A religious maker of hard-edged comedies:
Is Etan Cohen a Hollywood unicorn?
Cohen’s theory is that jobs like his — or perhaps anyone in a creative career such as film making, acting, writing, visual arts — pose an implicit challenge to a faith-based worldview.
Imagination might carry us to new worlds, but the people behind those imaginings sometimes are exactly as you would expect.
The executive who’s had the greatest influence on today’s family entertainment is Pixar chief John Lasseter — a jovial, Hawaiian- shirt- wearing father of five. The creator behind some of the most notable stoner man-child comedies of recent years is the stoner man- child comedian Seth Rogen.
And then there’s Etan Cohen. He has been responsible for some of the more ribald work Hollywood has produced over the last couple of decades. The longtime screenwriter was a protege of Mike Judge and worked on “Beavis & Butt-head”; he also penned the foul-mouthed antics of “Tropic Thunder.” Now Cohen is making his directorial debut with “Get Hard,” the prison- prep comedy starring Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell.
Cohen’s movie features shots of full-frontal male nudity, Hart describing in Tennysonian detail the ways in which Ferrell’s prison- bound character will soon be sodomized, and material so raunchy that it was initially given an NC- 17 rating before Cohen and Warner Bros. trimmed it to an R.
Yet Cohen is also a strictly observant Jew. He is a member of the Orthodox synagogue B’nai David in Los Angeles, sends his three children to an Orthodox school, is an alumnus of a prestigious Jewish day school in Boston and a post-high school yeshiva in Israel, and still studies Torah every week with his rabbi from says yeshiva.
In a Hollywood proud of its rock-ribbed secularism, Cohen and his wife, Emily, abide by a deeply held set of tenets — obeying the biblical prohibition against work on Saturday and major holidays (most of “Get Hard” was shot on a Sunday-Thursday schedule), keeping kosher and filtering all choices through the prism of halacha, or Jewish law.
Hard-R comedy by day, Talmud study by night can create some uncomfortable internal divisions. It also makes Cohen a double outsider. He’s an anomaly in mainstream moviedom, which shies from overt displays of religion. He’s also an outlier in the religious Jewish world, which despite Hollywood’s high proportion of secular Jews, tends to view the place warily. Even those who are observant in Hollywood tend to be writers, a much more flexible job. And most aren’t making full-frontal comedies.
“People in our community ask me when the movie’s coming out, and I make it clear I never want anyone in our shul to see it,” Cohen says with a small laugh. “Someone was even saying ‘ You should make an announcement and have a kiddush (post-services reception) and I said, ‘Uh, no.’”
Turning more serious, he says, “This has been a tension for me for many years. I always feel like I have a foot in two worlds.”
At an upscale kosher restaurant in Los Angeles, Cohen, 40, is wearing trendy jeans and the Silver Lakey newsboy cap he often prefers to a yarmulke. Though he talks about religion in a low-key manner, religious devotion has been part of a nearly 20- year career, one in which Cohen has sought to be the funniest guy in the room while knowing he’s being seen as the most religious guy in the room.
That devotion was there at the Harvard Lampoon. It hovered in the writers’ room in his years working on TV shows such as “American Dad” and “King of the Hill.” And it was present over this past year as the man captaining the set of a major Hollywood comedy.
“Get Hard,” which Cohen wrote with Jay Martel and Ian Roberts, is about the fragile and lilywhite hedge-fund manager James (Ferrell) sentenced to a maximum- security prison for financial crimes he probably didn’t commit, and also about car-wash operator Darnell ( Hart), who doesn’t have a thuggish bone in his body but is paid by a deluded James to help “get hard” in the 30 days before he’s sent to prison. Much of the movie is Darnell putting him through a series of comical training exercises.
The film’s comedy comes from the friction between the person we really are and the person others believe us to be. Early on, Darnell tells his wife, in essence: I just have to think of the stereotypes he already thinks I am and just be those. One needs neither a psychology degree nor an advanced knowledge of the Torah to understand why Cohen would be attracted to this theme.
Cohen raises an interesting theory: Jobs like his — or perhaps anyone in a creative career such as film making, acting, writing, visual arts — pose an implicit challenge to a faith-based worldview.
“I’ve always been interested in why religious people are suspicious of creative professions,” he says. “Does it just have something to do with creativity being about the individuals as opposed to being part of a community?”
Cohen wasn’t born into an observant family. He turned to religion at 14, at the same time his parents did. Some who are raised Orthodox want to experience the liberation that comes from throwing off its chains, but Cohen had spent his childhood without that yoke and, as he matured, he appreciated the snug feeling that came with having it on.
So instead of either embracing or shunning the secular world, Cohen decided to stay exactly where he was. He would abandon neither his religious nor his Hollywood aspirations, even if that meant each might suffer in the process.
Arriving in Los Angeles from Harvard in the 1990s, he used “Beavis” to satirize the couch-potato of the American male in full crotch-scratching relief and sent up perceptions again, this time of Texas suburbia, with “King of the Hill.”
Judge, creator of “Beavis” and “King of the Hill,” believes some of Cohen’s comedy sensibility comes from his religious beliefs.
“It reminds me a little of all the great Canadian comics I watched growing up who were outsiders,” he says. “Etan is a little bit part of a different world, so he can look at things a little more objectively.”
Cohen would break through on the film side in 2008 with “Tropic Thunder,” in which — with Ben Stiller’s mentally challenged Simple Jack and Robert Downey Jr.’s blackface Kirk Lazarus — offensively broad caricatures poked fun at the idea of the blowhard actor.
With a few slightly more family-friendly script credits under his belt — “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” and “Men in Black 3” — Cohen landed the “Get Hard” gig, making the rare jump directly from writer to studio helmer.
“Etan comes from a writer’s place of comedy and has an understanding of how to craft a joke that a lot of directors don’t have,” Warner’s head of production Greg Silverman says of the decision to go with a first-timer on a big movie.
Cohen is the furthest thing from a proselytizer. But his steadfast interest in operating as an observant man in Hollywood quietly introduces to his work an element of seriousness and personal belief. He hopes that a movie like “Get Hard” conveys a deeper purpose.
“It was really exciting to make a movie that has broad appeal but that may make some people have a conversation on the way home about race or inequality,” he says. “I do want to put a little medicine in with the sugar.”