SAN DIEGO–Lawrence “Laurie” Baron is professor emeritus of modern Jewish history at San Diego State. He has a doctorate in modern European intellectual history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He’s an expert on Holocaust films.
So what’s a nice Jewish teacher doing writing one-liners like these?
- The Islamic State blew up the mosque located at the site of the tomb of Jonah. Here’s a cause that can unite most Christians, Jews, Muslims and members of Greenpeace.
- The United States is considering returning Murietta to Mexico as reparations for the bigotry displayed by anti-immigrant protestors there this week.
- Hamas agreed to accept all the unaccompanied minors who have sought asylum in the United States so long as they don’t mind living in tents above missile and weapon caches.
For a year now, Baron’s take-no-prisoners pen has been skewering all-comers in his column “Humoring the Headlines” for San Diego Jewish World, an online news site run by another former educator (and longtime journalist), Don Harrison.
Political correctness be damned.
“Originally when I approached Laurie about becoming a regular columnist for San Diego Jewish World, it was to be our movie reviewer,” Harrison said. “His books on Holocaust movies qualify him as an expert.”
But when Baron decided he’d like to do a satirical column, it was an “unexpected but welcome bonus,” Harrison said.
Baron’s column of clever but potentially offensive takes on the news “is gaining readers all the time, with over 1,000 readers per column becoming more and more frequent, and sometime as many as 1,300,” Harrison told Times of San Diego.
(Born in Chicago and now a Del Cerro resident, Baron is married to Bonnie Ellen Baron, a former adoption counselor for Jewish Family Service who now works with local artisans to showcase their work. They have a 22-year-old son who helps coach basketball team at San Diego’s Health Sciences High and Middle College.)
Baron, 67, doesn’t shy from local controversy either.
A year ago Thursday, in his debut column, Baron’s first entry was about Bob Filner:
“Between his therapy sessions, San Diego Mayor Bob Filner phoned Alex Rodriguez to get advice on how to delay disciplinary action for the duration of a contract and how to get past first base and not strike out.”
Times of San Diego interviewed Baron via email, and his answers were as revealing as his one-liners are pointed.
Times of San Diego: Have you done a similar column before?
Laurie Baron: Not really, but I have been writing comedy since I was a teenager. This began in the summer of 1963 when I was 16. My parents and I were staying at the Chicago equivalent of the Catskills (Pinepoint Resort in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin) and I performed a five-minute routine as part of a guest talent show. The owners liked my act and asked me to stay the rest of the summer.
I worked there the next two summers too. Although I also served as a busboy and as a waiter to earn a salary and room and board, I got to perform twice a week in the resort’s nightclub. I played guitar and wrote songs so a lot of my act consisted of satiric parodies. I particularly recall I wrote the summer … after the Cuban Missile Crisis:
[Sung to the tune] of “Lemon Tree”:
Bomb shelter, very pretty/And its walls are made of lead/But if you own a bomb shelter/You’ll shoot your neighbor dead.At SDSU, I became a satiric blogger on the faculty listserver. When SDSU faced major budget cuts in 2008-2009, and the faculty agreed to a 10 percent furlough, I composed parodies, some of which Don published in the San Diego Jewish World.
Here are some verses from my favorite:
Cut It
(Tune: Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”)
If you’re a student, don’t come around here.
They’ll raise your fees as courses disappear.
You’ll pay for less, the budget is clear.
They’ll cut it! They’ll cut it!
If you’re a lecturer, you better run.
Renewed for Fall, by Spring you’ll be done.
You’d like to teach more, but you’re gonna get none.
They’ll cut you; they’ll cut you.
If you’re tenured, or tenure-tracked,
Your’re not safe either, you’re gonna get whacked.
One tenth your pay, they will subtract
They’ll cut it! they’ll cut it!
Just cut it, cut it,
Take the CSU and gut it.
Higher education faces decimation,
They’ll cut it! They’ll cut it!
Despite the disclaimer that the column is satire, some folks have written long critiques. Does this make you back off from the hard edge?
It goes with the turf. I realize that I’m considerably more dovish about Israel than most of the columnists for San Diego Jewish World, but I appreciate that Don Harrison never censors me on this issue — though he sometimes deletes entries that are in bad taste.
I subscribe to George Carlin’s philosophy. [He] remarked: “I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.”
I don’t feel intimidated, but I must admit I hate having to reply to negative comments because it takes a lot of time (more than writing the column) and I doubt anyone’s mind is going to be changed.
Jewish humor has a history of pathos and social commentary, so you’re squarely in the tradition. Who are your favorite Jewish comedians? Jon Stewart and who else?
I do love Jon Stewart. Without knowing it, I grew up steeped in Jewish comedy. Aside from my father, who was a very funny man, I remember watching all the greats on the “Ed Sullivan Show”: Myron Cohn, Shelly Berman, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, David Brenner, Sam Levenson, Mort Sahl, David Steinberg, etc.
I’m currently a big fan of Bill Maher (who used to tell a joke about being raised by a Catholic father and Jewish mother claiming that when he went to confession, he would always bring a lawyer). After I decided I wanted to teach modern Jewish history, I got a broad sampling of Jewish irony and social criticism from writers like Heinrich Heine, Kurt Tucholsky and Sholem Aleichem, among others.
Did you use humor in your SDSU history and religion classes?
Very early on, I realized that students can’t stay focused on a 75-minute lecture. I always included several jokes — sometimes drawn from past humorists and other times writing them myself to draw satiric parallels with the present — to serve as commercial breaks and give students a pause when they didn’t have to take notes.
The last few years of teaching, I wrote parodies summarizing lectures and sang them in class before I started lecturing. For example, for my lecture on the origins of World War I, I wrote new words for Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” which I rewrote as “I Shot the Archduke.”
I also sing these songs as overtures for the lectures I’ve been giving around the country since my retirement in 2012.
What jokes would you NOT make about current events? Any sacred cows?
I rarely joke about the Holocaust unless the joke is to satirize the Nazis (Chaplin and Lubitsch followed this formula and it worked for them) or to ridicule the misuse of contemporary analogies to the Holocaust.
Otherwise, all topics are fair game especially when they obviously exemplefy political hypocrisy.
Where do you get your news — and ideas for your column?
I am an avid news hound. I read the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s website, The New York Times and the Jewish Daily Forward and watch a lot of CNN and MSNBC as well. I think Rachel Maddow is a terrific reporter who does a lot of in-depth research into stories that get overlooked on network news.
As I watch, I jot down the stories that strike me as having humorous potential. When I have 10 items over a few days, I pare the column down to what I consider the five funniest items
What are some of your favorite recent takes on the news?
- It took nearly two hours for an Arizona prisoner convicted of murder to die from lethal injection. After the first 10 minutes, it seems fair to revive the prisoner and give him a life sentence — since the extra time constitutes a lethal form of double jeopardy.
- ISIS declared that one objective of the Islamic State it has established is to overthrow Barack Obama. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have contacted ISIS about coordinating their efforts.
- Hamas broke the 3-day cease-fire with Israel shortly after it began. Its spokesmen claimed that its fighters inadvertently used a stopwatch instead of a clock to time the cessation of hostilities or that the word “cease” was accidentally deleted from the email informing them of the armistice.
- Although House Republicans insist that racism plays no role in their decision to sue President Obama, they have hired Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden as the prosecuting attorneys for their case.
- Lebron James decided to return to Cleveland and play for the Cavaliers. Inspired by James’ change of heart, Edward Snowden plans to return to the United States and work for the CIA.
What’s the status of your Spielberg book? Have you thought about an anthology of your Humoring columns?
I’m writing an article (not a book) about Spielberg’s Jewish identity for an anthology about his films. I don’t have any book projects right now, but I’m working on some articles, one about how wealth and poverty were depicted in the Hollywood films about the Lower East Side made in the 1920s and early 1930s, and another on how Hadassah and several other American Jewish philanthropic organizations produced docudramas to raise funds for the rehabilitation and immigration of Holocaust survivors (DPs in the parlance of the day) intended for broadcasting on television in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Do you use social media to share your one-liners or get feedback?
I’m on Facebook, and Don posts many of the columns there.
Tell me more about your background.
I started out as a European cultural historian who wrote about the German-Jewish anarchist activist, cabaret performer, poet and satirist Erich Muehsam (1878-1934).
My mentor was George L. Mosse, who held a chair both at the University of Wisconsin and at Hebrew University. He was the son of Rudolf Mosse, the owner the Berliner Tageblatt, the German equivalent of The New York Times. The family had to flee to England in 1933.
Although I did not intend to focus on modern Jewish history and the Holocaust, Mosse’s experience as a refugee and expertise in the history of modern anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and modern nationalisms, including Zionism, piqued my interest, as did living in West Germany to conduct my doctoral research in 1970-1971.
I taught for 13 years at Saint Lawrence University, which was in northern New York near the Canadian border. There were few Jews among the students, professors and local population, and I ended up becoming a de facto Hillel adviser to the school’s small Jewish student group and developing a repertoire of Jewish history courses to fill the void in the university’s curriculum.
The rest of my career is summarized nicely in the entry from the book “Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide.”
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Preceding article was reprinted from the August 6 edition of The Times of San Diego
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