He’s far from a household name even in his native Canada, but Alan Zweig is one of the country’s finest documentarians, and 2013 saw the domestic release of his latest feature documentary, When Jews Were Funny. It’s a characteristically introspective piece of work from Zweig, whose past documentaries border on self-obsession, but he has a way of making his narcissism interesting and engaging to an audience that exists outside his own mind. What is it about Canadians like Zweig, Polley and Guy Maddin that allows them to make such personal works of art that aren’t unbearably indulgent?
Limited by my Gentile perspective (I am, at best, a vicarious Jew), there was obviously a notable portion of the interviews conducted in this movie that went over my head. Nevertheless, Zweig finds a way of sewing his personal Jewish background together with a brief history of professional Jewish comedy in North America in a way that made his insider perspective a little more relatable and understandable to us outsiders. With his subjects, Zweig examines questions of cultural identity, Jewish exceptionalism, the role of humor in an individual’s life as well as the life of a community, and the way different sources of humor, such as suffering, can influence a specific brand of humor. Zweig says nothing is funnier to him than the thought of his father eating soup, which sums up the movie for me: I don’t understand this at all, and yet it somehow also makes perfect sense.
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