Comment of the Week: Many Levels of Irony

This week we tip our hats to Soccer for his/her insightful analysis of the Israeli YES HDTV ad that I wrote about on Monday.

Soccer wrote:

I think it is brilliant: The commercial is saying that if we do what the Chareidim dont allow, we will have fun, (as we watch chareidim having fun being against it)!

And then later wrote:

Tamar, crazy but I was also in BJ this shabbos! Dont forget what I thought was another terrific point that Rabbi Feldman made: which was the fact that the chareidim, arguably passionate, committed and religiously devoted people, have somehow become seen as a caricature of themselves. There was no concern that YES would be seen as insensitive, irreverant, politically incorrect, andti-traditional, or anything else other than creative, humurous, and original. The chareidim have lost such credibility that those who would never parody blacks, Ethiopians, homosexuals, housewives, or environmentalists can parody chareidim with impunity. Doing so will sell more televisions.

This is a really nice look at the levels that this commercial is using to parody the Charedi community. I think it’s a shame that Charedim have lost such credibility, but I think it happened as a result of their overboard reactions to anything that they find problematic. It’s simply not an effective way of running a community, and it of course affects whether or not the rest of the world is able to take the Charedi community seriously. Anyway, it’s interesting to think about how it’s somehow acceptable for an Israeli company to mock Haredi rabbis, but if this commercial was running in Germany or in the States, I doubt we’d find it amusing. More likely, we’d be offended.