Is Mel Brooks God?

Were the laws of the uni­verse writ­ten by the Marx Broth­ers?   Is Rod­ney Dan­ger­field a prophet?  Were all the seats at The Last Sup­per equipped with Whoopee Cush­ions?  Is life one grand re-​​make of Blaz­ing Sad­dles?

Unless the fol­low­ing sen­tence, which pur­ports to be from the New York Times Mag­a­zine, and which appears on the New York Times web site, is a com­plete fab­ri­ca­tion, these ques­tions are nei­ther fool­ish nor fab­u­lous, but are very good ques­tions indeed.

Unem­ploy­ment has soared to nearly 10 per­cent (about even with the strug­gling nation as a whole, but sig­nif­i­cantly higher than in sur­round­ing states) at the very same moment that the state’s infa­mous cor­rup­tion has reached a level of near par­ody, with Sephardic rab­bis accused of ille­gally sell­ing body parts and using the money to bribe local politicians.

Near par­ody?  What would be required for actual, full-​​blown par­ody?  For the UN Secu­rity Coun­cil to break into a cho­rus of Spring­time for Hitler? For Obama to greet the ambas­sador from South Africa with his ver­sion of  Swa­nee?

Is real­ity now being gov­erned by the spir­i­tual descen­dants of Vaude­ville and the Borscht Belt?

Tags: body parts, parody, rabbis, reality