Our Divine Comedies

Recovering a vital spirit in a tragic age

I delivered the following speech on June 9, 2024, at the Old Glory Club Conference near Memphis, Tennessee. The following is an excerpt of the first half with the full version available on the Old Glory Club Substack.

I always approach this yearly talk with some trepidation. I arrive with an idea for the conference that I am looking to explore at length. But then there is a need for an icebreaker. Usually, it helps if these icebreakers are humorous, but humor itself has gotten harder as of late.

We might forget that most of us, as serious as we are all trying to be right now, began with the pursuit of humor. And back in the glory days of YouTube, getting laughs was easy enough. The enemy was the progressives, and that was the group that everyone wanted to mock. But then things changed, the bottom fell out of the online discourse space, and it became very apparent that very little could be accomplished by talking to these people, much less cracking jokes about them — not simply because they were revealed to be the puppets of power, but because they were revealed to be batshit lunatics.

I guess the absolute collapse of the online left was as funny just as it was predictable. But not in any wholesome sense. Speaking as someone who interacts with these individuals quite a bit online (perhaps too much), I can say that it really is hard to look at someone in the position of ContraPoints, Thought Slime, or even Vaush without being filled with a sense of pity. It’s like encountering those people you knew in high school who never did grow out of a certain stage of their lives, or never could. Laughing is the last emotion you want to express, even if their situation is objectively ridiculous.

But from whence can be found a humorous topic? Is it just about finding some out-group to complain about?

Of course, when I brought this problem up to an old friend, right around the beginning of the anti-Israel protests near where I live, I was told point-blank, and with more seriousness than I was expecting, that probably the group everyone wanted to hear me complain about, especially in a humorous capacity, was well, uh… the Jews.

Um, no. That’s not going to work.

Do you mean to tell me, that after seven years of studiously avoiding speaking about this group, I was now just going to get up in front of an audience of two hundred people and talk about the Hebrew Menace? I mean, come on. I have a German last name, and half of my family tree fought on the wrong side of World War II. This is a non-starter.

So instead, I went in search of a good joke to tell. But it’s very hard to come across a good joke, the kind that makes you take a step back in a totally unexpected way, that draws you into a moment of self-reflection. I’ve heard only a few of these jokes in my lifetime. And only one changed the course of my life. And the more I thought back to that joke, the more I wanted to make it part of this year’s talk.

But unfortunately, that joke is about Jewish people.

I mean to be clear: this joke is a Jewish Joke. I call it the “Yiddish Chicken Joke.” But I can’t explain it, or really deliver it properly in any meaningful sense, without first discussing my own relationship with Judaism at the broadest level.

So here I am, in the exact place I didn’t want to be: talking about my own personal “Jewish Question” in front of hundreds of people.

I guess the beginning of my problems may be genetic. As everyone online, and sometimes in my personal life, reminds me, I look Jewish. There might be some basis for this suspicion. I learned a decade ago that I indeed have a great-great-great-grandmother who was Jewish, leaving myself somewhere in between 3 and 4% Ashkenazim, but also in that very enviable position of being Jewish by the matriarchal Talmudic law and Aryan by the standards of Hitler’s Nuremburg Laws, something I feel very proud of.

Hey, laugh now, but I have the 23andMe to prove it, along with a paper signed by Heinrich Himmler.

That’s a joke, but, well, not really.

Nevertheless, for my own part, I have always been fascinated with Jewish culture, not least because when I grew up, most of my friends were either half or entirely Jewish. More than a few times I found myself sitting at tables during parties, realizing that I was the only gentile present and that everyone else just assumed that I was one of the people. Very often I was that lone goyim, and so I feel like I have a unique insight into this other world that I was never a part of myself.

I am probably going to disappoint a lot of people when I say that I don’t really have anything very negative to say about Jewish culture generally. It has its known eccentricities, to be sure, and also its mysteries. It is radically traditional yet also radically deconstructive. Critical yet somehow supremely oblivious to even the most basic realities. As a culture, Jews have a certain style of genius, a certain ability to invert perspectives by saying the thing that couldn’t be said and expressing the truths that couldn’t quite be expressed publicly. Perhaps that’s subversive, but it’s also a core part of the Jewish culture that I deeply admire.

But it is not without paradox. There is always that sense in which Jews, the shrewd noticers of the wrong things about other people, could never really seem to notice anything about themselves as a group. Of course, at an individual level, Jews were hyper-aware and even had a penchant for a certain neurotic guilt complex. But when the question moved to the collective level, there was instead this blithe obliviousness, a feeling that even the concept of Jewish guilt, at any point in history, was inconceivable at an ontological level.

There is also that other paradox wherein Jews, known widely to be great explainers and debaters, can never convincingly argue their own side. Every time a Jewish person has tried to explain or defend his own actions to me, it has had the inevitable consequence of convincing me of the exact opposite. I always think that Jews themselves must be aware of this at some level, since these types of catastrophically bad apologetics are a staple of Jewish comedy (Larry David built his entire career on this). Still, I don’t think many realize how extensive the problem really is.

As some of you will probably know this year, from personal experience, there is no better way to talk someone out of Zionism than to put him in a conversation with an Israeli Zionist. That is certainly what happened to me. I began the conversation as a then-follower of Ben Shapiro and a complete supporter of America’s “greatest ally.” Then, after 20 minutes of hearing my interlocutor’s justifications for Israel’s actions, actions which I had theretofore thought I supported, I wanted to ask the guy if he knew how I could join the PLO.

Or alternatively, I might hear from an older relative that Jewish Talmudic law was an attempt to trick God to get around the spirit of His law. As a young man, I dismissed this easily (all the more easily because there was a nonzero chance that said older relative might have learned this fact from the Hitler Youth). Certainly, Jewish religious strictures have a beauty about them. But then, at a later stage of life, I sat down and watched a five-minute TikTok video of a rabbi explaining why they followed Talmudic law, and I immediately found myself mumbling, “Good grief, this guy is trying to trick God!”

I guess this phenomenon brings me right in line, to that one point in life where I almost converted to Judaism, the backdrop for the Yiddish Chicken Joke.

Suffice it to say that, as a young man, I was deeply impressed with Jewish culture. Not least in the way that it seemed to wed tradition and skepticism, and connect the Old World to the New. Of course, I had my own Old-World tradition, but it felt dead, it seemed only able to exist in a pre-modern state, and furthermore, it wasn’t an identity. It seemed that Jews were the only people who really understood the modern condition. They had criticism, yet also a certain concept of spirituality and permanence.

As such, around my early teens, I had managed to convince myself that I should convert to Judaism. Now, mind you, this was not a sincere religious ambition in any way. I was still very much a proto-skeptic — my main stint in atheism was very much ahead of me. My desire to convert was just about tapping into that feeling of identity that I so deeply coveted.

After all, what was a religion? Just a name, right? There wasn’t anything permanent about it.

Well. Maybe there was one thing permanent about it, considering how conversion to Judaism for men involved an uncomfortable genital surgery, but that was immaterial to me back then. And, as a former Hipster Millennial, I like to think now that I was just contemplating genital mutilation to obtain a fake identity before it was cool.

But as luck would have it, my ambition to convert to Judaism was stopped cold in its tracks, by (wouldn’t you guess it) a conversation with one of my Jewish friends. We were on a hiking trip at the time, and I broached the topic of conversion generally, only to try to get an idea of what the process would entail. Now in hindsight, I realize that he thought I was trying to convert him to Christianity, but that did not occur to me at the time, and instead of addressing the topic directly, my friend just told me a joke, the infamous “Yiddish Chicken Joke.”

It goes like this:

At one point in the early 20th century, there was a tenement building occupied by several Polish immigrant families and a lone Jewish widower still occupying his apartment after most of his community had moved to a different neighborhood. This being the early 20th century, the Polish residents still practiced meatless Fridays, which forced them to subsist on a rather unsavory fish stew for dinner while their Jewish neighbor celebrated Sabbath dinner with a sumptuous baked chicken. Subsequently, the smells of chicken made the Poles’ Friday fast all the more difficult. So one day they decided that the best course of action was to get the old man to convert to Catholicism.

Yet when confronted about the prospect of converting, the old Jewish man expressed concern.

“I don’t know anything about Christianity,” he said. “What am I supposed to believe?”

Now, not being well-versed in theology, despite observing the fasts — this is indeed how you know the story took place in the early 20th century — the Polish guys tried to dismiss the question entirely.

They said, “Don’t worry about believing things; it’s just a simple process. You are a Jew, you were born a Jew, you’ve been a Jew all your life, but we will take you to the priest, he will say some prayers, sprinkle some water over your body, and then you will be Catholic!”

After pressing him for a while, the old man relented, he went with the Poles to the church, and the routine went just like they said… He was a Jew, born a Jew, but then he was baptized and became Catholic.

So, after the Poles reminded the man that his new Catholic status meant that he could not eat chicken on Friday, everyone went home. But then, the next Friday, the Poles smelled the scent of chicken wafting out of the old man’s apartment once more.

Oh, no. One week, and he had already apostatized?

The Polish guys were furious, and so they decided the next Friday to spy on his apartment to catch him in the act of violating the Friday fast.

So they waited just outside the old man’s window on a Friday night. Sure enough, he came in with a cooked chicken and then held it over the sink with a cup of water in his hand. And the old man started speaking to the chicken, and said:

“You are a chicken. You were born a chicken. You have been a chicken your whole life. But when I sprinkle this water over your body, then you will become a fish!”

It probably sounds like a very old-fashioned punch line. But it’s hard to communicate the gravity of this joke in the context that I was in at the time of hearing it. Because I resembled the joke entirely: pursuing a fake conversion to change something about myself that was fundamentally unchangeable, all in order to get something that didn’t really exist. And then I understood at some level that I could no more become Jewish, in the way that I wanted, than the Jewish man’s chicken could become a fish.

Now before I go forward, some disclaimers. I understand, as a sincere Christian believer, that this joke comes close to blaspheming the sacrament of baptism. I also don’t want to scoff at conversion, as I know many very devout Jewish converts to Christianity. And I don’t want to minimize the transformative power of faith. However, as the Yiddish Chicken Joke teaches, these truths have to coexist with the realities of peoplehood and culture that are, in this world, permanent, and not easily changeable on a whim of language or personal preference.

But it is exactly this lesson of unchangeable collective identity and permanence beyond names that went against everything that I had been taught as a good Californian liberal in the 1990s. Were there relevant things about a person that couldn’t be modified? Were not your nation and culture just arbitrary zip codes, as The Simpsons and George Carlin had told me? Obviously, I wasn’t being given the whole story. So a crack began to form in my worldview.

And that crack only widened because the friend who so memorably told me this joke was the most unrepentant shitlib imaginable. Every policy he talked about, every position he pontificated on, and every opinion he voiced was about the interchangeability of all people, the transient properties of tradition, and the preeminence of choice in identity.

And all the while, when he was talking about his opinions, I always had that little voice in my head forming a retort.

“All right, man, no human is illegal. We can just declare people American at the border.”

But is that how ethnicity works? What about the Yiddish Chicken Joke?

“Sure, dude, tradition is meaningless. Your country is just the zip code you were born in. Belief is only a superficial component of your culture.”

But are identities really like that? What about the Yiddish chicken?

“Of course, my guy, anyone can change their gender. It’s just a word. It’s just a social construct. After all, these things don’t really mean anything under the surface.”

But is everything so transient? What about the Yiddish chicken?

Of course, I couldn’t say any of this. But my brain was all the while screaming:

“What about the chicken! What about the chicken! You knew why that joke was funny! You knew why people can’t just change their identities on a whim and that religion and faith are deeper than just the names we give to them. You know that’s what’s going on; otherwise, you wouldn’t have told the joke or laughed at it. Truth was spoken in jest, and now all I am hearing is feel-good bullshit spoken out of vanity.”

I felt at some level like I might be going insane, or maybe I was just being asked to believe in an insane thing. But that is the power of a good joke.

And not just a good joke. What I had experienced was the power of a true comedic spirit. The power to look at the world, see what is fake, and then mock it in the name of something truer and more wholesome. This was one of the great geniuses of Jewish culture in the last century and something that I hope to explore further, abstractly, in my talk today.

What creates a great insightful comedic sense? Not just being funny. But creating a moment of comedic truth where you notice that the emperor has no clothes and you are prepared to buck the social pretensions around you.

Of course, here we might indeed start with Jewish humor. Take for instance the Marx Brothers, my favorite classic comedians, and a type of humor that a lot of people say doesn’t translate well into our time. But the Marx Brothers are hard to interpret because we live in a supremely uncultured age. Within the context of classic high society, the deep irreverence of disrupting a formal embassy dinner or an opera with PG antics was the 1930 equivalent of a crude South Park gag. But what makes the Marx Brothers great comedy, at least in my own humble opinion, is the great joy that inhabits their craft. They are not cruelly deconstructing their native society, but merely shattering the illusions of its pretensions, always in service of greater goodness — e.g., the well-being of two star-crossed lovers, the tearing down of a tyrant, or merely helping out a good man who is down on his luck.

Great comedy is always the process of life mocking death.

Comedy is iconoclastic, but the humor must contain within it a greater purpose to feel right. If not, the process is a cruel and dirty farce, rightly held in contempt. And this contrast is very easy to see in the decline of Jewish comedy of the 20th century. That great childlike optimism of the Marx Brothers gave way to the still talented but cynical Woody Allen, who never seemed to know what note of hope to give his audience and just had to appeal to crude existentialism. Then finally, we arrive at where we are now, with the likes of Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman, who are unable to make anything that isn’t at base ugly and vindictive. They don’t seek to tear down falsehood in the name of truth, but simply to blaspheme for the sake of blasphemy, to poison and hurt, and to paint beautiful things as ugly. This humor is death mocking life.

But this is not simply a problem of Jewish comedy.

We live in an age that does not have a comedic sense. Not in the proper way. Hollywood has lost both its sense of humor and its understanding of storytelling. But what’s interesting is how difficult it is for even outsiders to mock our supremely mockable age.

You see this quite prominently in the creations of the Daily Wire, whose products feel like stale South Park jokes, warmed-over King of the Hill references, or callbacks to early 2000s awkward parodies. The Daily Wire can’t make humorous films, just period pieces.

Of course, this is low-hanging fruit. After all, who is less clueless than normie-cons, right?

But if you want to challenge yourself, do this sometime: try to think of what a good script for a comedy about transgender insanity would look like in 2024. It’s almost impossible to do, really. No matter what you think of, the jokes either feel too obvious or too political to be truly cutting.

And it’s not because there isn’t anything mockable about the transgender phenomenon. The whole thing is a joke. But it’s just too close, and the space to mock it is too narrow to maneuver. There isn’t enough shared understanding of what’s normal or good to land anything that feels properly comedic.

The only way I could even conceive of a humorous movie about transgenderism working would be to double down on everything and make a film in the style of something like Dr. Strangelove or Trainspotting. You would need to make a borderline horror movie, a freak show, where every element of harm and degeneracy is amplified and the total nihilistic squalor is laid bare.

But then would that really be a comedy in the classic sense of the Marx Brothers?

Hardly. It would just be a tragedy where we point and laugh at the victims before the curtains close.

But the modern world doesn’t need a freak show where we laugh at people destroying their lives. We already have our current reality. We have the Internet. Hell, we have the phenomenon of BreadTube. And, while this might reveal artistic truth in it, merely observing the tragic spectacle of squalor in a humorous way would not actually contain a true comedic spirit.

For the longest time, I have been looking to unlock the secret of comedy qua comedy. Not just the question of humor, but the common form that could be found in the myriad pieces of media called “comedies,” from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, from the Divine Comedy to The Big Lebowski. A spirit of Comedy in the same way that Nietzsche explored the spirit of Tragedy.

However, I never really found anything. Even the etymology of the word comedy doesn’t point in the direction of a larger theme since it simply derives from the Middle English meaning of “happy ending.” So it might seem that a word commonly used to describe humorous stories along with romances, and even metaphysical poetry, is more or less a coincidence of language.

But nevertheless, I feel you can describe a common ur-comedic form, visible in all media that properly carries the name.

The form is always the same.

First, we begin with characters who are stuck in a crisis and dealing with insurmountable problems. Then a twist occurs. Something radically disruptive emerges and the situation accelerates deeper and even seems to get worse (sometimes hilariously worse) until at once, a change happens and the spell is broken. The illusions and pretense that shrouded the characters are broken, sometimes by the absolute absurdity that the characters’ actions have heroically summoned, and then we return to the center, to order and to health, the good news has been received and the comedy has been resolved, and the characters enter into a greater reality.

It’s that last part that makes the comedic spirit distinct, and the form is not just a rehash of the hero’s journey.

The feeling that a comedy delivers is that of unburdening. One feels as though he has stepped out of a smaller world and has now entered a greater, more ordered, less deceptive, and more full life. This is a form that can be observed in Shakespeare’s Tempest, wherein Prospero’s sorcery persists just as does his feud with the King, until both his sorcery and his feud are shattered by the love of his daughter, who gives her famous quote at the conclusion, that now a “Brave New World” has begun.

This is also the form of my favorite poem, Dante’s Divine Comedy. The poet, locked in a moment of crisis, must descend into Hell to see things at their absolute worst, before very slowly rising and seeing each layer of falsehood stripped away as he approaches the Throne of Divinity until when he looks back, he sees that all former things and iniquities of both Earth and Hell are small in the light of the greatness that is God’s love.

And it’s this sense of spiritual comedy that I think we have lost as a culture, and we dissidents need to attempt to recover, to take the next step into a better world.

I suppose this is where we come back to what I think is the central question of our purpose at this conference today, where we are making some noticeable progress in addressing the realities of our modern crisis.

There is this problem that right-wingers have, especially in conferences, that was recently pointed out humorously by the Red Scare girls. On one episode, hosts Anna and Dasha made an interesting observation that the right wing often seems fundamentally to misuse discourse; we create conversations around abstractions and idealisms that, while true, don’t advance a real conversation that is going on among real people.

So, for example, we might hold conferences on pro-natalism, or fighting progressive cultural domination, or opposing atheism. All of these pursuits are very worthwhile, and the causes are true. And I am a huge admirer of people like Kevin Dolan and others who organized these events. However, these topics aren’t active areas for discourse. They are too basic to be argued. And anyone who is taking the other side of the conversation is almost by definition too far gone. Because you are just trying to argue people into sanity.

I know this sounds pretty rich coming from me, a person who still likes engaging with insane lefties from time to time for sport. But it’s worth taking stock of this problem. You have to understand the actual conversation in play, and not just the one presented to you.

But right-wingers, conservatives in particular, can never stop preparing for a debate that isn’t happening.

For instance, currently, Jordan Peterson and friends are spending an enormous amount of time to develop arguments against cosmetic transgenderism for children. And pretty soon, as trends continue in Canada, they will be developing arguments against assisted suicide for children. And I am sure their case will be full of absolute bangers.

But it’s all meaningless, because how is a conversation like this supposed to go?

“Okay, so maybe you haven’t been convinced by Jordan Peterson’s Third Teleological Argument against ‘chopping your dick off and killing yourself,’ but have you heard Wesley Yang’s Sixth Ontological Argument against ‘chopping your dick off and killing yourself’? Or maybe Jonathan Pageau’s Second Cosmological Argument against ‘chopping your dick off and killing yourself’?”

This is the picture of insanity.

We aren’t debating solutions, because we all know the solution: Don’t chop your dick off and kill yourself. Is it really that hard?

Debate is a pretense where modern narcissists perform their desire for collective self-obliteration, just to see the advocates of life plead their case before the court of death, and look like fools doing so.

But the answer to this challenge is neither to engage with the debate as such, nor to shun it and walk away, but rather to mock it. To shatter its pretensions. To break its spell. To dissipate the illusions with poetic insight and the demonstration of a greater strength. To become the happy iconoclasts of the false gods, the same piercing sense of comedic energy that I found in the Yiddish Chicken Joke.

Read the whole thing at the OGC blog!