Fred and Loathing on The Internet

He'll Make You Laugh Until It Hirsch

2025-Feb-28

An unprecedented blog topic! A bit controversial I might say. At least when it comes to topics for the fredlambuth.com blog. I would know about just what is controversial in this tiny media landscape. Based on my web traffic, I would guess that I am at least fifty percent of all visitors to this god forsaken blog. Oh well. Nobody’s perfect.

I do not foresee too many other ‘actor’ tagged topics for the fredlambuth.com blog. Instead this one will probably be lumped into the ‘series’ category. It could also go to the ‘film’ category on the strength of our blog topic’s subject’s career. What is that subject? Or unofficially (in the data model so far) who is this subject?

Judd Hirsch! Accomplished actor of stage, screen, and broadcast! An actor that has given me a touch of familiarity every time he appears on screen. They just do not make actors like this guy anymore. Maybe some of the more neurotic actors of my generation will age into this type of acting archetype. Judd Hirsch was born to be an old funny wise Jew from New York City. Until that happens, he is the best among current actors for striking the balance between laughter and tough wisdom.

You know, I think I did set a second field for ‘subcategory’ for the blog_post model. Having film+actor or series+actor, or even series+film could be done. Geez, I wish the management of the fredlambuth.com developers could get their shit together. The talent that provides the content on the blog has little to no confidence in their development department. We need improved leadership or product management.

You haven’t heard of Judd Hirsch? He’s that Jew-ish guy that appears on so many television programs and movies throughout the last few decades. When it comes to aged avuncular Jew-y actors, there is none better. I say aged because I do not believe I had seen this man act prior to his mid forties. Why is there none better? Because he hits the right amount of Jew-y-ness for me. Do I myself have any Jewish relatives? No. Although I have seen many on TV.

Jackie Mason goes too hard into the vernacular. Woody Allen is too smart for his own sake (among other personal problems). Right smack dab in the meaty axis of all the qualities you want in a skilled thespian- who can also tell a joke that will make you plotz!- is Judd Hirsch! At least in the visual mediums.

I say that as a lapsed Catholic who has a fascination with Jewish American funny guys (and on occasion gals). Something about that combination just really pays off for me; comedically. As far back as Henny Youngman pitching out slightly mean one liners that could occasionally make you think. All the way to the late eighties, in the standup comedian boom. Often it was Jews proving through in the muck.


This idea I’m conjuring goes as far back as the very hammy Jewish funnyman from somewhere in the northeast of the USA. That idea was already passe by the time Woody Allen was complaining about having to write for these types of guys. The standups of the eighties were pushing out of the ethnic cache of successful Jewish comedians. They were blending in with all the other goy comedians.

Judd Hirsch himself is not a comedian. Well, not a straight up comedian. Every role in which I have seen him has had him using laughter to make his acting more human. He is probably a funny guy in real life.

I got my first taste of Judd Hirsch from Independence Day, the big summer blockbuster movie about aliens invading the earth. Released in the summer of 1996, the prologue season before my first year of middle school. He played the unbelievably Jewy father to Jeff Goldblum’s character. For years I would not know the actor’s actual name. I would remember his role, his face, and the way he carried himself. I enjoyed how much chutzpah he put into his work. Or maybe he just made me giggle with the backwards delivery of his lines.

Around the same time I had seen Independence Day, I had seen the episode of King of the Hill where Hank Hill’s mother had a retirement community boyfriend who was a very Jewish guy from New York. That episode gave me the filtering tool to start deciphering what I liked about Jewish funny guys. Bobby Hill learned from this mensch dating his grandmother just how to break up the normal cadence of his sentences. “I like you” becomes “You, I like”.

That sentence breakdown is the cornerstone to just why there is wisdom in all the yuks. There is more to the wisecracks of Jewish funny men. Jokes are a restructuring of expected language. Somewhat.

Ultimately. I’m not here to get that deep about just what comedy is. We are also not here to talk about why Jewish American men from the late 20th century are overrepresented in my tastes among the media made to make people laugh. The word count is too low for mixing that many themes.

We are here to talk about Judd Hirsh in an unknown sitcom to me, until now. A sitcom that ran on NBC from 1988-1992 called Dear John. Judd Hirsch plays the titular John as John Lacey. A private high school English teacher living in a cramped apartment in Brooklyn after being tossed out by his wife. The, now ex, wife got to keep the kid and the house in the suburbs. Throughout the four seasons John is a regular at weekly meetings held on Friday evenings at a local community center. The meetings are for recently divorced people, conducted by a cartoonishly British school marm type and attended by equally cartoonish members.

Before we go further, you might ask why a sitcom of not that great quality is worth the fredlambuth.com blog’s attention. Not only is the show itself not exceptional, there are many technical impediments to watching the damn show. The only available media is a handful of YouTube channels that carry most of the first three seasons (of four), all in a low visual or audio quality. With all these obstacles to a clear viewing of this show, asking why it got picked as a blog post is a very good question to ask.

The answer is because finding out that there is a whole sitcom with Judd Hirsch that I was unaware of is a delightful surprise to me. With the instant availability of quick queries into an actor’s career and my interest in this man’s acting performances, I figured this would have dawned on me ages ago. For almost two decades I have been crawling through the internet to find sitcom dribble from my early childhood to passively watch while I do some type of active work. This active work on my part had begun as almost exclusively as my artwork. Once I learned how to comfortably write software code, sitcoms also became a comfortable white noise for when I was performing routine coding tasks.

Judd Hirsch in a sitcom was something I knew to be heartwarming comedy dynamite since a little after watching Independence Day. For one season he appeared in a sitcom with Bob Newhart doing an odd couple schtick in I think… New Hampshire? With that limited viewing of a few broadcasts of the Columbia Broadcasting System I cough as a child, I also learned who Bob Newhart was! What luck! The delight I got from seeing Judd Hirsch be a little bit zany on a TV show was an almost forgotten sensation. Until Taxi was broadcast on some Mexican cable channel that was playing US sitcom classics. It was played in the dawn hours while I was getting ready for school. I got a chance to catch almost a full episode between wakeup time and moving out the door to catch the bus.

Taxi itself deserves the royal fredlambuth.com blog treatment. To give that show the respect it deserves, the short answer is to say Taxi put Judd Hirsch into the echelons of my memory. I knew I was going to remember that name and jump on it if I saw it in a cast list. Even recently it happened when I cycled through a streaming service looking for video fodder. I found Uncut Gems, a movie I immensely enjoyed previously but jumped on as soon as Judd Hirsch’s appeared in the featured list.

He did great. Small role with some angry range that I have not seen from him before. Once again playing a very New York Jew-ish character. Next subject I am probing for a new blog post topic is the 1970s film Ordinary People. That is something that once again jumped the line in my viewing list because I realized Judd Hirsch is in it. This time as a therapist in a very, very serious movie. Mary Tyler Moore is also in it! Shit. I forgot her show’s review was somewhat about an actor itself, not just the show…

What also compelled me to hastily fashion a blog post about a competent but not exemplary sitcom is the finite nature of having the ability to do so. Those YouTube channels I mentioned were hosting videos that have been on their channel for over a decade. Each with around thirty thousand views over all those years. Most of the comments talk about how they saw the show when it was originally broadcast. Or how they kinda remember it as an early childhood memory. I would be one for the latter category.

The actors themselves, the cadence of their voices they chose for their roles, the set of the classroom used for the meetings, the way the women were dressed- the piercing questions into each cast member's lives in ridiculously overdone British accents. All of these flushed into me from a subreddit post about forgotten tv shows that resulted in only very old and inactive YouTube channels. I saw a few episodes, then felt so much inchoate early TV memories come loose. After a half dozen episodes I felt flashes about raw childhood questions I had about the problems I thought these characters were going through. Back when I was childlike enough to take most of what adults said quite literally.

Watching all of the available episodes had not much more effect on jarring loose early childhood memory. Watching did spur memories of searching through substandard sitcom recordings in my early web crawling days. YouTube in the late 2000s was very ripe with television shows that were in legal limbo and unable to be conveniently steamed on some web enabled device. Back then 640p was beautiful quality. Dear John right now on the aged YouTube channels is a pixelated mush. Who knows how long those accounts will remain available.

It is unlikely this show will ever get an official release and unless some Hollywood insider or undisclosed media pirates publishes something, this show will become lost media. I do not foresee myself doing anything about that fact other than this blog post. There are many other shows to use as grist for my working hours white noise.

I only wanted to remark on it. It is a fleeting remark on a forgettable show that balled up a lot of early memories in my gut I myself had forgotten. This post will be forgotten too.

Almost as soon as it was published by the looks of my server hit rates! I tell ya, I get no respect.