Anybody else get very Jewish vibes from this guy's books?

Anybody else get very Jewish vibes from this guy's books?

Something about them is really sarcastic in a smart way, well-read and worldly without being too high-brow. I get the same vibe from Seinfeld, Catch-22, Woody Allen movies.

I like it.

Pynch is of puritan stock though

What's the difference between Jewish humour and Irish humour?

Pynchon was shaped by the jewish counterculture of his day -- Beat, 60s, TV-wise, and so on -- which is why his writing is unserious, transgressive, childish, and full of degeneracy. That said, he is far too creative and innovative in his technique to be jewish. Jews are naturally poor writers in a creative sense, and Pynchon is a master of creative writing technique. He's way ahead of anyone else in that regard, but, unfortunately, he will be remembered as someone who wasted most of his talent since he was ensconced in the jewish-led hedonistic boomer culture of his era and as a result represents the detached, selfish nature of the boomer who partly because of this programming will be held responsible for letting western civilization fall into ruin.

alcoholism

potatoes

Puritan stock, but raised a Catholic.

So what? Joseph Conrad was born a Pole but his novels are exceptionally English

Jewish humor is generally situational while Irish humor involves more outrageous characters

Compare Seinfeld and Curb to It's Always Sunny or Father Ted

Pynchon is an Ascended Jew, or more precisely a synthesis of two traditions inherent in the people - reaching to grasp the Whole and failing to recognize the importance of its atoms, cold, solemn and removed from everything human, and the desire to remain in the partial without getting the gestalt, warm and cozy but also miserably small and insignificant. The Holistic Jew is too abstract and removed; his works feature structures and symbols but nothing that maps to real and personal. The Atomic Jew examines life as something isolated and local, anecdotal and ambitionless, his singular great achievment - hinting at the sillhoutte creeping behind relateable and personal, touching it once swiftly, realtionship vague and threatening but left unlooked into. Compare Catch-22 with GR; the great shadow of war is pictured from the viewpoint of an ant, in dreaded opposition, seen only from its tentacles assaulting the victims - whereas Pynchon doesn't just stop at the details, the incidents of relateable humanity broken, snapshots of a crime-scene, he looks the monster in the eye and conducts the interview.

For unascended Jews, the Big Picture and the Small Picture exist separately, although they sometimes conflict. Pynchon knows they are embedded.

Slothrop, the protagonist of Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow", is emblematic of how Tommy found himself in the sixties. Maybe he had a propensity for the drink and the drugs, maybe he was already a little wacky in a class clown kinda way, but going to college in the sixties as a white bread (normal bread) kid was like falling into the zone. Better hold onto your pants because you're high all the time and the girls, oh boy the girls wanna fuck all the time because it's the first time they can.
You get into that environment and you bet you inherit the smart humour of the jews, the clever clench-your-teeth-as-life-fucks-you-humour, everyone's your enemy when you just wanna chill man and oh boy the man might get 'cha.

You sound like a massive faggot.

one word: New York

never even realized this, wow, any good reads to recommend on this subject?

This is just something I've observed as a guy with both Irish nationals and Jewish Americans in my family

Way back in the day "Irishman and a Jew" was kind of a stock comedy format, where you pair a more outrageous comic with someone who's more sarcastic and subdued. Take away the ethnic element and you see this today with Larry David and Jeff Greene or Mark Corrigan and Jeremy.

Ah well I'm not American so I never noticed this before.

>Curb
>old man does something stupid and angrily argues with everyone for no reason
I will never understand the allure of this garbage.

Cause it's fucking funny

Curb illustrates common social situations in ways that are just a little bit off-kilter. Peep Show is the exact same thing with a British flavor.

It's best understood as a narcissistic display of jewish neuroticism. That's all it is.

Well he's from Long Island isn't he?

Yeah, he uses a lot of weird tidbits of Jewish culture and humor.

The word schlemihl (Benny Profane is a schlemihl, Slothrop a schlemihl), the kreplach story in Gravity's Rainbow (which is taken from a traditional Jewish joke, which, incidentally, may itself have been taken from the Sufis, although with something else for kreplach, which is Jewish), using the Yiddish slang "macher" in the Bleeding Edge trailer, etc. He also has the generally self-defeating but also life-affirming/hedonistic Jewish sense of humor/mindset as says