An unorthodox comedian
Etan Cohen, a religious creator of hard-edged comedy, further confounds expectations in ‘Get Hard.’
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 protégé of Mike Judge and worked on “Beavis & Butthead”; he also penned the foulmouthed antics of “Tropic Thunder.” Come Monday, Cohen will make his directorial debut when “Get Hard,” the prison-prep comedy starring Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell, premieres at the SXSW Film Festival ahead of its March 27 release.
Cohen’s movie features shots of 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, 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 To-
rah every week with his rabbi from said yeshiva.
In a Hollywood proud of its rock-ribbed secularism, Cohen and his wife, Emily, abide by deeply held 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 .
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 said 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 said, “This has been a tension for me for many years. I always feel like I have a foot in two worlds.”
Cohen, 40, is at an upscale kosher restaurant in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood. He is wearing trendy jeans and the Silver Lakey newsboy cap he often prefers to a yarmulke. Yet religious devotion has been part of a nearly 20year career that has passed through the Harvard Lampoon and the writers’ rooms of “American Dad” and “King of the Hill.”
“Get Hard,” which Cohen wrote with Jay Martel and Ian Roberts, is about the fragile and lily-white hedge-fund manager James (Ferrell) sentenced to a maximum-security prison for financial crimes he probably didn’t commit and 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 Mishna to understand why Cohen would be attracted to this theme.
Can you do both?
I grew up in a Modern Orthodox home not dissimilar from Cohen’s. Like him, I attended a religious but academic-minded Jewish day school and joined my friends in a post-high-school gap year to study at a yeshiva in Israel — a school just down the road from Cohen’s, as it turns out.
Although he was raised in Boston and I in New York, we have a number of people in common. Among his high school classmates I count several summer-camp friends, a good college friend and even an ex-girlfriend.
In my early 20s, I faced many of the same dilemmas as Cohen. Being a religious person in the modern world was hard enough. It was especially hard if you wanted to pursue a career in writing or journalism, which Modern Orthodoxy viewed suspiciously. Though my career path was supported unequivocally by my parents, I could still feel the hot stare from the place I came from, the head shake of many people I grew up with. “You’re doing what? Journalism? But can you be religious?”
In our conversation, Cohen raised an interesting theory — jobs like these pose an implicit challenge to a faith-based worldview. “I’ve always been interested in why religious people are suspicious of creative professions,” he said. “Does it just have something to do with creativity being about the individuals as opposed to being part of a community?”
Faced with skepticism from the only world I knew, I chose to turn away. And though I maintain a fondness for many of Orthodoxy’s cultural and intellectual aspects I’ve largely opted out of that world.
Meanwhile, several childhood friends who might have answered a call to venture outside their comfort zone went the other way. They essentially gave up the hope for a life of full-on exploration and instead put an emphasis on family and 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. He had done what I and others hadn’t, and listening to him it was hard not to feel like he was offering a glimpse of a path not taken.
Exploding stereotypes
Near the halfway mark of “Get Hard,” Hart’s Darnell is acting out for Ferrell’s James what the prison yard will be like. In a showcase of his impressive mimicry skills, he offers up in quick succession a white skinhead, a black heavy and a Latino gang member.
The scene dances on the edge of stereotype, but because it’s what Darnell imagines prison is like — after all, he’s never gotten near one — it somehow is OK. In fact, it’s more than OK because it becomes the kind of deceptively smart deconstruction of stereotype that’s become a Cohen specialty.
Arriving here from Harvard in the 1990s, he satirized in “Beavis” the couch potato of the American male in full crotch-scratching relief and sent up perceptions of Texas suburbia with “King of the Hill.”
He 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 familyfriendly 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,” Warners head of production Greg Silverman said of the decision to go with a first-timer on a big movie.
Judge 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. Etan is a little bit part of a different world, so he can look at things a little more objectively.”
Cohen’s 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 said. “I do want to put a little medicine in with the sugar.”
And he can, occasionally, bring up religion in Hollywood circumstances, which can make for amusing juxtapositions. “I remember when Etan was out here in Austin with me working on ‘Idiocracy.’ He had just written this great line that said ‘… y’all, ya’lls,’ ” Judge said, using a less printable command. “And then about two minutes later he looks at his watch and says, ‘I have to go pray. Can you tell me which way is east?’ ”
Cohen believes he’s lost jobs because of his observance but dismisses the idea that this is discriminatory. “If you’re hiring someone to drive the bus,” he noted, citing his unwillingness to work certain days, “you want to make sure they have a driver’s license.”
His casual tone belies the pressure someone like him faces — from secular Jews in the entertainment business who may feel worried about being judged and from fellow observant Jews who think Hollywood represents a different value system.. It’s notable that among all the people I’ve talked to about Orthodoxy and the modern world, some of the least freighted comments came from someone far from Judaism of any stripe.
“I saw Etan as a person whose priorities were intact,” Hart said when I asked what he made of Cohen’s observance. “Because the business should never put you in a place where what you believe is in jeopardy. And if you don’t set that precedent early,” he added, “you’ll never have that foundation.” (Warners’ Silverman says that Cohen’s observance was never an issue, noting only that “as a former craft-services guy I just wanted to make sure he could get good kosher food on set.”)
But actor and executive support is one thing; personal misgivings are another. “Get Hard” is a highly explicit comedy, and there are many scenes — a moment when Darnell goads James to perfect his fellatio skills on strangers comes to mind — that one might not want to watch with the local sisterhood.
Cohen, who would like to continue directing, says he has no easy answers on how to harmonize various aspects of his life: “I feel like if you’re a religious person you believe there’s a reason why you’re made to have certain talents. Even though I haven’t totally resolved this struggle, I feel like there’s a reason I’m grappling with it.”
He did once ask a rabbi he trusted about his conundrum. “He told me that truth is godly in some way, and if you feel this is a true expression of yourself, follow that.”
He paused and added wryly. “Of course, I don’t know if he knew that where that would lead me was to a bathroom … scene.”
Cohen might be a worthy template as a religious filmmaker not because he has the answers but because he hasn’t found many at all — because, when it comes to matters of faith, he’s muddling along like the rest of us, sure of where he’s going only part of the time.
“I feel like one of the great benefits of living a religious life is that it constantly challenges you to see where your values are, makes you ask where you were and where you’d like to go.” He added: “A lot of this has been a tough experience. But it’s also been a galvanizing experience.”