Jewish Comedy Is Having a Moment—and ‘Bad Shabbos’ Proves It

Jewish humor has long been Hollywood’s beating heart, from the sharp irreverence of Mel Brooks to the uncomfortable humor of Larry David. But in 2024, Jewish comedy isn’t just surviving; it’s evolving, bending to reflect a new generation’s identity, anxieties, and relationship with tradition.

Take Bad Shabbos, a breakout dark comedy from this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Directed by Daniel Robbins and co-written with Zack Weiner, the film turns a Shabbat dinner into a madcap spiral of death, deceit, and dysfunction. It’s bold, sacrilegious, and unmistakably Jewish—not despite its chaos, but because of it.

What makes Bad Shabbos stand out isn’t just its absurd premise (a possible murder during a family dinner) or its all-star cast, including Method Man. It’s how comfortably it walks the tightrope between honoring Jewish tradition and poking fun at it. The film offers a glimpse into modern Jewish life that’s as self-aware as it is heartfelt.

This is Jewish humor 2.0: equal parts reverence and rebellion.

In earlier eras, Jewish comedians often used humor as a shield, wielding sarcasm and irony to process trauma, assimilation, and marginalization. In a post-Holocaust, post-immigrant, mostly assimilated American Jewish landscape, the punchlines have shifted. Today’s Jewish comedies are less about escaping the past and more about confronting the messy present: interfaith marriage, inherited guilt, performative tradition, and the cultural contradictions of being both deeply Jewish and deeply American.

Bad Shabbos does what modern Jewish comedies do best—it uses humor not to resolve these contradictions, but to hold them up to the light. The laughs come not from mocking tradition, but from revealing how it collides with modern life in absurd, sometimes grotesque ways. Think Shiva Baby, You People, or even episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—all stories that are deeply Jewish but unafraid to challenge the boundaries of faith, family, and cultural identity.

For audiences—Jewish or not—these films matter. They show that Jewish identity is not monolithic. It can be observant or secular, awkward or loud, reverent or irreverent—and sometimes, all at once.

The beauty of Jewish humor today is its honesty. It doesn’t need to be sanitized or universalized to be relatable. It believes that complexity, contradiction, and even a hint of blasphemy can be the most sacred forms of storytelling.

So no, Bad Shabbos probably wouldn’t make it into a Hebrew school curriculum. But in its own twisted, hilarious way, it’s a prayer—one for families, for truth, and for the enduring, shape-shifting spirit of Jewish comedy.