Critics didnât like The Dictator. The Post found it unfunny. The Times thought it was âlazy.â They didnât like it because it exploited crude Arab stereotypes: sex obsession, arrogance and obscene chauvinism. They didnât like it because it felt like a tired sketch comedy with a nod to current events. And they didnât like it because it wasnât unscripted like Borat, it wasnât racy like Borat and it wasnât gross like Borat.
But what can I do? I liked it. I think itâs because I speak 21st century Jewish.
My Zayde was suspicious of anyone who didnât speak âJewish,â including the woman who wanted to marry her son and eventually became my mother. When she said she spoke âJewish,â she meant Yiddish (my mother was perfectly âJewishâ by any other standard). But when I say that I speak Jewish I meanâin the very best possible wayâthat I laugh at Holocaust jokes. Even though Iâm not really supposed to.
And, OK, Iâll admit it: I liked the âinâ jokes. I liked that no one but me in the theater understood the Hebrew. I liked that when Admiral General Aladeen was playing his Terrorist Edition Wii and shooting Jews (âoy vey!â), he was shooting me. I was nostalgic for a time Iâve never experienced when I might have been the Eternal Outsider, the hated Jew. As atavistic as it sounds, watching The Dictator, I found myself reveling in my image of my grandfatherâs anti-Semite; one just as uncircumcised and distasteful as Cohenâs. If the ADL had seen me, I probably would have made them nervous.
And while yes, I take guilty pleasure in old country stereotypes, I was also drawn to Cohen because heâs a New Jew. Cohen was born to a well-off British family. He grew up in a post-1967 world. He told Howard Stern that he never experienced anti-Semitism. Heâs not actually afraid of the goyimâhe just wants to, in his words, âexposeâ them. This isnât Woody Allen and Jews arenât neurotic or self-deprecating. Cohen speaks Hebrew rather than Yiddishâhis grandmother lives in Haifa and his mother was born in Israel. With Israel at his back, Cohenâs fearlessness lets him take Jewish comedy on a new course: the Hebrew offensive.
And it was the offensive Hebrew that wound up being my favorite part of The Dictator (kids, stop reading now).
Cohen invented Hebrew names for the male and female genitalia. He calls his penis a âbilbulââa âconfusion.â He could have said "bulbul," the word little Israeli kids use, but he didn'tâhe "confused" it. A Talmudic read ratchets up the irony: âbilbulâ could be an Arabic mispronunciation of âpilpulâ (the Arab alphabet does not contain the âpâ sound, a convention that Aladeen sticks to throughout), in which case the Hebrew would translate to âargumentationâ or âback and forth debate.â
Other pieces of R-rated anatomy turn into Israeli food items. Female genitalia are âmallawach,â a thick, oily Yemenite bread that migrated to Israel. He alternatively calls semen âsbich,â (the "real" Hebrew slang word would be "shpich") perhaps intended as a shortened version of sabich (an Iraqi-Jewish sandwich made with fried eggplant and hard-boiled egg) and âlabaneâ (a Levantine strained yogurt-cheese dip).
We can beat this movie up for being lewd, predictable and not as sidesplitting as Borat (itâs hard to top âThrow the Jew Down the Wellâ), but The Dictator is certainly funnier if you speak Jewish.