Professor David Peimer
The Marx Brothers and Jewish Humour: Genius and Outsider
Summary
This talk will explore the comic genius of the Marx Brothers and Jewish humour. Although the word ‘Jewish’ is not mentioned once in any of their films, the root of their brilliant wit is clear. Beyond notions of outsider, irony, parvenu and pariah, we will look at how their humour is distinctly Jewish.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
No, no, no, they were their stage names. Groucho was Julius Henry Marx.
Well to be frank, I know many universities where you now have to give a trigger warning if you teach “Macbeth” or “Richard III”, ‘cause Richard III has a hunchback, so it can be seen as anti disabled people. If you’re teaching “Macbeth”, trigger warning, because there are lots of gruesome killings, especially of little children in “Macbeth”. A trigger warning for “Hamlet”, there’s an attack on the mother. A trigger warning, I can go on and on, but I’m serious about this is happening, universities not only in the UK, but globally. And as a result, the choice of what people are teaching is becoming less and less culturally expansive, and challenging, to put it mildly.