Bad Comedy Inspired Ari Shaffir to Turn Jew Into a Killer Hour Special, And You Need to See The Taping This Weekend
Comedian Ari Shaffir is finally filming Jew, his explosive and hilarious fourth comedy special on Saturday and Sunday June 11-12 in Brooklyn. After several of the shows sold out, Shaffir and his team decided to add more seats, so you still have a chance to be there to see the culmination of 5 years of shaping (minus a year or so break from the material).
Shaffir is known for going places others wouldn’t dare. There are many comics who think they know what it means to push limits, but Ari lives in that space full time, so few can match his fearlessness at covering forbidden topics. He’s confident, bordering on cocky, and truly doesn’t give a fuck if you get your feelings hurt over his jokes. He’s also not an asshole, and doesn’t throw words around cheaply for shock value. He wants to shock you, and he will shock you, but not without purpose, and not without making you laugh. He’s a pro and he’s done this before. The Amazing Racist, Revenge for the Holocaust, This is Not Happening, Passive Aggressive, and his Netflix special, Double Negative all helped him build this reputation. Provocative, dangerous, hilarious. He does it again with his new show, Jew.
Shaffir has made this special about his own history growing up as an Orthodox Jew, and taking the audience deeper into the community than anyone ever has before. As both an insider (Shaffir was born, raised and educated Orthodox) and an outsider (after two years at Yeshiva he left his religion behind, becoming an atheist), Shaffir is the perfect person to examine, pull apart, and skewer the absurdities of religion.
Sara Dahms saw the show in 2020, and was blown away. You can read her reactions here. I haven’t seen the show yet, but I talked to Shaffir ahead of the taping about what it took to bring Jew to fruition.
In the spring of 2017, the idea started with one joke on stage, that did better with the audience than he had expected. That that got him thinking about whether there was a thread he could pick up for an hour. That bit has now become the show’s closer (which I won’t give away) and since then, he just kept building.
Around the same time, Shaffir said he went to the infamous Edinburgh Fringe festival with his storytelling show, This is Not Happening. He described the trip as his “Beatles go to India” moment, and didn’t mince words about what he experienced there. Shaffir said he would see everyone doing theme shows- one man or one woman shows- but he wasn’t impressed and knew he could do what they were trying to do. He said the themes were more of an artifice than a legitimate motif, and he didn’t think they really went for laughs. “They all do themes there, but they suck,” he said, bluntly. “They’re just not funny.” Shaffir thinks there are a few guys who do it right, but most of them don’t. “It’s cause they all come out of theater. That’s their stand up there,” he said. “So they’re still like living in that world and I’m like, Ugh. And then when you’ve seen it…. you’ve seen –the fucking Hannah Gadsby, you know? And she got derided here mostly because they just didn’t understand that theater thing. Yeah. And I just don’t like that style. It’s just like, you can be funny in this. There’s no reason not to.”
So he wanted to blend the best of New York style stand up, with the idea of a themed hour and show Edinburgh how it’s done. “I was like, I’m gonna come back in two years. I’m gonna show you what an American hour looks like. The plan was to do that and then show them what a theme would be like if they made it fucking, you know, America funny.”
Okay so he admitted, he made Jew out of spite. “I don’t wanna hide from that. I really am trying to throw it in their face,” he said.
But once he had a strong funny hour, he knew he still had a few challenges to deal with. Ari knew that doing the hour would open him to a lot of critiques– critiques from Rabbi’s, Orthodox Jews, religious experts, old friends telling him he got it wrong– so he had to make sure he really worked the hour. “If I didn’t cover enough of a topic or didn’t do it all the way, (they’d say) oh, well yeah, you did this, but you didn’t do it this way. You left this out. So I was like, no, no, I wanna like answer all your, what I perceive their critiques would be. So they can’t say fucking shit.”
Ari worked the show as a storytelling hour at places like The Stand and The Creek and the Cave, and Edinburgh, but he also worked it piece by piece as standup at the clubs to make sure each part stood on its own, to make sure he could follow some of the best comics with the material. He also did some Q&As after some shows to find out, what are people curious about, what really resonates, and to get the chance to find out from tougher critics if he got anything wrong. The questions inevitably led to more material for the show. “Cause I’d be like, oh, is this what you guys are thinking about? You get the same questions over and over. And you’d like, okay, clearly everybody’s thinking about this.” He also found that even though the stories were about his upbringing, outsiders to the culture could really relate, because they had their own weird shit growing up. “Non-Jews have plenty of ways to relate to this and the Jews do too.” And then he also learned from the critics. “I do get some Jews going “that didn’t happen.” I’m like,”oh, you’re wrong. I researched it. I remember.” When he would get those kind of responses, he would go back and make sure his information was not only sound, but rabbi-proof. One Q&A even led to him dropping a long and hilarious bit about Noah. “I had this long bit, I mean, a killer bit about Noah’s 40 children and what it did to his wife’s pussy,” he told me. But he had to drop that bit after he met a Rabbi who told him Noah definitely didn’t have 40 kids- he had a normal number of kids. “I’m like, no, that’s wrong. He goes, he was like, Hey man, I really don’t care. I’m not trying to get on you. But like, you’re just, you’re wrong. And then I looked it up and it’s like, yep. Not 40, not even close. So I lost a lot of material to research. Everything’s gotta be true.”
You already know Ari is hilariously funny, you know he’s going to push every button, every boundary, every limit he possibly can, and you know that he won’t sacrifice truth for the laughs.
And the merch and marketing is going to be like nothing you’ve seen before.
You have to see Jew, and you know someone will try to cancel it, so just in case it never sees the light of day, get your ass to Brooklyn this weekend to see Ari Shaffir tape his new hour, “Ari Shaffir: Jew.”
“Ari Shaffir: Jew” tapes at Roulette on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, on Saturday June 11th and Sunday June 12th, two shows each night. For tickets go to arishaffir.standuptix.com and use code JEW to get a $5 discount.
