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Irishman and a Jew
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No, this isn't a place to list stale old jokes, though it does have a very important connection to them. An Irishman and a Jew is much subtler (and older) variation on the White Bread and Black Brotha (by comparison, think of the Irishman as the "black dude" and the Jew as the "white dude" — although the Jew will usually have slightly darker skin); it is a fairly common but typically low-key form of Odd Couple pairing that largely originated in Older Than Radio Vaudeville. Simply put, it refers to any situation in which there is extensive collaboration or pairing between an Irishman or Irish-American (the latter is much more common) and a Jewish person. This can apply either to an onscreen pairing of two fictional characters or to a behind-the-scenes collaboration in Real Life. Interestingly, the latter seems to be far more common, and the full Odd Couple potential of this trope is rarely exploited, probably because the ethnicities are those of the performers themselves, and not so important to the characters they play. You'll see this trope occur most often in Vaudeville and in works which originated there; both Irish-American and Jewish entertainers became quite successful on the Vaudeville circuit, and would have had contact with each other and collaborated together. Their real-life collaborations sometimes spilled over into the fictional characters they played and created. Another reason that these collaborations happen so often may be simpler - before World War II, anti-Semitism was virtually unknown in Ireland despite the fact that Dublin has been the home of a sizeable Jewish community since at least the 13th century. Also, here's a Fun Fact - the Irish Constitution is one of only a handful in the world to mention the Jewish religion (it was also the first to mention it).note Another is the Egyptian Constitution of 2012, which specifically mentions that Egyptian Jews—of whom there are frankly not that many—have a right to have personal status adjudicated according to the Halakha. Israel's constitution does not mention the Jewish religion, in fact Israel has no written constitution at all, for the very Jewish reason that they couldn't agree on one. The trope is most common in the USA, but can be found in Britain as well and in any other place where both ethnic groups live. When the trope is exploited for Odd Couple purposes, it usually hinges on the ways in which the two characters' respective upbringings and outlooks on the world affect their personalities. Newsday critic Frank Lovece outlined the two different traditions of Irish-American and Jewish humour; the former is said to be concerned with the sentimental bonds of blood family, while the latter uses laughter as a defensive technique to deal with a cruel and hostile world. Along similar lines, self-described "Bad Catholic" writer John Zmirak humourously contrasted Irish Catholic guilt over lust and concupiscence with Jewish guilt about race and inequality — note how Vienna-born Jewish attorney Felix Frankfurter helped found the American Civil Liberties Union, while Irish-born Archbishop John T. McNicholas founded the National Legion of Decency. (To put it more bluntly, although the Irish and Jews are both famous for stereotypical guilt, Irish guilt is thought of as conservative and Jewish guilt as liberal, although this is by no means always so cut-and-dried: there have been socialist and even communist Irish, and Orthodox Jews tend to have very puritanical social mores.) It is hard to generalize, but the Irish character will probably be bolder and more self-assured, but also more naive and possibly ignorant; the Jewish character is more likely to be a bit nervous and unresisting, but probably smarter and more aware of how the world actually works, as well as willing to say exactly what he thinks of it. In a way, this could be an oblique allusion to Brains and Brawn, or Bully and Wimp Pairing, but it's usually much more subtle (if it is noticeable at all). And of course, the Jew will most likely be a German or some kind of Slav (typically Russian or Polish) as far as nationhood goes, while the Irishman will almost always be a Roman Catholic, though an Irish believing in Judaism (converted or not) is also not uncommon. Sometimes an Italian or Italian-American will be thrown into the mix, possibly because, other than Irish and Jews, the Italians were the most visible immigrant group in America between about 1870 and 1920note Although German immigration was so large as to result in an ethnic-German population that outnumbered even the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic population by the '20s, they tended to integrate better. Anglos and Saxons were from Denmark and Saxony, respectively, at the time of their emigration to England after all.. When this happens, the Italian will often be a kind of double agent: siding with the Irishman on matters of personal morality and community life, and with the Jew when it comes to issues regarding the wider world, especially politics. The Italian might even be mistaken for a Jew due to similar coloring and facial features, although he (or she) will be more likely to intermarry with the Irish because of religious compatibility.note For this, you need look no further than the demographics of the State of New Jersey, which is the only state of the Union where a plurality of people claim Italian ancestry—but where half these Italians either have obviously Irish surnames or are very obviously of mixed Irish-Italian blood. This trope was fairly common in the golden age of Vaudeville and still persists in the theater today; nonetheless, it has become much less prominent in recent years, as younger generations of each ethnic group assimilate to local norms and lose their distinctiveness. (This is particularly true of Jews, who mix with other ethnic groups through marriage more than any other American group, although paradoxically U.S. Jewish identity politics have grown stronger in the past decade.) More modern variations can be found among other American ethnic groups who are also quite similar or have a history of extensive contact, and who are associated with the same respective stereotypes (such as Chinese-Americans for Irish and Japanese-Americans for Jewish, or Mexican-Americans for Irish and Anglo-Americans for Jewish). Nothing to do with the Republic of Ireland's Jewish population (although the historically model relations between Irish Jews and Irish Christians may form yet another example of the trope), so Leo Bloom isn't what we're talking about. Incidentally, Israel's former president Chaim Herzog was born and brought up in Ireland note Belfast - and had a fairly strong Norn Iron accent too! and could well class as both rolled into one. If you are looking for characters that are both Irish and Jewish at the same time, see Twofer Token Minority. |
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In the original script for The Last Five Years, Cathy was Irish. There was even a song ("I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You") about how Jewish Jamie has always loved Irish girls. Truth in Television as the Jewish writer changed it and made Cathy Italian so she didn't too obviously resemble his Irish ex-wife. | |
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In a strange meta-example, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (frequently called "Seinfeld on crack") can also be seen as the Irishman to Seinfeld's Jew. Both the same general sort of setup: 3-4 men and one woman, supposedly "friends" but usually at each others' throats, getting up to hijinks that are ultimately meaningless (i.e. both are "shows about nothing."). However, the characters in It's Always Sunny have unmistakably Celtic names (Reynolds, Kelly, McDonald) and run an Irish-themed pub, and their brand of Comedic Sociopathy generally comes from overconfident, un-self-aware abject stupidity. The gang on Seinfeld were nit-picky about themselves, constantly whining and complaining, intellectuals/professionals, and consisted of three Jews (OK, one Jew,note Jerry one Jewish-Italian half-breed,note George and one guy who isn't supposed to be Jewish but totally comes off as Jewishnote Kramer) and one Eastern European Catholic played by a Jew.note Elaine Also, The Gang in Always Sunny is heavily family-based (Dennis and Dee being brother and sister, Frank being their father except not really, but he is (probably) Charlie's father), while the equivalent in Seinfeld isn't (the parents do show up from time to time, but the family stuff isn't as prominent). Seinfeld itself contains a variant: Jerry Seinfeld (a Jew) is best friend of George Costanza (a Catholic Italian-American, although there are hints that he is partly Jewish as well). |
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British rock group The Pogues cultivated a very Irish image, and were all of Irish heritage - except for guitarist Jem Finer, whose family were Jewish (meaning that their song 'Fairytale of New York' is yet another Christmas song that was (co)-written by a Jewish person. | |
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The Simpsons also makes a reference to this in "Treehouse of Horror III" in which Mr. Burns announces that King Homer's Broadway show will consist of him standing around for three hours, "followed by the ethnic comedy of Duggan and Dershowitz!" | |
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In The Lost Weekend, Don's attempt to pawn his typewriter is stymied because all the city's pawnshops — even the Catholic-owned ones — are closed for Yom Kippur. A character explains that the Jewish pawnbrokers return the favor by staying closed on St. Patrick's Day. | |
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The 1960's comedy team of Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber, who started out in the Chicago-based The Second City comedy troupe with a notable routine of Burns as a talkative taxicab passenger and Schreiber as the driver, and they co-hosted the Burns and Schreiber Comedy Hour of 1973, with Burns working in animated sequences and writing for the first seasons of Hee Haw and The Muppet Show, while Schreiber would be a recurring guest star on Chico and the Man and a semi-regular panelist on Match Game, a series of commercials for Doritos corn chips during the 1970's, and bit parts in Mel Brooks's 1990's comedy films Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. | |
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In Of Thee I Sing, Wintergreen's campaign song claims he "loves the Irish and the Jews," and they are represented on his nomination committee by Francis X. Gilhooley and Louis Lippman. | |
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Geddy Lee of Rush has Jewish roots while Neil Peart has Irish. (Alex Lifeson has Serbian roots, making him a Slav.) | |
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Ross O'Donovan (half-Irish, half-Australian) and Dan Avidan of Steam Train explicitly invoke this trope for Rule of Funny. Interestingly, neither really display any stereotypes of their respective ethnicities and the trope only comes into play when they're giving each other a hard time about it. | |
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Brooklyn Nine-Nine has Jake Peralta (Jewish) and Charles Boyle (Irish sounding name, but never explicitly confirmed to be Irish). It’s somewhat downplayed as both are Cloud Cuckoo Landers who frequently fall into Strange Minds Think Alike. However, Jake is the Brilliant, but Lazy Bunny-Ears Lawyer, while Charles is The Determinator who solves cases by working his ass off. On a personal level, Charles is freakishly close with his entire extended family, while Jake’s is Dysfunction Junction, and Charles is likely to respond to bad things happening to him by going into a deep depression, whereas Jake just “represses the hell out of it�. | |
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One (relatively rare) modern example involved Comedy Central's two current events shows, The Daily Show (under Jon Stewart) and The Colbert Report, from 2006 (when Colbert got his show) through 2015 (when Colbert left for The Late Show and Stewart more or less retired). Stewart (born Jonathan Liebowitz) took news stories heavily laden with corruption, stupidity, and disaster, and handled them with sarcasm and exasperated ranting kvetching. Stephen ColberT, despite the French-sounding pronunciation of his character's name, is predominantly Irish-American and unapologetically Catholic, and watching his onscreen persona on the Report was like watching every single patriotic George M Cohannote Despite what it sounds like, the name "Cohan" is Irish: the Jewish name is usually "Cohen". musical all at the same time. He also shared Gracie Allen's obliviousness to reality. Interestingly, in the 1999 comedy Big Daddy Stewart played Irish-American corporate lawyer Kevin Garrity, while Adam Sandler was his "tough," blustering Jewish roommate, Sonny Koufax. Both actors are Jewish. |
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Similarly, Max Keeble's Big Move has Max, who is Ambiguously Jewish and even has a (somewhat) stereotypical Jewish Mother, get picked on by red-haired, freckled tough guy Troy McGinty. | |
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Schitt's Creek has Jewish Johnny Rose married to the Irish-Catholic Moira Rose, and he is also in an Odd Couple friendship with Roland Schitt, the fourth generation Irish Mayor of the town. | |
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The Spy Who Loved Me has a non comic example with the villains Sol 'Horror' Horowtiz and Sluggsy Morant. | |
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Spenser has the main character/narrator, Spenser, and the love of his life, Susan Silverman. Spenser becomes the one to use humor, though, with Susan focused on analyzing relationships, in turn.note She can't help it, she's a psychologist. | |
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All Saints has this between nurses Connor Costello and Jared Levine, who share a house for the better part of three seasons. | |
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The long-running (fake) feud between Jack Benny and Fred Allen (born Benjamin Kubelsky and John Florence Sullivan, respectively) was one of these. Like most such instances, outright ethnic jokes were rare, with the constant references to Benny's skinflint nature having to do with the fact he was Jack Benny instead of being Jewish. Fred Allen's radio show also provided some examples; characters in "Allen's Alley" included Russian-Jewish houswife Pansy Nussbaum and Irish immigrant Ajax Cassidy. | |
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The Nanny: Best friends Fran Fine and Val Toriello fit this pattern, although Val is Italian-American, not Irish. Additionally, the series itself is built around a variation in this trope, with Fran working for the Sheffields, a British-American Blue Blood family. | |
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MTV's early 90's sketch show The State featured a musical sketch entitled "The Jew, The Italian, and the Redheaded Gay," which exploded into a loud, Vaudeville-type production. | |
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Seinfeld itself contains a variant: Jerry Seinfeld (a Jew) is best friend of George Costanza (a Catholic Italian-American, although there are hints that he is partly Jewish as well). | |
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Similarly, two of Nickelodeon's more popular comedies of the mid-2000s, Drake & Josh and Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide were very different in tone — The former had the bold, laid-back flavor of Irish comedy, while the latter became known for attempting to introduce younger audiences to quite a few classic comedy tropes rooted in Jewish humor. | |
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Interestingly, in the 1999 comedy Big Daddy Stewart played Irish-American corporate lawyer Kevin Garrity, while Adam Sandler was his "tough," blustering Jewish roommate, Sonny Koufax. Both actors are Jewish. | |
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In Being Human, John Mitchell the bold overconfident Irish vampire and George Sands the shy smart Jewish werewolf are best friends. | |
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SCTV had a sketch with Rabbi Karlov and an Irishman cracking stereotypical remarks at each other until they start talking about furniture. | |
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One of the all-time most popular detective pairings on Law & Order was Mike Logan and Lennie Briscoe (although Briscoe is only ethnically Jewish; he was raised Catholic).note Just like his actor, Jerry Orbach. This trope also holds true for the tag team of the show's most popular detective (Briscoe) and attorney (Jack McCoy), who shared star billing for ten years. For that matter, both McCoy and predecessor Ben Stone were earnest and forthright Irish-American prosecutors who consulted with the snarky Jewish District Attorney Adam Schiff. This trope also applies to McCoy's interactions with his Worthy Opponent Randall Dworkin. | |
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Batman: The Animated Series: The comedy-themed Outlaw Couple of The Joker and Harley Quinn provide a twisted take on this trope. The Joker claimed in one episode to be Irish-American and, while undeniably intelligent, is a cheerfully insane Card-Carrying Villain who sows chaos and destruction wherever he goes; meanwhile, Harley Quinn — who was voiced by Jewish actress Arleen Sorkin with a thick Brooklyn accent, but was never explicitly stated to be Jewish until her comic appearances — was far saner than the Joker (though that's not saying much) and was not above the occasional sarcastic response to the Joker's weirder antics. Interestingly enough, despite Harley being the Jewish member of the duo, it was the Irish Joker who was more prone to peppering his speech with Yiddish loanwords, suggesting either mixed ancestry or a Shout-Out to Jewish comedy acts like The Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges. | |
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Troll Cops portrays the two leads, Sollux and Terezi, in this way. The Captors are portrayed as a traditional Irish-American cop family, while Terezi is Troll Jewgish. | |
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The Bonfire of the Vanities: Detective Martin and his partner, Detective Goldberg. Like most of the homicide bureau, Goldberg has assimilated to the prevailing Irish-American cultural ethos (as has Jewish assistant DA Kramer). | |
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The Meet the Parents saga features an interesting example with the Jewish Fockers and the Irish-American (although "Ulster Scot"/Protestant) Byrnes; the former clan leading a freewheeling lifestyle while the latter is very straitlaced (Greg and Pam however tend to play this trope straight, if quite downplayed). The end of Little Fockers then subverts it by having Jack, the Byrnes' patriarch, discovering he's part Jewish. | |
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The two male leads of All in the Family were Caroll O Connor and Rob Reiner. Although neither of their characters were written to match their real-life ethnicities (Archie Bunker was a WASP and Mike Stivic was Chicago Polish), there was a considerable amount of subtext going on, which many viewers noticed; O'Connor modeled the Bunker character's mannerisms and speech patterns on many of the blue-collar Irish-Americans he had known growing up, while Reiner made no attempt whatsoever to sound like a Polish-American from Chicago. | |
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In Venus Envy, Zoë’s father is Jewish, while her mother is Irish. | |
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Mixed into one character to great effect in one Saturday Night Live sketch — a commercial parody of an album of Irish Drinking Songs. | |
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Used on one episode of Good Eats, of all things. A scene explaining how corned beef came (erroneously) to be associated with Irish cuisine employed a Jewish rabbi and an Irish priest sitting in a bar. After some dialogue and an explanationnote Before the Great Famine, a fairly typical Irish dish was boiled bacon with potatoes and cabbage; when destitute immigrants arrived in New York City, they found that bacon was too scarce and expensive, so they replaced it with corned beef, which they purchased from stores owned by their new Jewish neighbors. from Alton's nutritional anthropologist, we get the set-up to a corny old-fashioned joke: "A priest, a rabbi, and a nutritional anthropologist walk into a bar..." Then Alton, the priest, and the rabbi all roll their eyes and get up to leave. | |
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In Grace and Frankie, Grace's family (Irish Catholic) and Frankie's family (Jewish) both exploit and invert this trope in their Odd Couple interactions. The Hansons are more socially conservative as would be expected, but they are also more cutting in their humor than the Bergsteins—who come off as painfully sweet. | |
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Finian's Rainbow incorporated elements of Irish folklore (more or less) and featured an Irish protagonist named McLongergan; the show was penned by an all-Jewish writing team. | |
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In The Last Hurrah, Mayor Frank Skeffington's Jewish assistant Sam asks the mayor to do the drawing at a raffle for the Jewish War Veterans' Committee. Skeffington agrees to show up for the drawing and even buy a book of tickets, but wisely refuses to do the drawing himself. | |
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The two antagonists in Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party are a stereotypical pair of sinister gentlemen named McCann and Goldberg, who make a point of invoking their ethnic origins in their dialogue. Pinter himself was Jewish. | |
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An amusing subversion of this trope takes place in The Three Stooges short A Pain in the Pullman. The boys receive a call from a booking agency named Goldstein, Goldberg, Goldblatt, & O'Brien. They get the call from O'Brien - who speaks with a thick Yiddish accent. | |
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Family Guy revealed that the Griffin family exemplify this trope. Peter Griffin is generally identified as an Irish-American semi-lapsed Catholic, with other things thrown into his family tree for Rule of Funny. His wife Lois was eventually revealed to be Jewish on her mother's side (which by Jewish law makes her fully Jewish), which led to comedy as her husband struggled with this fact. True to the trope, Peter is ignorant and boorish but confident and self-assured, while Lois is snarky and (relatively speaking) more keenly aware of the world around her. Early on, Brian could be considered the "Jew" character, despite being an atheist (not to mention a dog) — he's witty, cynical, reads The New Yorker, and often acted as the eye-rolling Straight Man to Peter's Zany Schemes. |
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Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara in Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. | |
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The Broadway musical version of Young Frankenstein was penned by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan, in a fairly recent behind-the-scenes example. As in many of these cases, the fact of their ethnicity has little to do with the finished product, but it is remarkable that the trope persists long after the death of Vaudeville and the disintegration of the old New York City ethnic enclaves. | |
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One of the more common comparisons between the 90s sitcoms Friends and Seinfeld has to do with the former's bawdy humor and the latter's more cynical worldview being based in this trope (and how their approaches eventually created a clear division among later comedy works). | |
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Jim and Michelle in the American Pie movies. Jim is a nerdy, repressed Jew, while the stereotypically red-haired Michelle is equally nerdy but outspoken and bawdy. Ironically, this is reversed with their actors. Jason Biggs is of mostly Italian descent and was raised in a Catholic household, while Alyson Hannigan is half-Jewish on her mother's side (though also half-Irish on her father's). | |
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In Margin for Error, the two cops are Officer Moe Finklestein and Captain Mulrooney of the Homicide Squad, though the latter only appears at the play's very end. Refusing to cooperate with Moe's investigation of the murder, Horst says, "I'll take my chances with the Irish." | |
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