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Laughing at the Absurd

IsNothing Sacred?

Laughing at the absurd

Laughing at the absurd asserts agency over chaos and makes the unbearable and overwhelming manageable. These clips capture how Jewish ritual, even at its most solemn, can contain the seeds of absurdist comedy.

Clips

  • Shiva Baby (2020)

    Director: Emma Seligman.

    Shiva, a Jewish mourning rite, is intended as a space of dignified communal grief. Here it becomes the source of farce. The gathering of people to honour the dead turns into an anxiety-filled trip filled with judgement and gossip.

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  • When One Shalom Isn't Enough — Friday Night Dinner (2011–2020)

    Creator: Robert Popper.

    Friday Night Dinner is a British sitcom that follows the Goodman family, a middle-class Jewish household in North London, who gather every Friday evening for a Shabbat meal. In a running joke through the series, their non-Jewish neighbour 'Jim' continually misemploys the word 'Shalom' as he tries to come to grips with Jewish tradition.

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  • A Serious Man, Opening Sequence (2009)

    Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen.

    The film starts with a ten minute Yiddish folk tale about a man who invites a guest home, only for his wife to insist the guest is a 'dybbuk' (an undead spirit) and stab him with a soup pick. The bleeding guest continues to act normally, even hysterically laughing, leaving the question 'is he or isn't he?' unanswered.

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