British cringe comedy ‘Hapless’ arrives on American shores — but is it a Jewish show?
A rabbi, an imam and a Jewish journalist draft a statement responding to a terror attack in Season 2 of Hapless. Photo by Peacock
By PJ Grisar April 5, 2024
Early into the Israel-Hamas war, it was revealed that a certain offensive comedy series wouldn’t fly — literally.
In December, British Airways decided to scrap the English sitcom Hapless (previously known as The Jewish Enquirer, about a journalist for a fictional Jewish publication) from its in-flight offerings. The show’s creator, Gary Sinyor, became aware of this “mistake,” as he called it, and the airline soon reversed course. But, in all the coverage, Sinyor was given pause by BA’s ultimate apology, which addressed the “upset and hurt to the Jewish community.”
“It’s not a Jewish sitcom,” Sinyor, who believes the move was possibly made so as not to offend Muslims, posted to X (formerly Twitter). “It’s a satirical British Sitcom with Jews and non-Jews in it.”
But, to take a cue from the show’s leading man Paul Green (Tim Downie), who asks questions like why hatred of Muslims is called “Islamophobia” but Jew hatred isn’t “Judaismophobia,” I might quibble.
Season two of the show, about Paul’s daily assignments for an underfunded ethnic paper that few read, arrives on Peacock April 10. It features a sukkah and etrog subplot. Characters explain the distinctions between Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic ones (Ashkenazim like the Green clan were killed in Europe; Sephardis, like Sinyor, were killed in Syria, North Africa and Spain). When his editor at The Jewish Enquirer assigns a wedding supplement, Paul and his sister Naomi (Jeany Sparx) discover the Orthodox custom of Gemach, in which brides can rent a dress for the day.
Even Curb, the show’s elder American cousin, rarely devotes quite so much consistent attention to Yiddishkeit, though I take Sinyor’s meaning. The Jewishness is the setup — the career and background of the protagonist. And while it’s not quite so incidental as paper might be to the plot of The Office, to call the show simply “Jewish” would be to apply to it an insularity that it strives to resist.
Paul, who is reliably provocative in his inquiries — a truth seeker who can’t filter his own true feelings — is navigating both a world of his coreligionists and those who don’t quite understand the whole Jew thing.
He meets with a rabbi and an imam in an interfaith group called Islamajew, whose plan for tolerance includes naming catastrophic weather events “Shmuley” or “Ahmed.” Paul learns, to his shock, that a wedding hall quoted him a “Jewish premium.” A girlfriend, who is both blind and an ace at mental math, offends by questioning the round number of 6 million.
Some minor incidents have nothing whatsoever to do with Paul’s Jewishness, like when his dwarf friend demonstrates, to a COVID safety busybody, that as a little person he can stand closer to another person and not risk exposing them to any viral droplets.
Like these COVID details, some of the show’s punchlines feel dated, a natural result of a delayed U.S. release. In a scene that has gone viral, Paul schools a pro-Palestinian activist on the actual river and sea from the slogan “from the river to the sea.” By appealing to the activist’s love of gay nightlife in Tel Aviv, he has him agree that only straight Jews must vacate Israel.
Paul and the activist’s collective efforts to convince a porn mogul philanthropist to donate ambulances to Gaza aren’t as funny as they might have been months before, even if the donor’s recalcitrance would likely be the same today.
But Hapless, filmed well before the current war, isn’t properly about Israel. It is as fundamentally British as it is Jewish. American audiences may not track all of the references or, in the case of one cameo, recognize all the performers.
Sinyor’s premises are funny, if often crude (episode one spotlights the erotic potential of stuffed courgettes (zucchini for the Yanks)). At times there is some creakiness in how all the moving parts of the plots come together, but game performances and solid jokes make it a welcome addition to the canon of cringe.
It’s not a show for the easily offended, but Sinyor is right to say there’s nothing at all offensive about its Jewishness.
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