Watch or listen to the stand-up comedy special 'Jew' (2022) by Ari Shaffir on Comedy Buff. Transcript available.

Ari Shaffir

All right, let's talk about the Bible. Yeah, the original Bible, the Torah, not your shitty remake. Yeah, I'm not talking about your all-girls Ghostbusters version of the Bible. Talk about the OG shit. Yeah, I was raised Orthodox Jewish. I don't know what that is. It's a Frisbee Jew, you know, that kind. Second highest level of Jew. One step down from Hasidic Jew, or as I call them, Mortal Kombat Jews.
Yeah, whenever you see one, just go, finish him. And they'll have no idea what you're talking about. It's great. The ones with the, you know, the sideburns, the long, the curly fries, as my black friend calls them. Yeah, my friend Miss Pat, she came to visit me in New York. She'd never seen one. There's very few Hasidic Jews in the black ghetto of Atlanta. She saw her first weird talk, and she just goes like.
She was like, Ori. She didn't want to say my name, but she's like, Ori. Is that an Amish? And I'm like, no. I mean, yeah, more or less, yeah. It's pretty much the same shit. She goes, why that man has curly fries? And I'm like, those are not curly fries. She goes, what they do? And I'm like, first of all, the grammar on you people is on another planet. And by you people, I don't mean black people.
I mean non-Jews. Yeah, Jews are racist, but we don't see skin color. We see IQ and income level. That's all it boils down to. Yeah. Goys, that's all you guys are. You ever hear that word? Goy. It's Yiddish for non-Jew. Yiddish is like Jewish ebonics. Goy means non-Jew. And just so you know, when you hear it, you think it's fun and friendly when they're saying it to you. It's not. They're shitting on you to your face.
Goy is a derogatory word. Probably my favorite derogatory word. Yeah, because most derogatory words, they single out one race or culture and make them feel bad. Not goy. Goy is the most inclusive of all the derogatory words. Do you know how pompous that is to have as your term for the other? That means to them, it's one-tenth of one percent of the world and then, ugh. Various shades of goy. Yeah, dude, I was raised way religious.
I went to a seminary called the Yeshiva in Jerusalem for two years after high school. So you go to study if you want to become a rabbi. Spoiler alert. It did not tick. Anybody here raised religious of any kind? Yeah? What were you guys? Jewish, obviously. What? Jehovah's Witness. Hell yeah, dude. The fucking Harry Potter of Christianity. I know. Who else? What do you got? Baptist, what? Wesleyan. Wesleyan?
That's a new one, dude. I've honestly never heard of that one. Is that some kind of Christ? Is that some kind of Christ? Okay. You fucking Christians are hilarious with their separations. Every other religion is just one thing. Just Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and there's fucking 31 flavors of Jesus. Lutheran and Baptist and Southern Baptist, which is just like Baptist, but with slavery, I think. So funny.
And Catholics think they're the best ones, too. Yeah, they do. They look down on the other ones. From an outside perspective, Catholics think they're way better than the rest of the Christians. And I'm like, based on what? Besides most child rapes per year, like, what else is quantifiable? It's weird, though. Ask a devout Catholic, like an older, devout Catholic, ask if they're Protestant. They'll get mad at you.
They're like, we're nothing like Protestants. You're like, nothing? What's the difference? And they'll hit you with something crazy. They're like, we believe Jesus carried the cross way up top. Yeah, and they think he kind of dragged it a little bit. It's basically a different religion. Crazy Christians, you stupid separations. You guys still religious now? No. Okay, that's good. If you are religious, that's totally fine.
It is totally fine. There is a solid chance you're going to hate the next 68 minutes of your life. So, those of you who raised religious, of any kind, do you ever think about what they taught you when you were little, now that you're a grown-up? Guys, it's all darker than you remember it. It really is. I mean, let's start at the beginning. It's the only way to do this. Adam and Eve. You guys know that story?
Okay. If you don't know that story, this is all going to go over your head tonight. Here's what happened. In six days, God created the world. On the seventh day, he rested. You guys remember this one. And then later, God went to Adam and was like, Adam, how do you like it here? How do you like the Garden of Eden? And Adam's like, oh, dude, I love it. It's awesome. Plenty of sunshine. Plenty of sunshine.
Tons of animals to fuck. This place is sweet. And God was like, wait, bro, are you fucking all the animals? And Adam was like, not all yet. You made a lot of animals. You got to give me some time. By the way, I killed a frog on Tuesday. Yeah. His eyes were bigger than his belly. Split it right open. My bad on that one. And God was like, fuck, dude, stop fucking the animals right now. And so Adam was like, who should I fuck then?
And God's like, yeah, good question. Fair enough. He's like, tell you what, I'll make another person for you to fuck. Humans should fuck humans. So Adam, with no concept of women, right? There had never been a woman ever in history before. So when he heard another person was coming, he was just like, sweet. Another dude I can fuck in the butt, I assume. And God was like, no, you assume wrong. It'll be like a dude, but it'll have like a, like a front butt.
And you can fuck the front butt. Adam loved that idea. He was like, sweet, I can fuck the front butt and the back butt. God's like, no, no fucking back butt. I will never change my mind on that. Adam's like, why not? He's like, that's where shit comes out. I don't want you to fuck where shit comes out. I think it's disgusting. You can't fuck where piss and blood sometimes comes out, but not shit. Oh, I mean, Adam's so angry.
He's like, why would you make shit come out of such a good fuckhole? God's like, where else could it come out? He's like, dude, bottom of the foot. I've been thinking about it. It would be a way better place. He's shaking out really easily, wiping as a breeze. Every puddle's a bidet. It should be bottom of the foot, dude. And God was like, fuck, yeah, that would have worked. Maybe a week was rushing it.
What was the time crunch on that? I never understood that. It's an important project. Take your time. There's nobody waiting for you. There's literally nobody waiting for you. So he made Eve. And to make Eve, you guys remember how he made Eve? The rib. Yeah, you guys remember this. Yeah, he told Adam, I got to crack off one of your ribs. I'm sure Adam was like, why is that the new process for making things?
Is from scratch no longer available? Did you lose powers, dude? If you're tired, you can take a nap. That zebra's been eyeballing me pretty hard. I got time. Yeah, you can get it. Come get it, black and white. But he goes, no, I got a crack of a rib. So he cracks over on Adam's ribs. I'm like, fuck, whatever. Abracadabra, he makes Eve out of that rib. And that's the reason, my rabbis always told me, that's the reason that men have one less rib than women have.
It dates all the way back to Adam and Eve. Yeah. Then I grew up. I found out that we have the same amount of ribs. It was just a lie they told little Jewish kids. I don't even know what they had to gain. Do you know how embarrassing it is to find out you were wrong about that at 41 years old? People are like, why would you think there's been a different amount of ribs? I'm like, I don't know, when I was nine, I got some guy with beard, Dandruff told me.
So after Adam and Eve and Moses and Noah, a few other, you know, Bible stories that Jews and Christians kind of share, you know, at that point, we kind of split off. Well, no, we stayed right where we were. You split off. You guys wrote an unauthorized sequel. And fan fiction. They're just, you added a superhero out of nowhere. With all these miracles. You got us being on miracles. I'll give you that.
You got us being on miracles. We crush you motherfuckers on holidays. We got a lot of holidays. What's the biggest Jewish holiday? What do you think? Hanukkah, very good. Goy, idiot, stupid, wrong. Wrong, dumb, goy. Dumb like all of them, goy. People think it's Hanukkah because it falls around Christmas and we do presents and stuff. Just so you guys know, it's one of our lowest level holidays. Hanukkah's not even our top 40.
For real, it's on the level of like Arbor Day for your people. It just feels big because it falls around that time. Presents, by the way, is not even really part of Hanukkah. That's us copying you. Presents on Hanukkah is a modern Western civilization part of the holiday. My dad grew up in Romania before the Holocaust. They didn't do presents back then. That's here in America, in England. It's all these Jewish kids.
They saw their Christian friends getting presents and they wanted in. Yeah, and when Jew kids want free shit, Jew kids get free shit. So they went to their dads like, Dad, how come Christopher gets presents and I don't get presents? And their fathers were like, You know. More or less that. So now we do presents. Eight days of presents. It's an eight-day holiday. Some people think it's eight times the presents you guys get.
It's not. We have the same amount of parents you have. You know, we have the same amount of parents. But we just space them out over eight days. We get better presents than you. You know, because we're far richer than you are. I don't know what kind of white trash presents you've always got. We got like a grilled cheese sandwich wrapped in a shopping bag. You know, what did you guys get? Like a sock full of pills?
Postcard from your dad written in your mom's handwriting. But yeah. Same amount of presents though. You're supposed to get one present a day for eight days. And then if you have like nine or ten presents, you just double up a day or two. So one year, I didn't have eight presents. I only had seven presents. My mom didn't know what to do to get me every day a present. Instead of just getting one extra present, you know, some shit like wrapping avocado, you dumb bitch.
Instead, her fix was to split a present into two and wrap each half separately. Like I wouldn't know. Like I opened up day one's present. I was like, oh, it's skateboard wheels only. I wonder what's in tomorrow's flat oval box. She's like, you'll never guess. I'm like, it's for sure a skateboard, Mom. I'm the second smartest race in the world and this is very easy to figure out as it is. Korean. Here's a story of Hanukkah.
I'll tell it to you. So you can talk about this in December with your bosses probably at work. A long time ago, the Jews got kicked out of Israel, okay? One of the many times that happened over history. We are historically, we are the weakest race in the world. Anybody who wanted Israel just fucking took it. For real. Greeks, Romans, people from Alabama. Like it doesn't matter, dude. Anybody's like, get out of here.
Like, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, stop, stop, stop, don't get me, don't get me. It's so fucking defeatable. I hate it. Ugh. Here's why I don't really do impressions. Here's my only impression I do. It's a sound of the soul of a Jew. Ready? Yeah, all our stories are about survival. They're never about succeeding. Nobody's ever like, watch out, the Jews are coming. You know, it's like, yeah, Palestinians, we got them.
All right. We broke our losing streak on that for sure. Dude, I saw this, I saw this Free Palestine March last summer in New York, and they were all like marching. They had a big Free Palestine sign, but the Palestine part was covered. People were like in front of it, so it was covered. So I couldn't see that part. So I just saw the first half. So I like run across the street. What do they give? Oh no.
I'm like, this is the worst place for me to be. Oh. I'm so sorry. But they're all staring at me. I didn't know what to do. 