I grew up with a scrappy little kid named Sammy Hoffman who is now a tall director/videographer named Sam Hoffman. He has just started up one of the most brilliant yet simple Web sites I’ve seen in a while, called Old Jews Telling Jokes.

It is exactly what it sounds like: a series of short clips of Jewish-Americans of a certain age telling slightly off-color jokes in the Borscht Belt tradition, each joketeller set against a white backdrop as spare and elegant as an Apple tutorial video’s.

There are only a few entries up so far, but they’re all a pleasure to watch, and it’s inexplicably gratifying to see Sam’s own mother, Diane Hoffman, a pillar of Central New Jersey Jewry, using salty language. I only wish my father had lived long enough to participate; he had tons of material.

January 29, 2009  Link  General Posts