arts & entertainment
11reoltiirt.2. of tt
BLACK CHRISTMAS
a deep attachment to
the season that runs
from Thanksgiving to
Christmas, don't read
How one Jewish comedian deals with Christmas.
F
or many, the Christmas season is a
time of peace on earth and good-
will toward all. For Lewis Black,
the perpetually apoplectic stand-up come-
dian, actor, playwright and Daily Show
regular, it is "an emotional tsunami that
hits you with waves of tinsel that engulf
you until you have drowned in a sea of
good cheer."
Beginning anew each year, sometimes
as early as August or as late as just before
Thanksgiving, the Christmas season gets
under way and quickly takes on a momen-
tum all its own that Black likens to the
running of the bulls.
He writes, "Stampeding through every
street in every town, in every shop, every
home and every life, it careens through our
every waking moment with barely con-
trolled speed. ... As I'm a Jew, one would
think I could escape this maelstrom, but I
never do. No one can. No one is immune
from the all-consuming madness."
In his new book, I'm Dreaming Of
A Black Christmas (Riverhead Trade
Paperbacks), Black, perhaps inspired
by Dickens' most famous curmudgeon,
Ebenezer Scrooge, says "Bah, humbug!" to
carols, holiday dinners, Christmas trees,
decked halls and boughs of holly.
Letting loose on all things Yule, he
writes about what Christmas was like with
his former wife during their short-lived
(and disastrous) marriage, divulges why
a national theatrical tour of A Christmas
Carol (with him cast as Ebeneezer
Scrooge) was scrapped at the last min-
ute and describes the two occasions on
which he actually got to play St. Nick ("It's
bizarre at best to be a middle-aged Jew
dressed up as Santa Claus...").
Here, Lewis Black shares his take on the
Christmas season.
IN: Setting aside the fact that you're
Jewish, you're not exactly what one
would describe as the essence of
Christmas Spirit or Mr. Mirth. How
did you come to write a book about
Christmas? And what did Glenn Beck
have to do with it?
LB: My editor, who shall go unnamed,
thought it would be a good idea. I thought
he was crazy. Then he told me that Glenn
Beck wrote a Christmas book, and I
should look at it. I said I didn't want to
see it. Then he had the book sent to my
home. He taunted me with the Glenn Beck
Christmas book, and that pushed me over
the edge. The next thing I knew, I was
writing a Christmas book.
"l want you to know
that for those who have
Bah, Humbug!
Gail Zimmerman
Arts Editor
Lewis Black issues a
warning to readers:
this book."
told me. I asked if I could
go sit on his lap and tell
him what I wanted for
Chanukah. She told me
he didn't exist. "But there
he is!" I said. She said
he was just a fake. There
were lots of Santas, and
they were all fakes.
On Christmas Day I saw what my
friends had gotten — from Santa — and
that proved to me that the fake Santa was
getting better stuff for my Christian pals
than my parents were getting for me.
childhood come flooding
back — and that's just for
starters. The carols you
heard and sang and the
memories they evoke, the
spiked eggnog, and the
glorious meals and how
mom made everything
just so ... right. If that weren't enough,
there are all of the films that glorify
Christmas, from Its a Wonderful Life to
Miracle on 34th Street.
The spectacle of all the midnight mass-
es you attended. The warmth exuded from
a televised yule log burning on television.
It all flies around your skull, like too many
planes trying to land a jumbo jet at JFK
and you're the only traffic controller work-
ing. It's more than one person can handle.
It's psychic overload.
Ni.w York Times bestselling author of
ME OF LITTLE FAITH
JN: How would you compare Chanukah
and Christmas? Why do you say
Chanukah is proof that Jews just gave
up competing with Christmas?
LB: As I have said again and again, there
is no comparison. Christmas is great, and
Chanukah sucks. We just can't compete with
the lights and the hoopla and the songs,
and so we made our festival quainter and
more homespun. We haven't got the where-
withal to keep up with [the Christians].
IN: When, and under what circum-
IN: You've also written what you find
stances, do you remember first being
aware that there was such a thing as
Christmas (and that it was a hell of a
lot different from Chanukah)?
LB: When I was 5 and wandering
through the Hecht Company store in
Washington, D.C., with my mother, we
came across Santa Claus in the middle of
the toy section. I asked my mother who
the fat guy with the beard was, and she
most extraordinary about this time
of year is that it's not just this year's
Christmas that has arrived. What do
you mean by that? How does memory
— both real and fictional — play into
the emotional overload that you say
comes hand in glove with Christmas?
LB: You have all of those Christmases
stored in your memory bank. All of those
wonderful idyllic Christmastimes of your
Coming Full Circle
Which brings us back to Scrooge.
Lost love is one of the painful memories
to which he is subjected by the Ghost
of Christmas Past as he is forced to
confront the scene of his fiancee releas-
ing him from their engagement when
he was a young man. In breaking their
engagement, the young woman admon-
ished the youthful Scrooge for replacing
his love for her with his newfound love
for "another idol, a golden one." In this
passage, Scrooge becomes a metaphor
for the sinful Jews wandering the desert.
My case that Scrooge is the product
of Dickens' anti-Semitism encounters
denial and resistance. This calls to mind
the question posed by Marley's ghost at
the beginning of the tale when Scrooge
denies the ghost is there: "Why do you
doubt your senses?"
It is too much for many admirers of
Dickens to accept the great author's
regrettable trait of anti-Semitism. And
as they extend disingenuous acquittals
in the matter of Fagin, they cannot even
broach the subject of Scrooge as a Jew.
But all they are really denying is treat-
ment of A Christmas Carol in the con-
text of serious literature, relegating it to
the status of a mere fairy tale. And this,
too, does Boz poor justice.
JN: For quite some time the politi-
cally correct crowd has been saying
it's wrong to say "Merry Christmas" at
Christmastime; instead we should be
saying "Happy Holidays." People on the
other side of the issue are saying it's a
plot to abolish Christmas or an attack
on Christianity. What are your thoughts
on this great debate?
LB: Wow, of all the things we have to
worry about, this may be on page 150 after
"Be careful when opening a letter, you
don't want to get a paper cut" Only an idiot
would think that saying "Merry Christmas"
is somehow politically incorrect. It would
be politically incorrect to say, "I hope your
Christmas blows chunks." 1 I
Scrooge from page 27
his occupation. But we do know Scrooge
is a moneylender (having been forced by
the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to see
one of his debtors relieved by news of his
death).
It takes no anti-Semite to find appall-
ing the ugly reality of debtors' prison in
Victorian England. And Dickens makes
legitimate use of usury when the practice
is essential to the storyline, as in the case
of the wicked uncle in Nicholas Nickleby.
But in other works, Dickens betrays his
anti-Semitism when invoking usury with
capricious obsession. We see this in "What
Christmas Is as We Get Older," as Dickens
describes one during the holiday season
speculating about the fate of a lost love,
lamenting the possibility the lost love may
have become "usurious" of all things.
28
December 22 • 2011
John O'Neill is an Allen Park freelance writer
currently researching a book on Dickens and
anti-Semitism. He is author of the forthcoming
Dickens Project, a series of articles that will
appear in the coming year in Heritage Papers
in honor of the bicentennial of Dickens' birth in
February 2012.
Ebenezer Scrooge, depicted as a
miserly old moneylender, in Disney's
2009 animated film A Christmas Carol