Feelin’ Funny: Mordechai Schmutter

When people ask me why I don’t have money, I usually say it’s because I’m a writer and a teacher, and zero times two is still zero.  I’ve always figured that this was Hashem’s way of keeping my material relatable to people of all income levels.  But it’s never occurred to me that the reason I have no money might be because I’ve never bought a lottery ticket. 

Frequent readers of this column are aware that about once a year, I get out of the house head off to Kosherfest, which is the biggest kosher food industry trade show within a seven-mile radius from my house.  For two days, everyone in the kosher food industry gets together – manufacturers, kashrus organizations, Israelis selling face cream, and security guards, and apparently one security dog, who was there to sniff for dangerous items but ended up spending a lot of time near the sausages – to either shake hands or pretend that they’d really like to, but they’re holding too many food samples.

As frequent readers of my columns may have figured, I don’t really speak a lot of Yiddish.  Or at least I try not to use it as a crutch in my writing.  Like there are some humor writers out there – particularly in the general public – that think that if you pepper in an “Oy vey!” here and there, it’s just as funny as an actual punch line. 

Welcome back to “How Should I Know”, the column in which we attempt to answer people’s questions and hope they don’t take our advice seriously and ruin their lives.

It’s cold.  That’s all I can think about right now, as I sit in my drafty 80+ year old Passaic house, five feet from my front door. 

As I’m writing this, it is 7 degrees outside, and according to my device, it feels like it’s negative six. 

It’s once again that time of year when we talk about the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony – an actual ceremony, held in Massachusetts, that celebrates the head-scratching scientific discoveries that are ignored by the so-called “Nobel Prize Committee”, because they did not get into the business to be entertaining.