Old Jews Telling Jokes Getting Spinoff Series
The rumormill is churning with news that the web video series Old Jews Telling Jokes (which was recently adapted into a book by the same name) is being made into a TV show, tentatively titled “Nag & Noodge.” According to the comedy website splitsider.com, the hilarious “webisodes” will be the basis of a new web series that will take the form of a sitcom.
According to the article:
The show, tentatively titled “Nag & Noodge,” will be a short-form sitcom shot in front of a live studio audience. It’s being written by married writing partners Fred Rubin (who tells the joke in the above video) and Marley Sims, who have experience writing for “Night Court,” “Diff’rent Strokes” and “Home Improvement” between them.
The article says that the production style will be similar to that of the current Old Jews web format (ie, quick and cheap): “They’ll shoot an entire season of 10 seven-minute episodes of Nag & Noodge in one day. They’ll then put the show online, pushing it to the existing OJTJ audience.”
As the Forward recently reported, the website Old Jews Telling Jokes was launched in 2009 by Sam Hoffman and Eric Spiegelman, and now averages 700,000 monthly plays and has become an internet sensation, with bold-faced names like that of former New York mayor Ed Koch and filmmaker Sidney Kimmel dishing out their best one-liners.
But as funny as it is, the show may not make it to the small screen. “The main goal is to bring additional laughs to our audience, which is an Internet audience,” creator Spiegelman told splitsider.com. “If we do well to that end, and someone wants to adapt this to traditional television, hey, great. But that’s not our focus. We want to be funny on the Internet.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO