![]() Hollywood is notoriously tentative in its approach to a type of American Yiddishkeit, even as Jews helped form it. ![]() In the realm of standup, Borscht Belt comics held the ground that “Big Mouth” is now claiming, but once they found bigger audiences beyond the Catskills, they either tempered their Jewishness like Rodney Dangerfield or Don Rickles or maintained a more-or-less ghettoized career a la Henny Youngman. They creaked open the window of the Jewish mind and let all comers have a look around, but they didn’t label all the Judaica inside. These writers ushered in an explicitly Jewish sensibility to American letters and made a goyische audience work to understand the culture it emerged from. Many sat shiva for Norman Mailer whose anal sex scene in “An American Dream” makes Henry Miller (and Roth’s Portnoy) look tame, but the book and its murderous protagonist, Rojack, typify a brand of Jewish masculine anxiety and vengeance as he assaults a German maid. Saul Bellow was never meek in calling out the moral frailties of his co-religionists. Philip Roth was infamous for exposing the hypocrisies of Jews using our own vernacular. It’s the kind of insular work that seems to only have appeared before in, well, novels. In “Big Mouth’s” willingness to leave gentiles out of the inside joke and offend Jews with the same, there’s something novel in the works. Here is a tribute to the tri-state area and its Hebrew School milieu. These jokes, to say nothing of the show’s pervasive yiddishisms and regular exclamations of mazel tov, herald something big for mainstream animation: Inside baseball gags for Jews that put the Jackie Mason episode of “The Simpsons,” where he plays Krusty’s rabbi dad, to shame. Poblart fils is a disappointment, having tanked a business designed to sell sheitels to “religious dogs”-literal dogs. Later, we encounter both Rabbi Poblart (who holds down the bimah at Temple Beth Amphetamine) and his son, a middle-aged bachelor living in a condo for divorcees. Glouberman (Richard Kind) tells Andrew in an episode from the new season. Petty shulyard squabbles familiar to those in Jewish enclaves are mentioned offhandedly. A major plot point involves Jessi’s mother’s affair with a female cantor. The first season comes to a head at a Bat Mitzvah (in a temple that seems to serve scallops, but still). Though the show’s conceit - middle school kids navigating puberty with the help of their Hormone Monster shoulder angels -– has universal appeal, it goes out of its way to establish a particular ethnic fingerprint beyond it. The third lead, Nick Birch (Nick Kroll), may not have a canonical Hebrew name, but I don’t know a whole lot of goyim with sisters named “Leah” and brothers named “Judd.” The biracial Missy Foreman-Greenwald (Jenny Slate), also seems coded as a chosen person, and that’s a lot to work with. Two of its main characters, Andrew Glouberman (John Mulaney) and Jessi Glaser (Jessi Klein) are Jewish. ![]() ![]() While a lot of media, from “The Munsters” to “Bob’s Burgers,” is content to float by on Semitic suggestion, “Big Mouth” is hugely Jewish. But maybe the strangest and potentially most alienating aspect of Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett’s cartoon, now in its second season, is its self-conscious Judaism. By the same token, its extreme ribaldry, often paired with useful but sometimes didactic lessons about puberty, contraception and body image make it a weird fit for a post-pubescent adult. Though its charming animation and middle-school aged characters suggest something for the K-12 set, its excessively filthy humor makes it inappropriate for a large chunk of that demographic. Netflix’s “Big Mouth” is not for everyone. ![]()
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