professionally funny friends. He accompanied them on the job, he says, “and saw what it takes to tell a joke.” Russell tells of sitting on top of a newspaper on the New York subway. “Are you reading that?” someone will ask. His response: “I stand up, I turn the page, I sit back down and I say, ‘Yes, I am reading it.’” And he offers his unique interpretation on Israel’s storied military victory in the 1967 war: “Israel had to win the war in six days, because the equipment was rented.” • Rabbi Hershel Remer, probably the most obviously Jewish of the group. He’s bearded, with shoulderlength payot, a long black coat and a large woolen tzitzit beged over his shirt. “It doesn’t get any more Jewy than this,” he is prone to announce. “If you think Jackie Mason is Jewish . . . ” Rabbi Remer’s a Chassidic Jew, his appearance seems to say. Not quite, he says. “I attended yeshivahs of multiple Chassidic groups, and I still wear all of the Chassidic battle gear, but I would not call myself Chassidic.” “The demographics that love me most are people who were raised as Catholic or who attended Catholic school. I’m popular with a whole spectrum of groups that all have one thing in common—they are all misfits. Catholics have always been misfits in America—something they have in common with frum Jews. We all have lived way outside of the mainstream.” The content of Rabbi Remer’s material is sometimes edgy, but his style is definitely frum. “My limits in terms of material became clear when I performed as a cast member in a live comedy show. I was the one person in that show who would not touch members of the opposite gender, nor would I dance with them. That aspect about me often came under the spotlight, and I found myself explaining to audiences about the laws of shomer negiah—not touching members of the opposite sex. ” Rabbi Remer is an alum of Los Angeles’ YULA day school and UCLA. “I have no message. I am on stage purely to have fun and make people laugh. Period,” he says. “I love making people laugh, and I was born to do it.”
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I JEWISH ACTION
Summer 5773/2013
LESSONS IN BIKUR CHOLIM By Steve Lipman
t’s visiting time in a cramped hospital room. One visitor, a middle-aged Orthodox man sitting at the foot of a patient’s bed, offers some unsolicited advice. “So, who’s this quack who’s treating you, anyway?” he asks, referring to the patient’s physician. “Have you gotten a second opinion? A third opinion?” Another Orthodox visitor fidgets with the patient’s IV bag, causing the patient’s feet to spasm. In the next few minutes, more inappropriate comments and actions ensue, at the patient’s expense. All of it is fiction, captured on the video How Not to Perform the Mitzvah of Bikur Cholim produced by Baltimore-based Kolrom Multimedia, a full service corporate video and multimedia production house that mainly produces serious material for business clients and Jewish institutions. Word of mouth made the nearly five-minute video an instant hit after it was posted on YouTube in 2011—some 50,000 views within a few days. Everything in the video is based on truth, stories related by rabbis whom Kolrom (kolrom.com) had interviewed for another project. The firm’s staff heard horror stories about the way well-meaning people mangled visits to the infirm, says Chananya “CJ” Kramer, founder and president; some “common sense” lessons were needed. So was a non-preachy method. Humor was the obvious vehicle. “Comedy is the path of least resistance,” Kramer says. It’s “the best way to give musar [rebuke] in a way that is not condescending. It’s an effective tool.” He enlisted two members of the Baltimore Orthodox community— Mich Cohen and Shmop Weisbord—
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who are untrained but talented actors. He lined up a spare room in a local hospital through connections of a Hatzalah volunteer. The feet of the “patient” are his son-in-law’s. The taping took ninety minutes. The editing was done the next day, an exceptionally short production cycle for a video with professional-quality production values. Kolrom’s successful bikur cholim video has led to a series of similar videos by other producers on various topics of interest in frum circles—shivah, shidduchim, rules of speech and “Stuff Jews say to Converts.” Rumor has it that more videos are coming. Kramer says he doesn’t mind the competition in the serious-messagein-a-humorous-form business. It’s “only good” for the Jewish community, he says.
“How Not to Do Bikur Cholim”—a nearly five-minute humorous video produced by Baltimore-based Kolrom Multimedia— was an instant hit after it was posted on YouTube in 2011, with some 50,000 views within a few days. Photos courtesy of Kolrom Multimedia