Former Rockapella Frontman Sean Altman and his Jewish Comedy Album
Rockapella's Sean Altman is back. This time, he's got circumcision jokes.
It was just over a decade ago that Rockapella served as the house "band" for “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”, the PBS geography quiz show for the post-Sesame Street crowd. An entire generation cut their pop-culture teeth on the program, watching each week as three young gumshoes sought the Loot, the Warrant, the Crook, and a Sony Walkman, or some other public television-appropriate prize. Altman and the three other members of Rockapella appeared in fedoras and plaid pants as comic relief, performing distinctly vaudevillian slapstick sketches and a capella numbers. At the end of the show, the studio audience (and, in my household, the viewers on the couch) would shout “Do it, Rockapella!,” as the foursome launched into the classic theme song.
Over a decade later, Altman is on the scene once again. In December of 2007, Altman launched a Jewish comedy album entitled “Taller Than Jesus,” an outgrowth of his touring show, “Jewmongous!” [Clips available here.] The songs are filthy and gleefully dumb. There’s a sort of cognitive dissonance that goes along with hearing the former Rockapella tenor sing a song called “Long Tongue Shloime ,” which is about exactly what you think it’s about. Other songs include “Today I Am A Man ,” a Bar Mitzvah song about sex, and “Be My Little Shabbos Goy ,” a Shabbat song about sex. The most outrageous is a deceptively endearing drinking song on the pleasures of “delicious, nutritious Christian baby blood .”
“My love of Jewish culture is so evident in the show that I’m able to get away with material that’s quite provocative,” Altman says. “I’m working pretty blue. It’s amazing how with a nice voice and a smile you can say anything on stage and it goes down okay.”
Altman didn’t set out to be a career novelty musician. “The first musical project I was ever seriously involved with was a conventional rock band,” he says. “Rockapella was just me and my college buddies singing on a street corner. My day job was trying to become a rock star. But then, lo and behold, Rockapella started to get attention, and my rock band went down the tubes.”
Altman spent eleven years with Rockapella, which became one of the most visible professional a capella groups in the country. He says that he left in 1997 to take another shot at a career as a traditional pop star. The allure of kitsch, however, proved irresistible. “Again, on a lark, I started up doing a novelty act,” he says. That act was called “What I Like About Jew,” a revue of Jewish comedy songs performed with Rob Tannenbaum, an editor at Blender.
Tannenbaum and Altman performed the show each December for seven years before parting ways acrimoniously in 2006. “The Boston Globe called us the Simon and Garfunkel of the ethnic gag joke,” Altman says. “I was the Simon and the Garfunkel, Rob was the ampersand.”
“Jewmongous!” picks up where “What I Like About Jew” left off, even borrowing some of its songs. This time, however, Altman’s going it alone.
“I’ve always worn my Jewishness on my sleeve,” Altman says. “It has always been a big part of me.” Exactly what that part is is unclear. The unanswered question of the album’s first song, “What the Hell is Simchas Torah,” is odd, as Simchas Torah is not exactly the most obscure Jewish holiday. One gets the sense that Altman has never heard of Shavuot. “I am observant in that I like to observe other Jews practicing their religion,” he says.
Altman’s brand of Jewish humor, too, is slightly off. Yes, he’s cynical, sarcastic, and has a sexual obsession to match Portnoy’s. Somehow, however, he lacks that streak of self-loathing peculiar to the Jewish comic. Instead, his songs are surprisingly brash. One threatens members of Jews for Jesus with physical violence. On the title track, “Taller Than Jesus,” Altman sings, “Jesus was a short dude/At least compared to me.” Nothing nebbishe about that.
Altman still regrets never having becoming a pop sensation. “I seem to be attracted in my career to projects that have no hope of gaining broad acceptance,” he says. “Between a capella music and Jewish novelty songs, it’s like I’m trying to prevent myself from ever becoming a rock star.”
