Some jokes to mark the recent passing of pass rusher O.J. Simpson.
“My Sick Mind: O.J. Simpson” first aired on Dave’s Gone By, Sat, April 13, 2024. Host: Dave Lefkowitz All content (c)2024 TotalTheater Productions.
MY SICK MIND – O.J. Simpson What’s the best thing about worms and maggots’ breakfast this week? They’re having O.J.
Why will O.J. have a quick funeral? Because he was known for rushing.
When OJ was having money troubles, he tried his hand at stand-up comedy. He killed.
To O.J. Simpson, what’s the difference between first down and second down? Nicole was first down; Ron Goldman was the second down.
Why are college kids so disappointed that O.J. Simpson was killed by cancer? Because they can’t blame Israel for it.
Why will Kim Kardashian never live up to the standard set by her father? Kim Kardashian has a big ass and fucked a guy named Ray-J. Robert Kardashian was a big ass and fucked the whole legal system.
How do we know a dying O.J. still missed doing car-rental commercials? He kept moaning, “Hertz! Hertz!”
Did you know that O.J.’s father was an African drag queen? “Awisha Yuzdarubba”
How did O.J. Simpson mature from child to grownup? As a boy, he did ticket scalping. As a man, he said, “Who needs tickets?”
They found O.J. Simpson’s diaries. Turns out he never used hyphens. Just a lot of slashes.
What made Nicole Brown Simpson the ideal Jewish wife? She stopped moving, but O.J. kept penetrating her… and he got off!
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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #182 (3/23/2024): Jokes for Purim 2024
airs March 23, 2024 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://youtu.be/A3rIw1W5OFs
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the joyous holiday of Purim.
Purim is one of those times when the Jews faced brutal annihilation and yet were somehow spared and got revenge — kinda like… last year. When reading the Purim story, the megillah, we use noisemakers to drown out the name of our bitterest antagonist, Haman, which is Persian for “Sarandon.” We also dress in costumes so the IRS won’t recognize us, and we’re supposed to get so drunk we’re unable to distinguish our friends from our enemies. In that way we’re like left-wing Democrats.
My manner of celebrating the Purim simcha is to laugh. Ha ha ha. But so I don’t seem psychotic, I attach my laughter to jokes. Freud said that comedy is an expression of the subconscious battling to be heard in a society that drowns out anything non-conformist. (I think that’s what he said; I don’t speak German.) So let’s examine the psyche of a couple of classic Jewish jokes:
Yankel has found this girl on J-Date, and he’s meeting in person for the first time. They’ve got an 8 o’clock reservation to meet at the swankiest Kosher restaurant in town, but it’s 7:50, and Yankel is circling the block unable to find a parking space. He drives around again and still no spot. Finally, he prays to God, he says, “God, this girl might be my bashert. Please let me find parking.”
But nothing opens up, and Yankel keeps driving. It’s now 7:55, and Yankel’s beside himself. “God,” he says, “If you find me a parking spot, I’ll never miss Friday services again.”
Still, no spaces, and he circles `round the block. Now it’s 7:59, and he’s frantic. He calls out to HaShem, “God, I swear, if you find me a spot, I’ll donate $500 to the United Jewish Appeal.” Suddenly, right in front of the restaurant, a car pulls out leaving a space. Yankel says, “Never mind, God. I found one.”
What does this joke tell us about taking the Lord’s name in vain? That we do it. That under duress, we are apt to say anything, make any promise. it’s what every person does going into surgery hoping they’ll come out of surgery. It’s every horny putz who tells a girl he’ll still respect her in the morning, and it’s every girl who believes him. It’s anyone who eats half a pizza pie and says, “Oy God, I’m never eating again.” Two hours later: “What, there’s one slice left over? Lemme just finish it.”
Humans show an uncanny talent for pivoting from need to satiation and right back to need. The little stops they make along the way to fulfill those needs — well, they’re often forgotten the way a pregnant woman can’t recall the pain of labor. After all, if mama did, she’d shoot the father, punch her OB, and strangle the infant with its umbilical cord. Instead, she’s moved forward, hugging the father, cradling her newborn, and wondering when her vagina will stop looking like the mouth of a camel.
Anyway, let’s have another joke—this one highly appropriate for our fraught and frightful times. When God was creating the world, he called his builders—the angels—together and told them His plan for a Jewish homeland called Israel. “It will be a magical place,” God said, “beautiful, with hills, gardens, and so many natural wonders. And the Jews will be smart and resourceful. They’ll build great cities and farms, make fantastic art, excel in science and engineering. Truly, Israel will be a beacon to all nations.”
“Sounds amazing, God,” said the angels. “But won’t the rest of the world see all this perfect stuff and be jealous of the Jews?”
“Nope,” the Lord replied. “Wait till they see who they have as neighbors.”
Of course, this joke has an especially jagged edge these days—even though, technically, Israel was attacked not by neighbors but by its own squatters: Muslims we were nice enough to give land to—inside the Jewish state—rather than forcing them to move to Africa or Arabia or, God forbid, Amityville. And the upshot is that for 75 years, while trying just to survive in our minuscule homeland, we have been confronted with non-stop terrorism and war. And now, the Arabs’ misinformation campaign has been swallowed up by the kinds of teary-eyed liberals who think shoplifting is the store’s fault, turnstile jumping is a human right, and blocking traffic is an act of courage rather than anarchy.
But I’m sorry — it’s Purim. I meant to keep things light. So here’s one more joke: It’s late night and a policeman sees a car speeding down the highway. He pulls the car over and is surprised to see the driver: a rumpled, middle-aged Jewish man.
The officer runs his information and says, “Mr. Schwartz, we both know you were speeding. But it’s 2AM. Where were you racing?”
“To a lecture,” says the driver.
“A lecture?,” says the cop. “Who gives a lecture at this hour?”
“My wife.”
This isn’t technically a Jewish joke; it could work for anybody. But the joke tastes Jewish because it teaches us that you always answer for your deeds. If it isn’t to a policeman’s blotter or a judge, it’s to your spouse, or your boss, or your children, or maybe just that reflection in the mirror. So whenever possible, we try to be our better selves. Rather than dread the consequences of our actions, we want to anticipate the delight our efforts will bring to others. Needless to say, this is an ideal, and as flawed human beings we’re more likely to do the right thing for the wrong reason, or the wrong thing for any reasons, than be perfect people. But on Purim, when right and wrong are intentionally confuzzled, we can simply enjoy the mishegoss inherent in being human and Jewish.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. (spins grogger) Roger Waters. Jonathan Glazer. Susan Fucking Sarandon!
On Saturday April 23, 2022, instead of doing his regular show, Dave Lefkowitz took a vacation but still went on for a few minutes to greet regular viewers. For more information about Dave’s Gone By, including our extensive archives, visit davesgoneby.com.
DAVE: Ladies and gentlemen, we’re very proud here at the Dave’s Gone By show to introduce a special guest – one of the absolute legends of comedy. He’s played every possible stand-up venue as well as appearing on television and in the films, The Aristocrats, and, of course, Aladdin. He’s a bit older now but we’re honored to have with us in the studio, Gilbert Gottfried. Gilbert?
GILBERT: Thank you, Dave.
DAVE: Gilbert, can you tell us about that moment at the Hugh Hefner roast when you made the 9/11 joke, realized you were in trouble, and just pivoted to the most offensive joke in the world?
GILBERT: Thank you, Dave. You know, I’ve spent many years doing comedy. And you have moments that are good and moments that are not so good.
DAVE: Uh huh.
GILBERT: So I was doing the Hugh Hefner Roast for the Friars Club.
DAVE: Yes.
GILBERT: Now, Hugh Hefner — I don’t know if you know this, but Hugh Hefner used to publish a magazine called “Playboy.” And there’d be girls in there with no clothes on. And he got famous from this, from making a magazine with nude women in the pages.
DAVE: Yes.
GILBERT: Marilyn Monroe was in there. A lot of women.
DAVE: But you were mentioning the roast?
GILBERT: Yes. Now, back in my day a “roast” was what you did to a chicken or a side of beef. And it was very tasty, and you could have it Kosher or not.
DAVE: Uh huh.
GILBERT: But for a comedian, a roast is when other comedians come up and make fun of you. They tell jokes and the jokes are all about mockery of the person being joked about.
DAVE: Right.
GILBERT: So they’re telling jokes about Hugh Hefner. Who made this magazine, Playboy.
DAVE: Right. With the naked women.
GILBERT: You know it?
DAVE: Yes, you just — But the whole Aristocrats thing.
GILBERT: Yes, I’m telling jokes to Hugh Hefner. And no one’s laughing. Which I’m used to.
DAVE: Ha!
GILBERT: So I thought, uh oh… let me tell the dirtiest joke in the world. (pause) And that was it.
DAVE: Right, wow, yes. Um, so I’m sure a lot of our listeners would love to know how you got your most famous role in the Disney film, Aladdin.
GILBERT: Ah, Aladdin. So my agent gets a call from Walt Disney. Not actually Walt Disney, he’s been dead a long time and frozen somewhere.
DAVE: (laughs) Right.
GILBERT: But Walt Disney made a studio. And this studio made movies like The Little Mermaid, and The Jungle Book, and Song of the South.
DAVE: Yeah, they don’t really mention that one.
GILBERT: What one?
DAVE: Song of the — doesn’t matter. What about Aladdin?
GILBERT: So they say to my agent, “Hello. We’re making this new movie called Aladdin, and we think Gilbert Gottfried should play the parrot character.
DAVE: Uh huh.
GILBERT: Now, there’s an irony here. Because animals don’t talk in real life. But they do in some Disney pictures.
DAVE: Yah..
GILBERT: But parrots can talk in the real world. They can say dozens of words and even imitate a person singing.
DAVE: Right.
GILBERT: So in this movie for Disney, unlike others of their movies where animals talk but not in real life, I would be playing a parrot that talks in the movie just like a parrot might talk in a pet store. I thought that was very interesting.
DAVE: Right. So…in doing the voice for Aladdin, did you just use your regular comedy voice or did you tweak it to be more cartoon-like? Or did they process your voice in post-production — make it higher or cuter or something like that?
GILBERT: (pause) What was the question?
DAVE: How did you come up with the voice for Iago?
GILBERT: Well, of course, I wasn’t on the screen.
DAVE: Right.
GILBERT: You heard the actors, but we recorded all the voices.
DAVE: Sure, Robin Williams.
GILBERT: Yes, he was in that.
DAVE: In Aladdin, yes. Do you have any memories…?
GILBERT: Very funny man.
DAVE: Of course. Please, tell us about Robin Williams.
GILBERT: Well, we weren’t on screen together because we recorded the voices in a control room. But we would kid around.
DAVE: Yeah? Yeah?
GILBERT: This wouldn’t go in the movie, this was just the two of us making jokes.
DAVE: For sure! Like…?
GILBERT: You know, the movie already had a script. Robin Williams would improvise some jokes that they would add, but we also made jokes that weren’t for the movie at all. Because we’re comedians.
DAVE: Yes.So when you first saw Aladdin, the finished movie, did you sense it would be a smash?
GILBERT: You never know.
DAVE: Ah.
GILBERT: You hope, but you never know. When my agent called and said, “Listen, Gilbert, Walt Disney wants you to play the parrot in their new movie, called Aladdin. And it’s got Robin Williams in it, and it’s just after Beauty and the Beast, and you would be co-starring in a Walt Disney animated film?”
DAVE: Yeah…
GILBERT: Now, back in my day, animation was a cartoon that you might see on Saturday morning or maybe prime time like The Flintstones or The Jetsons.
DAVE: Right, on a whole other level.
GILBERT: But it’s still the same idea. The animator makes a drawing. And then he makes another drawing that’s almost the same as the first drawing but just a little different. And then you put the drawings next to each other, and it looks like they’re moving. Then you put a whole bunch of these drawings together and you flip them very quickly. And that’s Aladdin.
DAVE: We’ve been chatting with Gilbert Gottfried here on Dave’s Gone By. We’ll be back after this.
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for St. Patrick’s Day, 2022.
As the saying goes, everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day! Italians, Hispanics, African-Americans are Irish. Well, Black Irish. Jews, too, identify with our Celtic brethren, because we suffered oppression, we love literature, and just as the Irish swallow their ale, Jews wallow in our ailments.
I can think of no better way to celebrate Irishness than sharing poetry by James Joyce, who is, notwithstanding Agatha Christie and George R.R. Martin, the most important writer to have two first names. Here’s a little verse from 1904 called “Silently She’s Combing.”
Silently she’s combing, combing her long hair Silently and graciously with many a pretty air. The sun is in the willow leaves and on the dappled grass and still she’s combing her long hair that goes down past her ass.
No, I’m kidding — it’s “before the looking glass.”
I pray you, cease to comb out, comb out your long hair. All you’re doing is getting lice everywhere.
No, kidding again. I’ll spare you the rest of the poem; it’s just a guy worried that his girl is a skank.
Let’s try another verse, this one with a Jewish cadence: “All Day I Hear the Noise of Waters.”
All day I hear the noise of waters making moan. Sad as the seabird is when, going forth alone He hears the winds cry to the water’s monotone.
The grey winds, the cold winds —
See? This is why Jews move to Florida.
I hear the noise of many waters far below. All day, all night, I hear them flowing to and fro.
Basically, the guy needs a space heater and some Prozac. But James Joyce is clearly using nature to reflect the psychology of his characters. Much as Yiddish-Irish poet Shmuel O’Malleystein did when he wrote, “Toilet’s backed up again. Ruining the floors. Guess we go back to pooping outdoors.”
Let me close my scholarly examination of James Joyce with this passage from Finnegan’s Wake, which I think is the key to his work, if not all literature:
The spoil of hesitants. The spell of hesitency. His atake — is it ashe, tittery-taw tattery-tail, Hasitense hump-on-a-dimply, heyhey-heyhey a winceywencky.
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. Slainte’ (slant-cha) and L’Chaim!
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #174 – Poems for Valentine’s Day
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a special poetical Rabbinical Reflection for Gingold Theatrical Group’s Virtual Open Mic Night on this Valentine’s Day, 2022.
You know, poetry is central to the Jewish people, from biblical psalms to Leonard Nimoy’s “Warmed by Love.” Since poetry expresses love, I wish to share with you some classic Jewish poems of romance and arousal. For example, Rabbi Tseitlin of Detroit gave us this most appetizing sonnet:
Shall I compare thee to a hot knish?
Thou art more tasty and much cuter
With boobs as plump as gefilte fish
And scrumptious nipples on each hooter.
A knish is square, but thou do curve
With far more spice than hot pastrami
Thy sexiness makes me a perv
When thou dost swallow my salami
Thou art chicken soup for my soul
and matzoh farfel for my heart
Your kugel makes me lose control
In a good way — not like when I shart
So long as Jews can shlep and kvetch and daven
I eat you up and give you all my lovin’.
Is it any wonder Rabbi Tseitlin has restraining orders in twelve different Michigan counties?
Let us consider this poem from the great Rabbi Vogel of Omsk:
Roses are red, violets are thrilling me
I love you so much,
but my prostate is killing me.
Inspired by Rabbi Vogel, I, too, have written short verse, many in the haiku form. For example, this Chanukah-ku:
Dreidels made of clay.
When they’re dry, it’s time to play.
Women? The reverse.
Of course, not all poems about love are so refined. For an earthier exploration of desire, we turn to Rebbetzin Meyrowitz, widow of the great Estonian Rabbi, Leroy. Here’s a gem from her shocking blue period, shocking because it was her first period since her thirties.
There was a young girl from Tiberias
whose horniness made her delirious
They found her in Gaza
Undressed in a plaza
Her pregnancy ain’t that mysterious
In her latter years, Rebbetzin Meyrowitz became more audacious, disgusting even, as when she wrote:
In order to brighten his sukkas
Reb Mendelsson hired three hookas
They pulled on his payess
and sat on his fayess
and jammed an etrog in his tukas.
My friends, somewhere in the Torah — I’m not sure where — it says “Love Thy Neighbor.” — not possible. But we can still aspire to love, if only as a poetic ideal.
My hope for all of you during these times is that you receive love. And when you do, may you have enough money to pay the girl and her pimp.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. Happy Valentine’s Day.
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #173 (12/31/2021): 2021 Farewell
aired Dec. 25, 2021 on Dave’s Gone By. Watch on youtube: https://youtu.be/FnMeyeZ9K3Q
Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon, founder and spiritual leader of Temple Sons of Bitches, with a Rabbinical Reflection for the end of the year 2021 AD — After Delta.
Well, we’re not really “after delta,” of course. We’re just discussing it less because another variant of the coronavirus came along to goose up the news cycle. Honestly, I think the whole Omicron thing was started by Hilaria Baldwin just to get her husband’s name off the front page.
But my friends, it’s certainly been a year. Again. You know, there’s something to be said for pessimism; at least you’re not disappointed when everything goes to shit. So in 2020, we made it through the first wave of the pandemic: the triage tents, the refrigerator trucks, the zoom fatigue, the hidden charges for InstaCart deliveries. And with 2020 hindsight, the vaccines came — hallelujah! The government went to Big Pharma with a blank check and said, “Do something.” And they did! By new year’s, all these old people who were dying of Covid in nursing homes could get vaxxed and go back to dying of the flu.
We all breathed a sigh of relief when, only months after the explosion of COVID, Pfizer, Moderna, and one-shot/blood-clot Johnson & Johnson proved that modern medicine could change the game. Unfortunately, viruses are like robocallers. If you block your number in the morning, they just find another sequence of digits to call you again at dinner. So Covid morphed into Delta, which spun into the more contagious but milder Omicron. By the time we get to Upsilon, everyone will have it, but it’ll just be constipation and hangnail.
Still, we must be careful — no matter how careful we are! Double-masked, tripled-vaxxed, quadruple-sanitized — the CDC messaging is still: go on with your normal life, but don’t do anything normal. As we end the annum, Broadway shows are closing, sports are canceling, hospitals are filling… The Rockettes even postponed their Christmas show till after Christmas. Now it’ll be the Lent Spectacular.
So 2021 was really the year to get our hopes down. In New York we looked to the Cuomo Brothers for inspirational pep talks, which was like asking the New York Jets for tips on scoring touchdowns. We looked to reunions of Friends and Sex and the City for nostalgia, only to realize that women who are no longer cute are immediately irritating, and that “just like that,” Chris Noth is a rapist.
We heard right-wing Republicans decrying vaccine mandates because the government has no right to tell them what medicine to put in their bodies. Sounds reasonable…until you remember these same people want to tell women what to do with their bodies. And now with the homemaker harpy, the college rapist, and the pubic-hair schvartze leading the Supreme Court, they may get their chance.
Not that America needs even more polarization. On January 6th, we realized half the country still believes Donald Trump won the election, that COVID is just the flu, and that country music is listenable. As scary as it was to see white people rioting, it was even creepier to see a guy painted blue and wearing a viking helmet storming the halls of Congress. Doesn’t he know the clowns in Congress don’t need makeup?
So we distracted ourselves from the yecch of the year by watching unbelievably rich entrepreneurs…and William Shatner…go into space. They didn’t visit the moon or anything, they just went up in the air. Big whoop. That’s like going to a multiplex and telling the ticket guy, “No, thanks. I’m just here to enjoy the lobby.”
At least people started going to the movies again — well, superhero movies; the rest they’re watching on TV because that’s the only pastime people can afford. Between health insurance and home prices, you either have to sell an organ to buy a house or sell a house to buy an organ. And then you have to rent the organ out just to buy groceries.
But at least 2021 was instructional; we learned something. We learned that just because you get rid of a bad president doesn’t mean the next president will be good. Joe Biden, who always looks one step away from competence and two steps away from assisted living, has a knack for finding the failure in success. He pulls us out of Afghanistan — and we look like the Keystone Kops in the process. Biden signs a trillion-dollar bill to revamp America’s infrastructure, but his two-trillion-dollar domestic bill gets torpedoed by one centrist Democrat. Biden tries to reverse Trump’s anti-immigration policies, and so — big shock — thousands of illegals we can’t handle swarm to the border.
President Biden did keep the economy going during COVID with numbers for both Wall Street and unemployment remarkably good. But that’s because people are working to shell out four dollars for gas and ten dollars for bread. And that’s if the bread makes it to the supermarket in the first place. Turns out a supply chain is only as good as its weakest link, and this year that link was the Suez Canal, where the good ship Ever Given got stuck like an impacted bowel movement.
The whole year 2021 felt like the Ever Given; each time we’d pivot with hope to a different direction, we’d hit another sandbar. Tokyo held an Olympics…that nobody went to, apart from a couple of US athletes who got the twisties and tanked. Radical Democrats called for defunding the police — and then backtracked when rampant crime made their cities more dangerous than a Travis Scott concert. R. Kelly went to prison, presumably filling the space just vacated by Bill Cosby. Britney Spears finally became a legal adult — just in time to join AARP.
And then race. You had black people getting angry because the jury found Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty — for killing two white guys. And when policeman Derek Chauvin was found guilty for suffocating George Floyd, all America heaved a sigh of relief. They even put up a statue of Floyd in a Manhattan Park, and it was quickly defaced by an unemployed actor. Sorry, that was redundant; an actor. But how dare he? After all, if we’re pulling down monuments of Civil War Generals and Founding-Father slaveholders, why not replace them with a counterfeiting drug addict whose biggest life accomplishment was holding a pistol to a woman’s stomach during a home invasion? Then again, when you come right down to it: whether the statue in the park is of Abraham Lincoln or Robert E. Lee, it’s still just a pigeon toilet.
But before we flush this year down the crapper, we should take a moment to remember some of the people we wish were still afloat in 2022:
Farewell Willard Scott — whose hundredth won’t be sponsored by Smuckers
And bell hooks and Anne Rice, you fine literary motherfuckers
We’ll miss Charlie Watts and his incredible drumming
Mort Sahl and Norm Macdonald, who kept the comedy coming
Goodbye Cicely Tyson, God finally took her
And old Cloris Leachman — you know: Frau Blucher.
We lost Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind
And also Don Everly, who never left his brother’s behind
Melvin Van Peebles made films that were funky
Mike Nesmith brought street cred to being a Monkee
Leon Spinks and Marvin Hagler, who never took a dive
And broadcaster Larry King — Not Live
Farewell Roger Mudd, and thanks for the news
And Shalom, Ed Asner — you were good for the Jews
We lost Mod Squad’s Link, and that’s a stone bummer
And God roto-rooted old Christopher Plummer
Farewell Nanci Griffith who sang with her soul
And two decent statesmen, Mondale and Dole
Shalom, Jackie Mason, and thanks for the funny
Bye bye Bernie Madoff: shtup you and your money
Phil Spector’s bad deeds are interred with his bones
And Tawny Kitaen — I wish she had clones
We lost Ned Beatty, who, like a pig, did squeal
And how about a Mister Mic-drop for Ron Popeil?
And last but not least, Stephen Sondheim made his mark
with Gypsy and Sweeney and Sunday in the Park
But just when these deaths make it seem dark as night
Remember with joy: there’s still Betty White!
And so my friends, my enemies, as we shuffle off the mortal coil of Covicious 2021 into Omicrazy 2022, I can only wish you all healthier, happier times; hope when things seem hopeless, and hot pastrami because…well, it’s hot pastrami.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches, in Great Neck, New York. Shana Tovah, be glad this one’s ovah.
David Lefkowitz’s short comedy, THREE PERCENT, was performed as part of the third annual Faces of America Monologue Festival, produced virtually by The Playground Experiment live on Nov. 20, 2021.
Directed by Darpan Joshi, Three Percent stars Mischa Dani Goodman as Avery. To read the play, visit: https://wp.me/pzvIo-1V9 For more writing by David Lefkowitz: dave lefkowitz.org.
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for mid-October 2021.
It has been a sad and surreal year for fans of a little music group called The Rolling Stones. You may have heard of them. They began as a blues-rock band in the mid-60s and then, for several years, made the most compelling rock and roll in the history of ever. Then Mick Taylor quit and they vacillated between still kinda-great and name one decent album in the last 40 years.
But through it all, they were the Stones — the swagger, the sound, the mix of energy and grit — and not the kind you get from a Larabar. When Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and — oh, okay, we’ll include Ronnie Wood — when they locked in together, you knew they were still the greatest band in the world who weren’t the Beatles.
And then this August, cancer took Charlie. We all felt like we’d been kick-drummed in the stomach. But Ronnie, Mick, and Keef had already decided the show must go on. They survived Brian Jones doing the backstroke, they endured when Bill Wyman quit to concentrate on divorcing his 10-year-old wife. Jagger’s open-heart surgery? Richards’ urban-legend bloodstream? Bumps in the road; the Stones roll on, touring as we speak.
So why am I complaining? Well, because I’m Jewish. But also because Mick and Keith recently made a decision about one of their classic songs: “Brown Sugar.” What is “Brown Sugar” about? Nobody knows. Mick Jagger doesn’t know, and he wrote it. He just threw some ideas on paper about white men shtupping the hell out of black women — not an uncommon theme for the guy who wrote “Sweet Black Angel” and “Some Girls.” But because of these woke times, and because the lyrics reference slavery in a jaw-droppingly tasteless way, “Brown Sugar” is now officially retired from the Stones catalogue.
Since its 1971 debut on Sticky Fingers, “Brown Sugar” has been a radio staple and concert favorite. Fans, black and white, boogied to it, and, guess what? They did not spontaneously combust or weep indignantly at the lyrics. Granted, it’s impossible to understand the lyrics burbling out of Mick Jagger: “Old boy stagecoach hypocotyl beans” – what? But even if you have the lyric sheet, you don’t hear the song and think, “Ooh, this makes me want to take a riding crop to Harriet Tubman.” Not to mention, the narrator of “Brown Sugar” is complimenting black women on their pleasant vaginal flavor. Hey, I’ve eaten some Jewish women, and it’s like having an anchovy throw up on your teeth.
No question, “Brown Sugar” is all kinds of politically incorrect, but so are a million rap numbers that do a lot worse things to black women than tasting them. Still, what scares me about the decision by Jagger and Richards — who, as authors and performers, have every right to do as they please with their work — what scares me is precedent. If you self-censor one particularly egregious tune, how long before other Stones masterpieces fall under the same scrutiny and become cancel-culture casualties?
Feminists give “Under My Thumb” the middle finger, your local PTA is sure to ban “Little T&A,” and born-again Christians raise hell against “Sympathy for the Devil.” But sometimes the offense is more subtle. What if Al Sharpton comes out against “Paint it Black” for its negativity about that color? What if “19th Nervous Breakdown” starts giving mentally ill people their 20th? What if third-grade English teachers — already despairing over teaching this generation anything that isn’t a digital game — what if they hear “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and get pushed over the edge by the double negative? (So he can get satisfaction?) What if animal-rights activists protest “Beast of Burden” and transgender woman feel bad about “Rocks Off”? What if the makers of tampons and maxipads lobby to ban “Let it Bleed?” What if the makers of Imodium want to censor “Let it Loose?” What if deaf people say “no” to “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” blind people have a problem with “Far Away Eyes,” and hemophiliacs cringe at “Too Much Blood”? What if Catholics try to block “No Expectations” because that conflicts with their idea of the afterlife, or if Rabbis urge congregants to delete the song “Happy” because they know it’s something Jews will never be?
Instead of cancel, cancel, cancel, we need context, context, context. Whether it’s Birth of a Nation, a Statue of Thomas Jefferson, Mickey Rooney in yellowface, or Wagner at the Israel Philharmonic — explain it, debate it, keep it. At some point, we have to tell all the woke whiners, “You can’t always get what you want. Go ahead and vent at what vexes you. Give a speech before the movie, put a sign near the statue, have the deejay say, `This next song is `Brown Sugar.’ It might be about slavery, or drugs, or dessert. Either way, don’t try this at home.”
Asked about “Brown Sugar,” Jagger once said, “I would never write that now; I’d probably censor myself. I can’t just write raw like that.” That was in 1995. And Jagger had long stopped writing raw like that. You tell me if that’s a good thing.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. Gimme Seltzer!
