Most stand-up comedians' first appearance on television is a nerve-racking experience, but Joel Chasnoff decided to crank up the stakes: On Tuesday evening, he made his television debut - not only live, but in Hebrew.
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"When I think about it, it's ridiculous," says an impressively calm Chasnoff, speaking to Anglo File prior to his five-minute slot on the Channel Ten talk show, "Every Night with Assaf Harel."
"The whole notion of speaking in a foreign language on live television is crazy enough, but comedy! It's so dependent on language and nuance and the rhythm of words - sometimes it just doesn't translate. The punch line can end up in the middle of the joke."
The 30-year-old comedian offers an example from the material he uses for his Jewish audiences. "I talk about the difficulties of being married to an Israeli," says Chasnoff, who met his wife Dorit at one of his shows. "Every summer my wife's parents come and stay with us for a full month. I call it `the occupation.'" While Chasnoff says this always gets a laugh from an American Jewish crowd, he has been struggling to find the best way to translate "occupation" into Hebrew. "It's hard to find a word that has that same all-encompassing connotation," he says.
Despite such obstacles, Chasnoff chose to perform in Hebrew on Tuesday. "I'd rather have the burden on me to translate than on the audience," says Chasnoff, who succeeded in getting several laughs from those in the television studio, despite letting his reasonably fluent Hebrew slip into English a few times. "Humor here is difficult because there is such a cynical culture in Israel. On the other hand, Israelis are willing to laugh at more things than other people."
Chasnoff, who now lives in Riverdale, New York, recalls being in Israel in September 2001 at the time of the terror attacks in the United States. "There were jokes about it here within 24 hours, but three years on in the U.S. there is still none. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it says something about the mentality."
But Chasnoff's real passion in comedy is not making Israelis laugh, but rather poking fun at the North American Jewish culture in which he grew up. Raised in a practicing Conservative household, he distances himself from traditional Jewish humor, which he dismisses as based on stereotypes. "It's very much about us versus the goyim, or `my friend is so cheap, he did this'; Jews with money and big noses and `my mother-in-law.' It was a product of its time and the situation that Jews were in - the immigrant experience, reflected through humor. But we're no longer this people on the outside and it's degrading. Jewish humor needs to change. I think audiences appreciate hearing something new, like [comedy about] real Jewish experiences."
The material that Chasnoff has written for Jewish audiences - which he estimates constitutes about two-thirds of his work - reflects his experiences at a Jewish day school ("We studied Rashi, who wrote Cliffs Notes for the Bible"); his frequent attendance at bar mitzvahs ("My nephew is half-Jewish, so for his bar mitzvah I gave him $9") and synagogue (he refers to "the `moves' of the Amidah prayer - choreography you won't find in any church"). He describes them as "jokes about being Jewish and having a Jewish life, as opposed to Jewish stereotypes. It's less predictable."
Chasnoff, who grew up in Evanston, Illinois, spent a year serving as a tank gunner in the Israel Defense Forces before launching his career as a comedian five years ago. Two years ago, he was able to give up his day job as a teacher and devote himself full-time to writing, performing, arranging tour dates and marketing himself.
In addition to appearing at the Montreal Comedy Festival and opening for comedians like Jon Stewart and Lewis Black, Chasnoff has performed numerous times for the Jewish campus organization Hillel and has been brought to Israel to entertain large numbers of Diaspora Jews here on educational tours with Birthright Israel.
Last week, he performed in the U.K. at the Limmud Conference, where British Jews were rolling in the aisles at his impression of a cantor singing the Kaddish prayer on Yom Kippur. "You know how the cantors like to drag out the service - it's their day at the opera," he says.
Despite such mimicry, Chasnoff insists that some of his biggest fans are Chabad and Orthodox audiences. In his experience, nonaffiliated Jews, or those with very little Jewish background, are much more likely to find him offensive.
Although Chasnoff is managing to earn a living as a comedian, he is conscious that he is still waiting for his big break. "This summer I could end up temping again," he admits. "The next stage definitely involves going beyond a Jewish audience, but I'd like to find a way for the Jewish material to get me there.
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