Jews Don’t Count: A Times Book of the Year 2021
* One particular area where there is avid monitoring of the rights and wrongs of ethnic casting is animation. I’m a huge fan of the Netflix animation show BoJack Horseman. It’s a stone-cold masterpiece, in my opinion the best comedy drama on TV of the last decade (not the best animated one, the best one). An issue that has dogged this show, however, and that the creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg has spent a lot of time apologising for, is that one of the main female characters, Diane Nguyen, is American-Vietnamese, but is voiced by the white American actress Alison Brie. Recently, Waksberg posted a very long Twitter thread in which he explained at great length how that – as he put it – error was made, and how much he has learned since and the amends the show has made for it. He did this because no doubt he feels bad about it, but also because there was, within the world of animation fans, a very large outcry about the casting of Diane. Meanwhile, the character of Lenny Turtletaub, who is Jewish – a very Jewish Hollywood producer stereotype, funny, but a stereotype – is played by J. K. Simmons, who is not Jewish. There has been no outcry about that, and Waksberg has seen no need to get anguished about it.
While we’re on the subject, I noticed something about BoJack, as it went on: it’s a show in which characters can be human or animal. Most varieties of animals turn up in its six series. But I spotted an absence in it, which at first I thought odd, as they are arguably the most humanoid animals: there are no apes or monkeys in BoJack Horseman. Cats, bulls, deer, horses, of course, turtles, as in Lenny Turtletaub, manatees, but no primates. Then I worked out why: I think that, considering that each animal essentially stands in for a human type (BoJack, a horse, is a washed-up sex-and-drug addict nineties sitcom star), there might be an anxiety in the writers’ room of the horrific possibility of viewers mistaking monkey or ape characters for corresponding humans of colour. So much so that they decided to just miss out that class of animals. Until the last episode of the entire series, in which a character called Danny Bananas appears. Danny is voiced by Phil Rosenthal, the Jewish producer of Everybody Loves Raymond, and is clearly a Jewish character. It’s good that a Jewish character is played by a Jewish actor. However, Danny Bananas is a monkey: a proboscis monkey.