What do you do when you’re Jewish and the calendar registers Christmas Eve? Rob Tannenbaum has the perfect solution: “Put the Ha! In Hanukkah” at Jammin’ Java.
The journalist, author of “The History of the First Decade of MTV” (due out in March), movie screenplays and Broadway shows, likens himself to Bloomingdale’s.
“We’re open all year, but December is our busiest month,” he said.
The wares he sells are songs and jokes poking fun at himself and those who were born to patronize Chinese restaurants instead of sharing Christmas presents and traditions under a glistening tree. Each December, he and his stage partner, David Fagin, crisscross the country to convulse audiences with their latest ditties about the traumas and delights that have touched their people.
They thumb their noses at the Nazis and other past persecutors in “They Tried To Kill Us, We Survived, Let’s Eat.” “Today I Am A Man” addresses the absurdity of spending $50,000 on a bar mitzvah for a 13-year-old boy and “Going Down to Boca” makes fun of the annual winter flight of snow-bound New Yorkers to balmy Florida. They even hitch up “Reuben, the Hook-Nosed Reindeer” to the team guiding Santa’s sleigh, assuring their audience that “It’s Good To be A Jew At Christmas.”
| IF YOU GO |
| Putting the Ha! In Hanukkah Tour |
| Where: Jammin’ Java, Vienna |
| When: 7 p.m. Friday (Christmas Eve) |
| Info: 703-255-1566; [email protected] |
“We begin composing by looking for common Jewish experiences,” Tannenbaum said. “For instance, every Jewish man can identify with ‘Today I Am A Man’ and the ridiculous idea of a boy becoming a man the day he turns 13 just because the rabbi says he does. When I was growing up and forced to go to Hebrew school, the music they played was horrible and didn’t appeal to teenagers. It was like Peter, Paul and Mary singing lyrics from the Old Testament. I liked Mel Brooks, Paul Simon, Carol King and Leonard Cohen, so I decided to write Jewish music that was a cross between pop songs and favorite comedians.”
It’s not as if Christmas and bad music were the only things Tannenbaum chuckles about overcoming. His surname, for instance, has been a lifelong curse.
“For eleven months of the year, nobody can spell it,” he said. “Then when December rolls around, everyone wants to sing it to me. I began doing this show ten or eleven years ago, about the time Jon Stewart and Jerry Seinfeld brought the whole idea of being Jewish to TV. It was new then; now it’s hip.
“Our appearances at Jammin’ Java always draw a good crowd, a mixture of Jews and non-Jews. The most fun for me is the improvisation. At one point, I go out into the audience to sing or joke with them. On one occasion, I was singing to a couple when the guy pulled an engagement ring out of his pocket and proposed to the girl. Someone in the row behind called out, ‘That was staged!’ It wasn’t. In fact, I was invited to officiate at their wedding in San Francisco and ended up becoming ordained for the occasion by one of those liberal religious groups in that city.”
On New Year’s Eve, Tannenbaum will pack away the Ha! in Hanukkah for another year. But no matter how involved he becomes in the project of the moment, he is always open to being a guest on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”
“I’ll make it, too, if the security people will stop throwing me out of the building,” he said. “Every time the phone rings, I jump up, certain it’s Jon Stewart calling me.”
