Do it, Jewmongous!

It was a normal winter's day in Chicago last December. My embarrassing childhood obsession with the Carmen Sandiego TV show (Mayim Biyalik appears in a special celebrity episode in the second season), video game (played on my dad's Commodore 64), and other various paraphernalia, was long behind me. I know enough about geography now, thank you.

Then I walked into the Beat Kitchen on Belmont, and there he was: Sean Altman, the lead singer of Rockapella! First I was star-struck -- then he put on a yarmulke, and I was in love.

His newest project, Jewmongous, is a musical comedy show about Jews and Judaism, and he had me laughing so hard that night, I was embarrassed all over again. And as in a similar phenomenon to that of Bob Saget (aka Danny Tanner) from Full House and Dustin Diamond (aka Screech) from Saved By the Bell, revisiting the comedy of my childhood as an adult in an adult setting was quite shocking. That is to say, raunchy, disturbing, explicit, dirty, derogatory, defaming, and utterly hilarious. I guess one could say it was good Jewish humor because I felt guilty laughing at it.

So I'm going to end this week's blog postings by building on yesterday's theme of comedy as serious business, and by posting this (actually relatively vanilla) video of one of Jewmongous' performances. Enjoy, and have a good Shabbos.



(I, for one, am glad everyone laughed at this. See this video of Sacha Baron Cohen for contrast, in case you haven't already...)