Five years ago, Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978) was added to the National Film Registry, the goal of which is to preserve culturally important films. Stanley Kubrick would have loved this addition, despite the film’s apparent lack of recognition elsewhere. In a 1980 interview, he was asked if he was interested in recent work by “Coppola, Schrader, Spielberg, Scorsese, or De Palma[SG1] ,” and instead Kubrick shifts the conversation away from big-name directors to Weill: “I think one of the most interesting [films] that I’ve seen in a long time is Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends. That film, I thought, was one of the very rare American’s films that I would compare with the serious, intelligent, sensitive writing and filmmaking that you find in the best directors in Europe. It wasn’t a success, I don’t know why; it should have been.[i]”

As Kubrick implies, it’s hard to pin down why it failed, and even more so why it hasn’t seen a resurgence like other cult classics. Part of the trouble may have been the way the film was presented to audiences. Even today, if one tries to watch this film on Amazon, for instance, they will find it under the “comedy” category and be in for a rude -awakening when they aren’t laughing. The posters for the film featured quotes raving about how funny it was, in addition to praising its romantic warmth. While the film does indeed have some funny moments, it is a much more melancholic, slow, deliberate, and philosophical film—definitely not a comedy, nor a particularly warm one. The humor that is there is what one might call “cringe” humor today: it is located in the awkward moments between Weill’s protagonist, Susan, and her various roommates, bosses, and Rabbis, while struggling to navigate young adulthood on her own.

Much of this “comedy,” if this is the word we will use for it, devolves quickly into tragedy. The awkward, if slightly humorous, relationship with the Rabbi turns uncomfortably sexual, her friendships (new and old) that feel whimsical at first become mean-spirited or depressing, and her pursuit of photography, which starts with her telling a joke to her subject to make him smile, takes her down a dark path of rejection. The categorization here is almost useless, and it makes one wonder about the intention.

This is not just a problem that plagues Weill’s film. Many Jewish films get miscategorized as comedies simply for having comedic elements, perhaps because of a widespread cultural notion that Jewish media needs to be funny, or because audiences see Jewish elements in a film (self-deprecation, dry satire, to name a few) and do not know how else to categorize them. For Weill, it may have been part of the reason her film received and continues to receive little attention, and for others, it might have been a blessing. With this conundrum in mind, this theme week explores the ways humorous elements make their way into and work within Jewish films, whether they are outright comedies or something entirely different, and how those comedic elements might add to (or detract from) the films’ success.