Are Steve Carell and Paul Rudd Schmucks?
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Paul Rudd and Steve Carell will be united once again in bro-mance in the upcoming “Dinner for Schmucks,” due out this July, according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times.
The movie, which will be directed by Jay Roach of “Meet the Fockers” and “Austin Powers in Goldmember,” is inspired by the 1998 French film “Le Diner de Cons” (essentially, “The Dinner for Assholes”). It follows the unlikely friendship between Rudd, an executive who nearly has it all, and Carell, an eccentric and clumsy IRS employee who creates dead mice dioramas for fun. Rudd plans to bring Carell to his boss’s annual “Dinner for Extraordinary People,” where the employee who brings the lamest and strangest guest to dinner is rewarded at the office.
But the movie’s title, which uses the a word more likely to be seen “Yiddish Sayings Mama Never Taught You” than in Leo Rosten’s famous “The Joys of Yiddish,” has put some writers and editors at the country’s most esteemed — and perhaps proper — paper in an in awkward positions. Resulting in a serious and utterly ironic attempt to penetrate the true meaning of the title, and whether or not it’s appropriate:
“Those familiar with Yiddish, polite and otherwise, will recognize a rude term that — in one of its several layers of meaning — denotes the penis,” Michael Cieply wrote in the Times article. He added: “Delve a little deeper and you also find the German term for ‘decoration,’ from the Middle High German ‘smucken,’ meaning ‘to press into.’”
The Times goes on to give a history of the word and to quote a film critic who suggests what she feels are more appropriate titles, like “Dinner for Schlemiels.”
Either way, we’re looking forward to watching Carell and Rudd act like schmucks on screen, because they do it oh so well.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
