Comedy mines religion’s unconventional reality
Although I’ve seen every episode at least seven times, I’m currently deep into Season 6 of Friends on Netflix, a lovely mid-winter gift. I’ve also been playing a little game: spot the Jewish references. It’s mostly a losing battle. Aside from the occasional mention — like when Ross tries to teach his Santaobsessed son about Hanukkah — there are few moments when the show openly acknowledges that half the friends (Monica, Ross and Rachel) are Jewish.
TV comedies tend to either exploit their characters’ religious backgrounds or simply paper over them. Transparent, the Amazon original series that recently triumphed at the Golden Globes, acknowledges its characters’ religious background more explicitly than any show in recent memory. Where Friends snubbed religion in order to portray its cast as a group of modern adults making it on their own, Transparent uses constant, throwaway references to its characters’ Jewishness as a reminder that these people have a deep, shared history.
On Transparent, religion is used to explore the unexpected ways our family influences us — even when we think we’ve outgrown them.
At the same time, Transparent doesn’t put religion in the foreground. Centred on a 70-year-old father of three who comes out to his family as a trans-woman, Transparent is unique not only in its frank, unsentimental depiction of sexuality but its equally frank and unsentimental depiction of secular North American Jewish life.
The opposite seems to be true for Fresh Off the Boat, a forthcoming ABC sitcom based on the memoir of chef and restaurateur Eddie Huang. Early reviews indicate that the show both challenges and plays into Asian stereotypes. But what Huang describes in his memoir is essentially Upton Sinclair’s exposure of the horrors of Chicago’s early 20th-century meat-packing industry, with Huang’s childhood taking the place of the animals and the ABC studios playing the role of slaughterhouse.
These programs find humour and emotion in the particulars rather than in broad conventions — they take little bites rather than bingeing on a buffet of cultural stereotypes. This approach reflects the changing role of religion in contemporary life.
The number of people who claim no religious affiliation is steadily increasing, and a 2012 Pew study showed that of those who seldom or never attend religious services, 50 per cent still consider themselves part of a religious tradition.
In other words, there is a growing number of North Americans who are tied to religion in a cultural, familial sense, and yet don’t make it a central part of their lives the way previous generations were expected to. Accordingly, series creator Jill Soloway doesn’t show the Pfeffermans gathered together to light the menorah; instead, they make Holocaust jokes, give blow jobs at a shiva and congratulate each other on ordering the perfect amount of Chinese food. For many North American families, that is what it means to be Jewish.
Friends caught the last tailwind of the traditional TV model, before the proliferation of cable channels and streaming services splintered the viewing public. The show remains the last sitcom to reach No. 1 in the ratings, a perch now reserved for football and American Idol. When Friends became a cultural behemoth, it began to whitewash its characters, slowly but surely, over its 10 seasons.
Of course, it’s not as if a mainstream, network comedy can’t feature characters who are explicitly Jewish. Many consider Seinfeld the best sitcom of all time, and it’s also one of the most Jewish.
But the proliferation of small-scale comedies, shows that aren’t burdened by the goal of mass appeal, has opened the door for a more honest, nuanced, and funny look at the way religion functions in contemporary families. That’s a blessing.