Former “Saturday Night Live” writer and current host of “Late Night with Seth Meyers” Seth Meyers is not, I repeat, is not, Jewish, but he does have three Jewish kids (one of whom was born in his building’s lobby) and a Jewish wife, lawyer Alexei Ashe. Which means, of course, he has Jewish in-laws, who are the subject of some of the best jokes in his newest special, “Dad Man Walking,” now streaming on Max.
The special, which came out earlier this month, is all about parenting young children, and the jokes in it cut deep for those of us in these particular parenting trenches, from tales about middle of the night wake-ups from “nightmares” to overenthusiastic dice throws, to him talking about how he never wants to hurt his kids but admitting that every now and then he does get a perverse pleasure out of pulling off their sweaters “as fast as I can.” There are a lot of great jokes about Ashe and their relationship, including a hilarious one about her insistence on bringing tubs of hummus onboard planes.
In the special, Seth talks about both his and Ashe’s Jewish ancestors. Meyers discovered in a recent episode of “Finding Your Roots” that he is the descendant of Lithuanian Jews who, he jokes, coined the expression: “How do we get the fuck out of Lithuania?” And he talks about the difficult conversations they are going to have with their kids about Alexei’s maternal grandparents, who were Holocaust survivors. The couple’s middle child was given the middle name Strahl, in honor of those grandparents, who met after the war in a hospital in Austria. In December, Ashe revealed her grandmother, Clara, was raped by a Nazi officer while trying to save her family in an op-ed about the importance of believing sexual violence survivors from Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Meyers somehow finds a way to make a really funny joke about these hard conversations about the Holocaust they’ll need to have with their kids, thanks to his son’s endearingly funny response after his wife told him he was lucky to have four grandparents because her mother, Joanne, had none. He also jokes that he loves when his kids are “content” — both the noun and the adjective — and in both “Lobby Baby” and “Dad Man Walking,” it’s true they serve as excellent fodder for the former.
And then, there are the jokes about Ashe’s parents, with whom Seth says he and his wife are extremely close.
In “Lobby Baby,” his 2019 Netflix special, Meyers talks about how his in-laws were excited that their daughter was dating a man named Seth Meyers, only to realize he wasn’t Jewish. It was “very unfair to them,” Meyers quips, “because to be named Seth Meyers and not be Jewish is false advertisement.” Over their five years of dating, Meyers shares, his future in-laws grew to think of him as “Jewish enough.”
“I believe that is the only religion where this happens,” he accurately concurs about Judaism.
In the new special, Meyers first mentions them when he highlights the difference between his family’s and Ashe’s. When he was growing up, the rule at the dinner table was to never speak until spoken to; if you do speak, it had to be relevant to the topic at hand; and never talk when someone else is talking. Whereas among his wife’s family, the rule was “as soon as you think something, say it out loud… ideally, try to start saying it before you finish thinking it.”
Another thing that they do is “call a restaurant to order delivery and it’s only when they’re on the phone with the restaurant that they ask anybody else what they want,” Meyers adds, and they also criticize the restaurant while on the phone with the restaurant.
“My wife’s family is Jewish, which I haven’t said yet but I have told you,” he said after these two anecdotes, and honestly, as someone who generally doesn’t like Jewish stereotypes, I don’t see a lie here. Our culture is one that values a lot of talk, especially about food, including what experts now call “cooperative overlapping,” a highly productive style of interruption.
“If there’s one thing that Jewish people agree on, I would love to know what that is,” he adds, and again, this is 200% accurate, a truth I have felt in my bones every day, especially among Jewish people in the past year.
Meyers, of course, makes sure to establish that he loves the Jews, even if he isn’t one. “I’d like to emphasize that these jokes are pro-Semitic. I love my Jewish wife, I love my Jewish children, I love my Jewish in-laws,” he says, adding that if you’re ever looking for them, you can find them “in the middle of my fucking business.” That joke was met with uproarious laughter, and well, in defense of our people: We just like to know things! We care about you!
“My wife argues that I should convert to Judaism. Her argument is everybody already assumes that I’m Jewish,” Seth later concludes. “It’s not a bad argument,” he says, given he is a quarter Jewish. He adds that he’s also a quarter Swedish, though nobody assumes he ever is, and goes on to make an excellent reference to “The Muppets'” Swedish chef.
While Meyers may not be Jewish, he does tell a pretty great Jewish joke.
