Jack Engelhard
Jack Engelhard’s classic international bestselling novel Indecent Proposal, which later became a worldwide hit movie, has been republished to meet readers’ demands. His other major works include Compulsive: A Novel, his award-winning post-Holocaust Montreal memoir Escape from Mount Moriah, plus Slot Attendant: A Novel About A Novelist. His website: www.jackengelhard.com
Seems we live in a country where people can’t take a joke. President Trump keeps finding that out, which is that wisecracking is now a lost art and a no-go zone.
If you don’t know New York…if you don’t know Catskills shpritzing…if you know Yiddish deadpan…if you don’t know Lenny Bruce…you don’t know Donald Trump.
He’s a New Yorker, for gosh sakes, where when we say, go out there and hurt them, we mean get them so they will beg for mercy from laughing so hard.
Today’s news that Trump was actually spied on, as he’s been saying, has them in a panic for fear that the truth is coming, that for all their bitterness, he gets the last laugh. But it is safe to assume that shakedown artist Mark Zuckerberg will terminate Trump’s Facebook account for failure to comply with terms that regulate FB as a safe space for Liberals only; all Conservatives must go, even if he’s president.
Zuckerberg has been purging off Facebook practically anyone who supports Trump, or Israel, and obviously, with two billion customers, figures himself president of the world. Trump’s only got the United States. This is bound to come to a duel. Count on Trump for the perfect response, like the famous Yiddish whammy, “May you win a million dollars, and spend it all on doctors”
Timing is everything and the punchline is the thing, which is how Trump uses his tweets, and his rallies, which is where he hurts them into cheers, by channeling Don Rickles and projecting Lenny Bruce, and if you don’t know Lenny Bruce, too bad, too late, but got you covered in “The Days of the Bitter End” and back to a time when humor was king.
Even in the worst of times there has got to be a joke. Comedy comes to heal.
No wonder that only a few years after the Holocaust, stand-up shtick and Variety programs on TV were dominated by Jewish jesters too numerous to mention, but with the same message – you can’t keep us down.
Jackie Mason’s iconic finger for Ed Sullivan symbolized Jewish defiance.
Enter Trump…Trump the iconoclast…Trump the idol smasher. Trump knows defiance.
No wonder so many love him…and so many don’t get him…don’t get the light-hearted put-down that goes down so well with the hot pastrami at the Second Ave. Deli.
People used to beg Rickles to please toss an insult their way. It meant you were Somebody.
Without humor, we are zombies. Do Liberals ever laugh, smile, lighten up? Zero, if you watched them at the Senate hearings where they kept trying to pester Attorney General William Barr through four hours of root canal. You watched. You saw. Such grumpy faces, no signs of humanity, as likewise they were for Kavanaugh through Inquisition-style life or death nitpicking. Get it wrong and you get the gallows.
That is not Trump’s world.
Trump is a funny guy, if only they would give him the chance, which they won’t; their loss, and our loss. These years could have been fun. Instead, we are a nation in the dumps, thanks to their gloomy politics, darkness in every room, as it was for the White House Correspondents Dinner, a flop for being so joyless, without Trump to liven it up.
Have we become Germans? Germany has never been a funny country, as Robin Williams reminded them for “killing all the funny people.”
For his MAGA people, Trump is Trump. But for the rest, he’s had to curb his light side.
He learned his lesson from that time when he made that joke about Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s strongman and leader for life.
Yes, leader for life, and so Trump, with a smile, picked up on that, and cracked – “Wish I had it so good.”
That was a JOKE!
The humorless Left missed it by a mile, accused him of trying to usurp the Constitution, and demanded that he be impeached.
Lighten up, people. Politics is long, but life is short.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His latest is the newsroom drama “News Anchor Sweetheart.” His Inside Journalism thriller, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” is being prepared for the movies. Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com.
