Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the Jewish-American writer behind the popular animated series BoJack Horseman, opened up to the Independent about the emotional struggles faced by Jews as a consequence of growing antisemitism.
“A lot of what I think the best comedy is, and a lot of the comedy that I write, comes from pain,” he said after sharing his favorite joke on Nazis. “It is an intermingling of humour and sadness and real cathartic laughter.”
Bob-Waksberg’s used this to explain the shift in the style of comedy from the Emmy-nominated series and his new production, Long Story Short. The new series follows the Jewish family the Schwoopers.
Using comedy to look at Jewish trauma
While Bob-Waksberg grew up in California, much like the Schwoopers, he said that very few parts of the series were autobiographical.
“It’s not my family story, or my experiences necessarily, but it is personal,” Bob-Waksberg shared. “The reason the family is Jewish is I felt like I didn’t have enough to say about Episcopalians to make an interesting television programme! I don’t know if I can quantify that it’s 22 per cent autobiographical, or what that number would be, but I would say it’s the appropriate amount that I wasn’t scared to show it to my family.”
Bob-Waksberg’s his father worked to help Russian-speaking Jews emigrate to the United States, and his mother and grandmother ran a shop named Bob & Bob Fine Jewish Gifts and Books.
Speaking on the state of antisemitism in the world now, he said, “It’s always a fraught time to be Jewish…That doesn’t scare me away from having Jews talking about being Jewish, or the different feelings they might have about it, or the ways they see themselves fitting in to the world.”
“Sometimes I feel like, yes, Jews think people are thinking about us much more than they actually are,” he admitted. “Sometimes things that I assume are antisemitic or exclusionary are not about me at all. The pendulum also goes the other way and I can perhaps give antisemites the benefit of the doubt more than they deserve. If a guy is shouting ‘Death to all Jews’ you don’t want to say:, ‘Well, we don't know his story.’ The show itself is not necessarily making a statement on one side or the other, but it is at that moment poking at that scab a little bit, intentionally.”