran’s grief-stricken face. Surely Abramovich would concede that Safran seemed pretty unconcerned about making this series palatable, or even digestible, for the goyim. Think of Safran’s Yeshivah mates who appear Greek-chorus style to warn him against marrying out.
Other critics of Safran’s, such as AJN columnist Michael Visontay, (“Modern comedy is a casualty of terrorism AJN 11/12) say he’s provocative without being funny. Judging from the number of times Safran had me crying into my TV dinner, I can only disagree.
Visontay also curiously advises the comedian to “find a little more sincerity”. For Safran’s own sake, I suggest he find a little less.
Julie Szego is a writer with The Age.
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