A romance between them seems at once inevitable and unthinkable, but the taboos that You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is unwilling to smash are few indeed. The movie is principally interested in establishing its main character as a new archetype in the annals of Jewish humor. He’s a warrior and also, to an extent undreamed of in the combined works of Philip Roth, Woody Allen and Howard Stern, a sexual hedonist, so utterly free of neurosis or inhibition that it’s hard to imagine him and Sigmund Freud occupying the same planet, much less the same cultural-religious tradition.
Sex, for Zohan, is like hummus: there is an endless supply, and no occasion on which it could be judged inappropriate. He is always on the make, but Sandler’s natural sweetness inoculates the character against sleaziness. In his feathery 1980s haircut and loud, half-buttoned shirts, Zohan joins a long tradition, stretching back from Will Ferrell through Steve Martin to the great Jerry Lewis himself, of goofballs who mistake themselves for studs and turn out to be right.
The film’s image of Israelis as hopelessly behind the pop-culture curve — Zohan’s musical taste belongs to the same era as his hairdo — is itself something of an anachronism. The hip-hop-inflected Hebrew pop on the soundtrack (by Hadag Nachash) provides some evidence that real Israelis are much cooler than the ones on screen. And the willingness of the American Jewish filmmakers to mock their Middle Eastern cousins is also a subtle, unmistakable sign of cultural maturity.
“Subtle” and “maturity” may seem like odd words to use about a movie that wrings big laughs from pelvic gyrations, indoor Hacky Sack and filthy-sounding fake-Hebrew and -Arabic words. But much as it revels in its own infantilism, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is also brazenly self-confident in its refusal to pander to the imagined sensitivity of its audience. In this it differs notably from Albert Brooks’s Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which approached some of the same topics with misplaced thoughtfulness and tact.
I suppose some Middle East policy-scolds may find reasons to quarrel with Zohan, either for being too evenhanded or not evenhanded enough in its treatment of Israelis and Palestinians. Did I mention that it’s a comedy? Seriously, though, the movie’s radical, utopian and perfectly obvious point is that the endless collection and recitation of political grievances is not funny at all, and that political strife is a trivial distraction from the things that really matter. There is so much hummus, and so little time.
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