The new Adam Sandler vehicle You Don't Mess With The Zohan marks Robert Smigel's first produced screenplay—he co-wrote it with Sandler and Judd Apatow—but he's already a famed television comedy writer. Smigel began writing for Saturday Night Live in the mid-'80s and has gone on to become one of the venerable comedy institution's most acclaimed and popular writers, having written or co-written classics like "Action Reagan" and the sketch where William Shatner admonishes a convention full of traumatized Trekkies to get a life. But he's best known for his "TV Funhouse" cartoons, an ongoing series of dark, pop-culture-damaged toons that have consistently ranked as the show's funniest and most bitingly satirical element.
Smigel served as the first head writer for friend and frequent collaborator Conan O'Brien's Late Night With Conan O'Brien and created some of the show's signature bits, like the use of crude Clutch Cargo-style "syncho-vox" animation for satirical fake celebrity interviews and Triumph The Insult Comic Dog, a ribald, cigar-smoking puppet insult comedian voiced by Smigel himself. As the executive producer of The Dana Carvey Show, he gave crucial breaks to a pair of young talents named Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell, who also provided the voices for the "Ambiguously Gay Duo," a popular recurring feature of "TV Funhouse." In 2000 he masterminded a short-lived but cultishly popular Comedy Central TV Funhouse spin-off that will be released on DVD in late July. The A.V Club spoke at length with the comedy vet about Adam Sandler's package, the super-charged libidos of Israeli men, and why You Don't Mess With The Zohan might just bring people together.
The A.V Club: Can you talk a little about the writing of Zohan? Did you and Sandler and Apatow go to local Starbucks with a laptop and spitball ideas?
Robert Smigel: I can't remember it was so long ago. It feels like 30 years ago. Did you see the preview?
AVC: Yes, I did.
RS: Did you like it?
AVC: I had a smile on my face pretty much the entire film. It is a very, very silly movie.
RS: You can be honest with me. You can be honest with me. You can be honest with me. I've been shat on in my career now and then. So I can handle it if you had problems with it. I like it, because it was opportunity to do a comedy with Adam that had stuff that you don't normally see, not just in an Adam Sandler movie, but in a summer comedy as well. I was excited about the opportunity to tackle this crazy sensitive subject in a movie. I had done Israeli sketches on Saturday Night Live before. Actually Adam's first sketch on SNL was something called the "Sabra Shopping Network." It was a home shopping show. It was at the beginning of the home shopping phenomenon. It was these Israeli electronic store guys with their own home shopping show and they would haggle with the callers and shame them into overspending on the items. And we did "Sabra Price Is Right" with Tom Hanks a few years later. I was excited to write about Israelis, too. I'd gone to a Jewish summer camp where I met a lot of Israelis every year. So I had a lot of Israeli humor stored up.
AVC: There's an interesting culture divide between American Jews and Israeli Jews, and there's a lot of overlapping as well. It's strange to think of all these very domestic American Jews who, not too long ago, were wielding an Uzi in the Israeli army.
RS: Just the fact that they all serve in the army is a hard thing to wrap your head around as a fat, lazy, American Jew.
AVC: There's also this culture of machismo that doesn't necessarily carry over to American Jews.
RS: Without question it exists. A lot of people wear it as a badge of honor. The Sabra mentality is being confident and aggressive and not hesitating and the appearance of strength. It's a reaction to everything the Jews dealt with that led to the creation of the state of Israel. Once it was created, it inspired people to behave from a position of strength.
AVC: The movie tweaks that a little bit. On one hand, Zohan is a very masculine soldier, on the other…
RS: Without question. Well, the movie extrapolates that into sexuality of course. I noticed a recurring theme of sexually confident and aggressive Israeli men. I was worried whether we were pushing it too far, but then we cast some of the actors, and were delighted to see that they embodied every aspect of that quite quickly. One of the guys that we cast was Ido Mosseri, who played the little sidekick Oori, who runs the electronics store. His first day on the set he's going off on Tel Aviv and how cool it is. Which is funny, because there was this line that we ending up cutting, which had Nick Swardson's character saying, "I'd love to visit Israel at some point. I always wanted to see the Wailing Wall." And the guys are all saying, "Wailing Wall? You're not going to get any pussy at the Wailing Wall! Tel Aviv is where you go! Fuck the Wailing Wall!" And then I'm talking to Ido about it, and he goes, "Jerusalem? You don't need to see Jerusalem. You come with me to Tel Aviv. You won't believe it: the partying, the girls, it's unbelievable!" Then there's a little bit of silence, and then, "You married?" And I say, "Yeah. Yeah I am." "Maybe you don't have to come." Not joking, just, "Well, all right. Then you might as well not come to Israel if you're not there to score." Then his buddy got another part, a smaller part, and he shows me this text message he sent him after he got cast—here's a guy that's been working as an actor in Israel then all of a sudden he gets a part in a summer blockbuster comedy. The first thing in his text message: "I got cast! Tell the girls in Los Angeles to wait for me!" It didn't matter if it were Adam Sandler or Gallagher II in a movie, this guy just wanted to be flown to L.A so he could get laid.
And then they got here and it was funny, and I think this is reflected in the movie a little bit, they talked about how they were getting shut out at clubs by the girls. I don't know what clubs they went to, but they said they weren't having any luck and they said it was because there was an inherent prejudice against, you know, they came off as foreign guys. They were frustrated that everybody was mixing up Arabs and Israelis here anyway, which is also in the movie.
AVC: Did you do a lot of research on the Mossad before writing the film?
RS: That's where Judd was the responsible one, Judd mostly worked with us on the first draft. Then he went off to become a superstar. Remember, the first draft was written in the summer of 2000. I think Judd was ready to do Undeclared at that time. We were completely happy with it and then 9/11 happened and we didn't even think about doing the movie for a long time after that. Basically, at some point, we were like, "Oh, the Zohan movie. Forget that. That's not happening." It wasn't even a blip at the time. It was the last thing that mattered to us.
AVC: When do you think we, as a culture, reached the point where people could laugh about terrorism?
RS: We didn't even really talk about the movie for a couple of years. Even before 9/11 there was some talk about fictionalizing the countries. Having the dispute stem for orange groves or something like that. Just heightening the trivialization. Once we got back into the reality of it, we tried to get away from that. We're just comedy writers, and I hope it comes off that we are not trying to imply that there's an easy solution to the disputes over there. The only point we're trying to make in the movie is that once these guys are placed in another context that they're not necessarily all that dissimilar from each other.
AVC: If you had gone the fictionalization route, do you think that would have been a cop out?
RS: Well, people on both sides were saying that people are going to know either way what you're talking about. Some people thought that's why you can do it and some people thought, well, you might as well do the real thing because you're not going to be fooling anyone. Adam and I always wanted to do the real thing because everybody knows what it is. Why not hit it head on? In 2004, I tried a version where Adam became a stuntman in a movie directed by a Scorsese kind of guy. He was hired to be Mariah Carey's hairdresser and he sees a stuntman doing something really badly and he shows him how to do the stunt and the guy is amazed by Zohan's ability to get hit by a car and not be hurt. The whole thing ended up turning this Martin Scorsese drama into a crazy action movie. The director becomes consumed with Zohan's ability to absorb pain. I tried that at one point. And then after a few years it just became apparent that not only are we used to the state of the world as it is, but there have been so many uprisings in the Middle East since then that people have become sadly, on some level, desensitized to the violence. On the other hand, people are ready to laugh at the shitty state of affairs we're in.
AVC: Do you think it can be cathartic in that respect?
RS: Absolutely.
AVC: The paradox of this story is that it is an incredibly silly movie with an incredibly serious subject.
RS: Hopefully, whatever points we make are not trite. Most of the parody in the movie has to do not so much with stereotypes, although people might disagree; but I don't really see it as a movie so much about the stereotypes of those two cultures as parodying everything that goes with war and the passions on both sides. I think one of the bolder things we do in the movie is parody the glorification of violence. We do it on both sides, I think, with the guy Adam meets who is an enormous fan of his work. He's reminding Adam of the time he made a terrorist sit on a grenade. He's like, "You gotta tell me how you did that, man!" It's sort of a sports metaphor-y type thing. Then on the other side, it's the same thing. The John Turturro character, after he's presumably defeated Zohan, he gets blinged out and gets a gold tooth and a chain of restaurants.
AVC: With his action figure in the happy meal.
RS: Like a retired superstar. It's dicey because there will be people that might suggest that we're saying that everybody glorifies violence.
AVC: Do you think that you could have written with Sandler and Apatow if you weren't Jewish? Do you think that granted you a little more leeway?
RS: The only leeway we might have is making fun of Israelis a little more than non-Jews. As far as creating stereotypes, we've probably hit on some Israeli ones more than we hit on Arab ones. I went to an Arab comedy festival. I made a lot of friends with a lot of the actors in the movie and also used this guy, Dean Obeidallah a comedian, for feedback. He's an Arab comic who read all the scripts and a lot of the drafts. He was one of the people I depended on to make sure I wasn't saying anything that was inaccurate or offensive, or that would be perceived as unfair by the majority of people. But he had an Arab-American comedy festival that I went to. And there were a lot of funny people there, but I was amazed by the stereotypes that were in the sketches. A lot of the sketches were about being an Arab-American, and some stuff was political, but some sketches were about how Arab women are hairy and have moustaches, stuff I never even heard of or thought about. It was funny to see how every ethnic group goes to that well of exploiting their own stereotypes.
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