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The Schmooze

Old Jews Telling Jokes Getting Spinoff Series

The rumormill is churning with news that the web video series Old Jews Telling Jokes (which was recently adapted into a book by the same name) is being made into a TV show, tentatively titled “Nag & Noodge.” According to the comedy website splitsider.com, the hilarious “webisodes” will be the basis of a new web series that will take the form of a sitcom.

According to the article:

The show, tentatively titled “Nag & Noodge,” will be a short-form sitcom shot in front of a live studio audience. It’s being written by married writing partners Fred Rubin (who tells the joke in the above video) and Marley Sims, who have experience writing for “Night Court,” “Diff’rent Strokes” and “Home Improvement” between them.

The article says that the production style will be similar to that of the current Old Jews web format (ie, quick and cheap): “They’ll shoot an entire season of 10 seven-minute episodes of Nag & Noodge in one day. They’ll then put the show online, pushing it to the existing OJTJ audience.”

As the Forward recently reported, the website Old Jews Telling Jokes was launched in 2009 by Sam Hoffman and Eric Spiegelman, and now averages 700,000 monthly plays and has become an internet sensation, with bold-faced names like that of former New York mayor Ed Koch and filmmaker Sidney Kimmel dishing out their best one-liners.

But as funny as it is, the show may not make it to the small screen. “The main goal is to bring additional laughs to our audience, which is an Internet audience,” creator Spiegelman told splitsider.com. “If we do well to that end, and someone wants to adapt this to traditional television, hey, great. But that’s not our focus. We want to be funny on the Internet.”

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